Ga. Deputies Escape Serious Injury in Harrowing Shooting, Crash
By Joe Kovac Jr.
Source The Macon Telegraph
An all-out manhunt in the hours after a pair of Macon teens allegedly opened fire on Bibb County sheriff's deputies who were about to pull them over in an unmarked car led to the youth's arrests Monday evening.
The deputies, who were not wounded in the gunfire, were treated at a local hospital and later released for injuries sustained when their car struck a utility pole after they were shot at.
The shooting happened shortly before 3 p.m. near a roundabout at the intersection of Georgia Highway 74 and Lamar Road in western Bibb County. The teens were apprehended less than two hours later on the east side of the nearby Lake Wildwood subdivision on North Plantation Parkway.
Sheriff's officials said the suspects, Xzaydrian Ja'Won Lewis, 18, and a 16-year-old boy, now face aggravated assault and other charges.
Sheriff David Davis on Tuesday told The Telegraph that investigators were still piecing together what happened and possibly why one of the youths may have opened fire on the deputies.
Davis said the deputies were members of the sheriff's office's gang-policing unit and had been about to stop a Dodge Charger the teens were in because they were possible suspects in another crime.
"It's as perplexing to us as it is to anybody," Davis said when asked what may have prompted the gunfire — other than, as he put it, "spur-of-the-moment meanness."
The sheriff said "at least" 10 bullet holes riddled the unmarked Dodge Charger the deputies were riding in.
Davis said the deputies were "very lucky" not to have been struck by bullets that pierced their windshield, adding that "an angel was riding with them yesterday."
In early February, an undercover Bibb deputy in an unmarked car was shot at but not wounded by a suspect who stepped out of another car on General Winship Drive in the Ingleside Avenue area just west of Riverside Drive.
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