T-31, Out of Service… Job Well Done
As I lay fingers to keys at this moment, I have no idea what was going through the mind of Christopher Hodges last Saturday night when he decided to use the Gordon Highway as his own personal shooting gallery.
The former Evans-Augusta resident was stationed at Fort Gordon undergoing technical training related to his service as a National Guardsman. According to his girlfriend, Hodges was drunk and angry, and it was when he reached the interchange at Gordon Highway and Bobby Jones Expressway that she decided to bail out of the vehicle he was driving.
He did not like her decision to bail.
For reasons that we likely will never, ever know, Hodges reached into his trunk and pulled out his legally purchased M-4 assault rifle and opened fire, aiming randomly at passing traffic.
Seventeen-year Richmond County Sheriff’s Office veteran J.D. Paugh had no idea, none whatsoever, what he was driving up on as he made his way home from a late-night assignment handling traffic congestion around the Georgia-Carolina Fair.
A disabled car on the side of the road, with its passengers looking for assistance.
Or so he thought.
The call had not yet gone out on the radio, and what a shame that is. Fellow officers who knew him well say there is no way J.D. would have ridden up directly on such a violent situation. There are strategies and procedures in place for such confrontations. A sole officer on a motorcycle would not knowingly offer himself up as a sitting duck in such a case.
Simply put, J.D. was precisely in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time.
Hodges fired at least 42 shots that night, with at least nine of them finding the body of the deputy, before taking his own life with the same weapon.
Investigators were amazed as they pieced together the final moments of his life and the final acts of law enforcement of Deputy Paugh, not because they were uncharacteristic of the kind of officer J.D. was, but because they showed a scene of amazing bravery and dedication to service quite profound by any measure.
J.D. was under fire from the very moment he climbed off his patrol motorcycle. He knew there was nothing he could do but return fire, and he had to do it quick if the enormously dangerous assailant was to be stopped. At almost the same moment he fired his third and final shot, a round from the assault rifle blasted his service weapon into pieces of deadly shrapnel.
The damage from that one round was enough to incapacitate the deputy, but thank God his final shot, the last aggressive move Deputy Paugh would be physically able to make, found its target true, disabling the arm of his disturbed attacker.
Moments later, Hodges managed to use his other hand to pull the trigger and fire the bullet that took his own life, and perhaps forever sealed the true story and rationale behind his actions away from mortal man.
I believe J.D. Paugh saved lives last Saturday night. I believe he was ready to do that every time he put on his uniform, and cranked up his motorcycle. He always knew there was a chance he was going to have to fight with his own life at stake, in order to save the lives of others. A lesser man, and a lesser officer, would have failed.
Simply put, J.D. was precisely in the right place at precisely the right time.You Might Also Like:
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