An 85-year-old man, Wendall Cross, was fatally shot by Union County deputies during a reported domestic squabble involving a firearm this past Sunday, officials shared. This confrontation led deputies to a residence on Wesley Mountain Road around 3:20 p.m. where the altercation escalated, as stated by FOX 5 Atlanta. The situation turned violent when Cross allegedly brandished a gun and fired at the responding officers.
The law enforcement personnel, finding themselves in the line of fire, returned shots after attempting to disarm the man, they commanded him to drop his weapon but he refused, and the deputies were then forced to use their firearms. Cross was hit, consequentially taken to a nearby hospital, but he couldn't survive the wounds, per details from 11Alive. In the aftermath, there were no injuries reported among the deputies involved in the incident.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is currently looking into the shooting, an action that is standard protocol in such officer-involved shootings. The results of this probe will be evaluated by the Union County District Attorney’s Office—as both FOX 5 Atlanta and 11Alive inform, looking to bring clarity on the chain of events that led to this tragic outcome.
The local community awaits the conclusions of the GBI's independent review, and what these findings might mean for the deputies' actions and the protocols they followed that day, the community shaken by the reality of a dispute turned deadly, the peace of a quiet road in Blairsville shattered by the echo of gunfire and the loss of one of their own.
