ATLANTA — A metro Atlanta resident was hard at work when he received a terrifying phone call from his wife Tuesday afternoon.
"She called me, and I was sitting at my desk working and told me that one guy had shot another guy on the bus," Johnny Gilbert said. "I'm like, 'what?' It just didn't make any sense to me."
His wife was one of 17 passengers on board when a Gwinnett County transit bus was hijacked in Atlanta. Police said the first call it received was about how people were being held hostage on board the bus in Atlanta and that a weapon had gone off.
"Once I realized that somebody really did shoot somebody, she was on the phone, and I told her to put the phone down because I was worried about him shooting her or something," Gilbert said. "Put the phone down, turn it off and just sit quietly and just don't say anything to anybody."
Gilbert then texted her 15 to 20 minutes later. But there was no answer.
"For about maybe 50 minutes or so, I had no idea what was going on," he said. "That was the hardest part."
APD Chief Darin Schierbaum said an officer responded to 45 Ivan Allen Junior Boulevard and upon arrival, police saw the suspect inside the bus but the suspect forced the driver to drive off at gunpoint.
During the chase, the bus appeared to hit multiple cars, including a Gwinnett County patrol car, while Georgia State Patrol cruisers followed along. At one point, authorities appeared to be attempting a PIT maneuver on the bus to disable it from driving. DeKalb Police said they used a BearCat vehicle to help disable the bus.
The bus came to a stop off Hugh Howell Road between Deer Ridge Drive and Rosser Road. Multiple passengers were seen getting off the bus with their hands in the air. A person was found with a gunshot wound and was rushed to the hospital, where they died from their injuries, police said.
But with no knowledge about what happened to his spouse, Gilbert took things into his own hands. He used the "find my phone" app to find her and drove to the location.
"We've been together since I was 26 years old. It was gut-wrenching," Gilbert said about the incident.
His wife typically commutes to work, but it was always the concept of walking in Downtown Atlanta alone that worried Gilbert -- not a bus ride.
"It never even dawned on me that somebody would do this in the afternoon," he said.
The person accused of this crime is a 39-year-old who has been arrested 19 times, with a few of those instances relating to being armed with a weapon. Chief Schierbaum said mental health might play a factor but that this suspect should never have had a weapon, being a convicted felon.
"Until this stops happening, nothing is going to change," Gilbert said about the suspect having a prior record but getting his hands on a weapon.
Despite the nightmare that occurred on a weekday afternoon, Gilbert believes his wife won't let the incident deter her from how she commutes in metro Atlanta.
"You can't necessarily go through life living in fear, I guess, so she probably will," he said about her riding the bus.