TIFTON — A Tifton police officer shot in the neck Saturday night is at home recuperating after and is expected to return to his duty with the Tifton Police Department in the future.

According to Tifton Police Chief Jim Smith, Officer Eddie Bailey is doing well.

“They removed the bullet and he his at home resting comfortably,” Smith said Thursday.

Smith said he expects Bailey to return to work. He isn’t sure when that will be.

Bailey was on patrol Saturday night and checking property at the Sun Mart convenience store on South Central Avenue at 9:47 p.m. when he saw a person wearing a mask in the alley behind Willis Country Meats. He began driving toward the person when another person approached his patrol car on the passenger’s side and fired one shot into the car. The bullet struck Bailey in the neck.

“God took care of him,” Smith said. “By all rights he should have been dead.”

Curtis Jermaine Akins, 25, 515 Elm St., Apt. B, was arrested at midnight Saturday on Elm Lane. He remains incarcerated at the Tift County Jail.

The investigation into Bailey’s shooting was turned over to agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. A spokesman at that agency’s office in Sylvester said Thursday that the second suspect has not been arrested. The spokesperson said he could not speculate as to whether Akins and the second suspect intended to rob a business in the area where Bailey was shot.

A computer search of past stories that ran in the Tifton Gazette show that Akins was arrested in 2003 for the armed robbery of a beer truck. According to the article, an employee of Fitzgerald Ice Company reported that he was at the front of his trailer unloading beer at 1520 S. Central Ave. when he thought he heard one of the doors on the rear of the trailer open. He walked to the back of the trailer to see three black males attempting to steal beer.

According to the incident report, the man said he told the suspects to put the beer back into the truck. One of the suspects then said, “I guess we have to kill him,” the victim told an officer. The victim said the man who made the threat pulled a black revolver and pointed it at him. It is unclear of Akins was the man with the gun or the one who made the threat.

The driver said that the men turned and ran west on 17th Street. After climbing a fence and searching an abandoned shed in Captain’s Point Trailer Park, the officer wrote in his incident report that he ran into Akins. The officer wrote that Akins told him he had been chasing some boys running through the trailer park. The officer wrote he saw Akins 15 minutes later and Akins agreed to talk with detectives.

In 2004, Akins was charged, along with 22 others, after the Tift County Sheriff’s Office’s Drug Enforcement Unit and the GBII conducted an investigation. Akins was then charged with sale of crack cocaine.

In recent weeks, there have been an unusually high number of reports of gunfire in the area. Some of those reports have been from people who believe they were the intended target of gunshots.

“It concerns me the number of calls we are getting for incidents with guns involved,” Smith said. “We are going to be taking steps in the immediate future to help prevent some of these guns from being on the streets.”

Smith said that most of the suspects officers and detectives of his department arrest or investigate have been “in and out of the system.”

“When you look at it, you wonder why they aren’t still in jail,” Smith said. “Years ago, people were afraid of the system. They aren’t afraid anymore.”

In other law enforcement news, the TCSO is investigating two assaults and an alleged attempted shooting.

• A 29-year-old man reported at 11 p.m. Wednesday that someone he didn’t know tried to shoot him at Short Street and Southern Avenue.

• A man reported that between 5:55 and 6:02 p.m. Wednesday, a 56-year-old disabled man was assaulted by several unknown men on South Ridge Avenue near W. 27th Street.

• A 34-year-old woman reported that between 5 and 6 p.m. Wednesday two people she knows “caused her substantial physical and visible bodily harm to her by striking her on the head and biting her.” The woman was treated and released from Tift Regional Medical Center, according to a spokesman there.



To contact senior reporter Angie Thompson, call 382-4321.