Officer Joel Gunn of the Chattanooga Police Department and a woman who was fired at after she walked into the scene of a shooting testified in court Wednesday concerning the shooting at the Chateau Royale Apartments on South Germantown Road on April 22.
Coy Sims, 48, was arrested by Officer Gunn after police were called by residents of the apartment complex. On the night of the arrest, police said the suspect had first fired at Lawanda Smiley.
The female witness told police that she had exited her apartment to see what was happening and had found Ms. Smiley hiding behind cover as if she was in fear for her life. She said Ms. Smiley had pleaded with her to call the police.
The witness said she yelled, “I am going to call the police.”
She said Sims yelled, “Oh, really,” before he fired at her and then fled. She ran into her apartment. She said she called the police and they were already at the scene when Sims came walking around the corner.
She said she knew it was him because he was wearing the same blue and white clothes.
“I actually could smell liquor from where he was,” she said.
Officer Gunn said after he apprehended Sims he noticed the “bottom part of (Sims’s) overshirt and undershirt were torn.” He said police found a firearm and parts of Sims’s overshirt and undershirt behind a relatively high security fence inside the apartment complex.
He said Sims did not volunteer any information about “why he was firing at these women.”
“When I talked to Mr. Sims, he was extremely intoxicated,” Officer Gunn said.
Officer Gunn also said that when Sims entered the jail, the suspect sat on a bench reserved for inmates, but that when Sims got up and moved there was “a small dime bag of marijuana” where he had been sitting. Officer Gunn said the bag had not been there before.
Judge David Bales found probable cause and bound Sims’s charges to the Grand Jury.