Photo Credit: Blake Aued
From left, GBI special agent Mike Ayers, Police Chief Cleveland Spruill, Capt. Jerry Saulters and deputy chiefs Jeff Clark and Mike Hunsinger.
Athens-Clarke County police are looking for the man who robbed one UGA student and shot another this morning at a South Milledge Avenue apartment complex.
Police received a call regarding a shooting on South Milledge shortly after 7 a.m. and found a 22-year-old man who had been shot multiple times at a bus stop on Milledge just south of the Loop. An ambulance took him to a local hospital, where he’s suffering from life-threating injuries.
At around the same time, police received another call about an armed robbery that had happened in the Milledge Place apartment complex’s parking lot a few minutes prior to the shooting.
ACCPD Chief Cleveland Spruill said investigators believe the same man committed both crimes. Because the items taken from the first robbery victim were “not substantial,” Spruill theorized that the gunman tried to rob a second victim, this time shooting him. The first victim was not harmed.
Spruill described the suspect as a black man with dreads or twists who left the scene in a white late-model Ford Mustang with a tan top. He also had a gold or silver clasp in his hair. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation released a sketch based on witness’s descriptions.
Spruill called in the GBI, Georgia State Patrol and UGA police to help with the investigation.
“Any time we have an incident like this, regardless of whether it’s a student or not, we want to bring in as many resources as we can,” he said at a news conference this afternoon. But he agreed with a reporter who suggested there might be additional urgency to catch the suspect when the victims were college students in a college town, and he said he’d stepped up patrols around campus.
The students were probably not targeted because they were students, Spruill said. But given that the suspect is still at large, he urged everyone to be vigilant and to call police if they see something suspicious.
“We’d rather be called and not needed than needed and not called,” he said.
Police are asking anyone with information to contact Lt. Stephen Daniel at stephen.daniel@accgov.com or 706-613-3330, ext. 235, or Sgt. David Norris at david.norris@accgov.com or 706-613-3330, ext. 556
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