MACON, Ga. — The major who leads Bibb County's patrol officers is defending their response to a weekend homicide.
Bibb deputies took two and a half hours to locate a homicide victim.
The Bibb County Sheriff's Office says their gunfire detection system ShotSpotter, first alerted officers at 5:43 a.m. Saturday about shots on Monroe Avenue and again at 5:44 a.m.
At 6:25 a.m., 40 minutes after the ShotSpotter call, the first deputy arrived and found a duplex home shot up.
The report doesn't say what deputies did for the next two hours until 8:18 a.m. That's when a friend of Jimmy Lee Bradberry broke into the home and found him dead.
Major Brad Wolfe, who oversees the patrol division, says his deputies responded properly.
He says deputies had to take in legal considerations and make a judgment call before entering the home.
Wolfe says looking at the facts, he believes his patrol deputies responded properly.
"Could we have gone in the house immediately when we go there we could have would that have been the appropriate thing to do? It depends, and looking at the circumstances, I think they I can appropriately wait and try to find where Mr. Bradbury was," Wolfe said.
Major Brad Wolfe says deputies didn't have enough credible information to enter the home until two and a half hours after the original ShotSpotter report when a friend found Bradberry dead.
He said when the first deputy arrived 40 minutes after the ShotSpotter alert, they saw the gunshot damage to the home's exterior.
We asked if shots on the outside of the home were not enough to go inside the home to check on the victims.
"No, not just shots to the house on the outside of the house... You have to have some information on if somebody's inside that residence before you go. When the public has an expectation of privacy from the government, so we can't just kick it going because the house was shot," Wolfe said.
So Wolfe says that deputies called Bradberry and people he knew to confirm where he was. A neighbor pointed out Bradberry's car in the driveway.
"Well, one of the neighbors told the deputies that he often leaves his car there and goes off with other people, and they didn't think he was home," Wolfe said.
The Sheriff's office told us Monday that deputies also considered that dogs were inside the home.
"We don't want to jeopardize the pets any more than we do the person," Wolfe said.
Finally, Jaquavious Pass, one of Bradberry's friends, broke into the side door to check on him.
He found him dead and opened the front door for deputies.
"He didn't ask us if he could go, and we didn't ask him to go in. But I think he probably felt like we were taking too much time trying to make a decision," Wolfe said.
Wolfe says the uncertainty about Bradberry's location, dogs, legal concerns and the lack of credible information were all reasons the deputies didn't move in sooner.
As for the ShotSpotter call, it took 40 minutes for a deputy to respond to the home, and Wolfe says that's too long. But he couldn't explain the delay.
He says in cases like this one, where ShotSpotter pinged at least twice, the response should have been urgent within 10 to 15 minutes.