A man was shot in the groin in a business parking lot on Richards Road in Antioch, Tennessee, late Sunday night after surveillance footage showed him confronting another person who then drew a handgun and fired. The victim was transported to Vanderbilt University Medical Center with non-life-threatening injuries.
Police noted the victim appeared to draw and possibly fire a handgun of his own following the shooting. No arrests have been made, the suspect fled the scene, and prosecutors will determine whether any use of force was lawful once the investigation concludes.
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ANTIOCH, TN — A man was shot in the groin in a business parking lot on Richards Road late Sunday night and then appeared to pull a handgun of his own, according to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.
The shooting was reported shortly before 11 p.m. in the 900 block of Richards Road, and responding officers found the wounded man in the parking lot, as reported by WKRN. He was taken by ambulance to Vanderbilt University Medical Center with injuries described as not life-threatening.
MNPD said surveillance video shows the victim arriving in a dark SUV, getting out, and confronting another person. That person pulled a handgun and shot him.
“The victim then appeared to pull a handgun and could have fired a round as well,” the department stated.
The sequence starts before the gunfire. Police say the man drove up, got out, and moved toward another person. The sources do not say what the confrontation was about, and I am not going to guess. But closing distance on someone in a dark parking lot at 11 at night is a decision, and it is the decision that put two guns in the same ten feet of asphalt. Prosecutors reviewing a shooting do not look at the final two seconds in isolation. They look at the entire approach, including who chose to be there.
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Deadly force is justified only against an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm. Nothing released so far establishes what either man believed or intended in the moments before the first shot, and that gap is the entire difficulty here. Police have described a confrontation and a shooting. They have not described a threat.
No one has been arrested. Police said the suspect ran off down Richards Road toward Una Antioch, and no persons of interest have been named. Neither man has been publicly identified, police have not said whether the round the victim may have fired struck anything, and no charging decision has been announced against anyone. Whether that round was lawful is not a call police make. It belongs to prosecutors once the investigation closes.
