A man in a late-model Chevrolet Camaro that was parked in an emergency lane along Interstate 75 in north Macon on Wednesday night opened fire inside the car when law enforcement officers stopped to check on him, authorities said.
The man later stepped out of the car and aimed a gun at the police, who shot and killed him, the GBI said in a statement sent to news outlets Thursday.
Bibb County Coroner Leon Jones later identified the man as Steven Lewis Finfrock, 63, who Jones said was a disabled veteran from Titusville, Florida.
It was unclear what branch of the service that Finfrock, an Ohio native, was served in.
Jones said Finfrock had been traveling with his dog, Chloe, possibly a Yorkie mix, which was found dead from a gunshot wound inside the car.
Where exactly Finfrock may have been traveling to Wednesday night was not clear.
The coroner went on to say that late Thursday afternoon he reached Finfrock’s relatives in Ohio and informed them of his death.
Meanwhile, the GBI’s statement was scant on many details from Wednesday night’s gunfire, but investigators were still early in their examination of what happened.
The deadly encounter began unfolding in the 7 o’clock hour just below the Bass Road interchange along the freeway’s northbound lanes.
A roadside assistance worker for the Georgia Department of Transportation spotted the car and pulled over to help.
Finfrock, inside the Camaro, “would not respond” so the worker called the cops, the GBI’s statement said.
Officers from the Georgia State Patrol along with Bibb sheriff’s deputies soon arrived and as they got close to the Camaro they noticed Finfrock, in the driver’s seat, with a gun.
The GBI’s statement, which does not elaborate further, says “during the incident, the driver shot his gun multiple times inside the car and the officers took cover. The driver then got out of the car and pointed his gun at the officers. At this time, the officers shot the driver and he was pronounced dead at the scene.”
No one else was hurt.
According to online records, Finfrock had ties to the Dayton, Ohio, area, which is home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He had only a few known brushes with the police, though it was unclear if any were violent.
His earliest known arrest came in 1985 when he was charged with DUI near Tampa and, later that same year, charged with filing a false application for a driver’s license.
In 1990, Finfrock was fined $200 for a DUI near Dayton and in 2006 he was arrested for a misdemeanor involving alleged telephone harassment.
Tax records show that about three years ago, in May 2019, he bought a house with a pool near the Indian River in the coastal Florida city of Titusville near Cape Canaveral.
Early Thursday afternoon, as the coroner in Macon continued searching for Finfrock’s relatives, a tip from a Telegraph reporter helped locate Finfrock’s nephew and sister in Ohio.
Jones had earlier enlisted the help of police in Titusville, who went to Finfrock’s house on Greenwood Street there but found no one home and no neighbors who knew Finfrock.
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