Winter 2005 newsletter
Georgia First Amendment Foundation

900 pages of related records from I-185 shooting are released

By Jim Houston
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

Columbus, Ga., Dec. 2004 -- The voices were calm, the words plain and matter-of-fact.

Listeners to the radio calls that night could never have grasped that the words they were hearing would impact so many lives.

A mother would lose her son, a wife and child their husband and father. A law enforcement officer would be fired from the only job he ever wanted. A community would find itself questioning its ability to get along.

But it happened. And it's captured in the radio calls from the night of the Dec. 10, 2003, when Kenneth B. Walker was shot and killed by then-Muscogee County Sheriff's Deputy David Glisson during a traffic stop on Interstate 185 that was part of a drug investigation. The tape of those transmissions, kept from the public until a grand jury refused to indict Glisson on Nov. 30, was released by District Attorney Gray Conger, complying with Georgia Public Records Act requests filed more than 11 months ago by WRBL-TV and the Ledger-Enquirer and WRBL-TV.

Also turned over released were more than 900 pages of investigative reports, interviews and files, completing a process that began with the release of a videotape of the traffic stop and shooting, and transcripts of interviews with Glisson interviews conducted by the sheriff's internal investigators.

The I-185 stop

In stark, matter-of-fact tones, the audio tape begins with Metro Narcotics Task Force agents checking to ensure that sheriff's Special Response Team units were ready to assist in stopping a vehicle containing four men who had visited an Armour Road apartment from which two suspected drug dealers were operating.

The Metro agents had watched as the gray GMC Yukon drove up to the Northwoods Apartments, then left after one of the men from the SUV talked to one of the suspected drug dealers. Minutes later, the Yukon returned and one of the men carried something into the suspect's apartment, followed a short time later by the SUV's other three occupants of the vehicle.

Officers would later learn that the driver of the vehicle was Warren Beaulah, a teacher and coach at Carver High School. His passengers were Walker, 39, a BlueCross/BlueShield employee, Anthony Smith and Daryl Ransom. No guns or drugs were found in the SUV and none of the occupants were charged in connection with the events.

 As the sheriff's department's marked cars pulled ahead of the unmarked cars that followed Beulah's Yukon from the apartment onto I-185, a Metro agent radioed the description of the SUV the marked car was to stop:

"That's him in the silver . . . in the silver vehicle . . . the silver vehicle," the Metro agent said. ". . . Go around the pickup . . . that silver Yukon, silver Yukon."

As the marked unit turned on its blue lights and siren at 9:06:18, the officers making the stop were cautioned by one of the agents, "All right, y'all be careful. There's at least four individuals in it."

That's the last transmission before the call for medical help is made, but playing the videotape and audiotape together shows that the shooting of Walker, who had been forced from the vehicle by Glisson, occurred about 43 seconds after the sheriff's car's blue lights were turned on its blue lights.

Times recorded at the 911 center on the audio tapes differ from the timestamp on scenes from the videotape of the stop,

The audio tapes show that 52 seconds after the two fatal gunshots were fired, a sheriff's unit called for an ambulance.:

"We need an EMS en route to our location. We're between Manchester and Macon (Road) southbound. We need them 10-18," the unidentified officer called, using the law enforcement code calling for a quick response.

"10-4. What's the nature, sir?" the sheriff's office dispatcher asked.

"We just need one 10-18, 10-18. Got one down," the officer replied.

One minute and 15 seconds later, the dispatcher told officers at the scene that an EMS ambulance was on its way. The audio tape shows that an ambulance and fire truck left the 5844 Whitesville Road firehouse at 9:11:49 * less than four minutes after the officer on I-185 called for an EMS unit.

At 9:16:26 the ambulance arrived at the scene, about halfway between the Manchester Expressway and Macon Road interchanges on southbound I-185. The videotape shows the EMS crew immediately begin rendering aid to Walker, relieving a sheriff's deputy who began applying pressure to the head wound about two minutes after the shooting.

About 8* minutes after they arrived, the medics and Walker were on their way to The Medical Center, with the crew notifying doctors and nurses by radio that their patient had two 9 mm gunshot wounds to the head, had lost a lot of blood and had no regular pulse.

Exactly seven minutes after the ambulance crew reported it was Medical Center-bound, a firefighter radioed that the ambulance and crew were out of service at the hospital.

More calls from scene

There's much more detail and many more transmissions on the tapes released by the district attorney's office. The tapes were played for the media, an event that took about 90 minutes, compressing events that on Dec. 10, 2003, took 3 hours and 38 minutes from first call to the final transmission from the I-185 scene.

Among the other calls were requests for additional marked cars with blue lights to help slow down I-185 traffic that was rounding a bend in the highway so fast that officers feared they or their cars would be rammed.

Other calls summoned senior sheriff's department officers to the scene, sent some to The Medical Center where Walker was taken and others to St. Francis Hospital, where Glisson was taken for blood tests, which is required of all officers involved in shooting incidents.

Another call brought a jail van to the scene to take Beaulah, Ransom and Smith to the sheriff's department, and another to have the keys to Beaulah's Yukon returned to the scene to remove so the vehicle could be moved.

Finally, after a fire truck had been called back to the scene to wash Walker's blood from the roadside, the last transmission released the last marked car from the scene, returning the stretch of interstate to its normal purpose.

Editor's note: The Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments in R.W. Page Corp.d/b/a Columbus Ledger Enquirer and Media General Operations, Inc., d/b/a WRBL News 3 CBS in September. After the open records were released, Attorney Walter Bush of Atlanta's Arnall Golden Gregory said in December: "The Supreme Court may consider the case is moot, but I say the exemption still needs to be resolved. Secondly, the statute provides for attorneys' fees, and we think the court should rule in this."  Susan Catron, managing editor of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, added in December: "Yes, we definitely believe the case should remain on the docket. This is a case that illustrates how loose the standard is for investigative files, and the court needs to define it clearly."