Fire Chief Is Fatally Shot After Stopping to Help Driver Who Struck Deer

A fire chief was fatally shot after he and a driver who had hit a deer on a rural road in Alabama came under fire as they approached a house to ask for help, the authorities said.

Sheriff’s deputies responded around 5 p.m. on Sunday to a report of a traffic accident involving a deer near the Georgia border, the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

They found three men with gunshot wounds. James Bartholomew Cauthen, 54, a battalion chief with Coweta County Fire Rescue in Newnan, Ga., was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver, whose name was not released, and a man identified as William Randall Franklin were flown by helicopter to a hospital for treatment of gunshot wounds, the sheriff’s office said.

Mike Segrest, the district attorney for Alabama’s 5th Judicial Circuit, said in an email on Tuesday that Mr. Franklin had been charged with murder.

The authorities said that Chief Cauthen had stopped to assist the driver and that the two men sought help nearby in the small community of Stroud, Ala. As they were doing so, Mr. Franklin “opened fire on Chief Cauthen and the individual that struck the deer,” the sheriff’s office said. “All individuals were injured during the shootout.”

“They start walking up a driveway and an individual that lived in the residence where this driveway was came out and started shooting,” Mike Parrish, chief deputy of the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office, told WTVM-TV of Columbus, Ga.

Deputy Parrish, who could not be reached on Tuesday, told WTVM that all three men were armed. A dispatcher said that he was unable to take calls because of bad weather in the area.

“You pull up and three people are shot — it just don’t make sense any way you look at it,” he told the station. “We just really didn’t know what happened. It was just bizarre.”

Chief Cauthen, who was known as Bart, had worked for more than 24 years for Coweta County Fire Rescue in Newnan, which is about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta. The department did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

It was not immediately clear why Chief Cauthen was in the area where the crash took place. Stroud, a small unincorporated community, is about six and a half miles from the Georgia state line.