[chris]

A traffic stop in Athens, Georgia, left one police officer dead and a second gravely wounded on March 22, 2011, after a kidnapping suspect opened fire and touched off a four-day manhunt across the region, according to Athens-Clarke County police and court records.

The recording archived here is a police logging tape, a continuous capture of 911 calls and dispatch radio traffic from the county communications center rather than a single caller's line. It runs from the report of the kidnapping through the search for the suspect's vehicle, the radio transmissions as the officers were shot, and the citizen 911 calls and dispatcher phone calls that followed.

The sequence began earlier that day when Judon Antron Brooks, 31, told police he had been bound with plastic zip ties and locked in the trunk of a car, according to a police report. Brooks freed his hands when the car stopped on Lexington Road, popped the trunk and climbed out, then reported the abduction. Officer Tony Howard soon spotted the suspect's vehicle west of downtown and pulled it over.

As Howard approached, Jamie Donnell Hood, 33, jumped from the vehicle and shot him, according to trial testimony. Senior Police Officer Elmer "Buddy" Christian, 34, who had pulled up to assist, was shot twice and killed while at the scene. Howard survived his wounds.

Hood evaded capture for four days and took several people hostage before surrendering on March 26, 2011, police said. He agreed to give himself up only after authorities allowed the surrender to be carried live on television, saying he feared he would be killed as his brother had been by police years earlier, according to news accounts.

Prosecutors also charged Hood in the December 2010 killing of Kenneth Omari Wray, whom he shot multiple times. Representing himself, Hood became the first defendant in a Georgia death-penalty case to act as his own attorney at trial. On July 20, 2015, a jury convicted him on 36 of 70 counts, including the murder of Christian, and four days later sentenced him to life in prison without parole. The Georgia Supreme Court upheld the convictions in June 2021.