911 TAPES RECOUNT EVENTS

900 Pages of Related Records From I-185 Shooting Released

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 Dec. 10, 2003, when
Kenneth 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
Wednesday 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. Also released were more than 900 pages of investigative
reports, interviews and files, completing a process that began last week
with the release of a videotape of the traffic stop and shooting, and
transcripts of interviews with Glisson 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. 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:
"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. Times
recorded at the 911 center on the audio tapes differ from the timestamp on
scenes from the videotape of the stop, which were released last week. The
audio tapes show that 52 seconds after the two fatal gunshots were fired, a
sheriff's unit called for an ambulance. 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. 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 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 1/2 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.

Among the other calls were requests for additional marked cars with blue
lights to help slow down I-185 traffic. 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
shootings. Another call brought a jail van to the scene to take Beaulah,
Ransom and Smith to the sheriff's department.

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.