Library Guard Shoots at Fleeing PatronAn on-duty security guard at the Anderson County (S.C.) Library January 6 shot at a woman who set off the library’s alarm as she fled the facility late in the afternoon. James Turner fired the single gunshot as the woman, who had ignored his repeated commands to stop, drove her sedan directly at him, forcing him to jump aside.
The bullet damaged the driver’s side door, but whether the unidentified woman was hurt is not known. No one noted the vehicle’s license-plate number, and the library discovered that the security cameras lacked videotape that day due to officials complying with an unrelated subpoena from the county sheriff’s office.
Although it is not known why the woman fled the building in the first place, Turner speculated in the January 9 Anderson Independent Mail that she was running from something more serious than getting caught with a stolen book, and that she told him to stop chasing her. “When the car started to move, I pulled my weapon,” he explained. “She started forward slowly and then she hit me [in the knee]. That’s when I fired my weapon. And she gunned it.”
The incident has prompted library officials to prohibit guards from carrying firearms until the board has reviewed the library’s overall security policy and to consider contracting with Anderson County Park Police instead of Cherokee Security Systems, the private company employing Turner. “We have to have guards, because we have to have safety for the folks,” library Director Carl Stone said in the January 9 Independent Mail. “But we don’t want them to come in and be fearful of anybody.”
Stone has also told Cherokee, which has provided library security for almost two decades, not to assign Turner to any future library shifts.
Posted January 12, 2007.
|
