Rifle shot whizzes past man’s head in ‘ruckus’ involving chicken-eating dog

Neighbors clashed on a recent Friday evening in western Bibb County. A man who lives on Rainey Drive, north of Lake Tobesofkee below Thomaston Road, crouched down to check the air pressure in his four-wheeler’s tires when a bullet whizzed past his head. The bullet hit the corner of his house. The man, 58, later told the authorities that a 54-year-old man who lives nearby had fired the shot. “He was very upset,” a sheriff’s report said of the man who’d almost been shot, “and he screamed for his neighbor to quit shooting.” The 58-year-old pulled a gun of his own, a pistol, and pointed it at the shooter, who by then, armed with a .22 rifle, had made his way toward the older man’s house. The guy with the rifle turned around and went home. The man who’d been shot at told a sheriff’s deputy that the shooter can often be heard firing a gun, and that he “rides his ATV up and down the road drunk all the time … always causing a ruckus.” The deputy then spoke to the shooter who “seemed very upset” and admitted that he had recently lit some fireworks to “scare a dog away from eating his chickens.” The guy also confessed to firing a single shot toward his neighbor’s house, the sheriff’s report noted, but that he “never meant for the bullet to go” that way. He said he had aimed “at the bottom of a pine tree,” the report added. He was jailed on a charge of reckless conduct with a firearm.

This story was originally published February 9, 2017 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Rifle shot whizzes past man’s head in ‘ruckus’ involving chicken-eating dog."