A customer at a Georgia Waffle House was shot and killed early Friday, allegedly by a restaurant employee.
The shooting happened about 4:30 a.m. at the 24-hour restaurant located about 9 miles west of downtown Atlanta.
“The preliminary investigation has determined that a verbal altercation occurred between an employee and a customer,” Fulton police Cpl. Kay Lester said. “At some point, the male employee retrieved a weapon and fired upon the customer. That unidentified male customer was deceased at the scene.”
Lester said the employee has been taken into custody.
Ontray Haley said he was eating in the Waffle House when two men and a woman came in the restaurant.
“The girl got into it first with the security guard and they told her she had to leave the property,” Haley told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “So she left but the other two guys hung around and they told them they had to leave. The cook refused to serve them because they were getting unruly.”
After that, Haley said, the two men “got into it with the cook and the guy that got shot, he threatened the cook. He told him, you come outside and I’m going to fire you up, which basically meant he wanted to shoot him.”
Haley said that’s when gunfire broke out.
“It occurred right at the counter,” he said. “It was just chaos; I was ducking for cover like everybody else. I looked up and I saw the guy on the floor, dead.”
Haley said he heard three or four shots.
“I was too busy ducking,” he said.
The incident was the second fatal shooting at an Atlanta-area Waffle House in the past two weeks.
On May 31, an off-duty police officer working security at a Waffle House was shot and killed.
About the Author