Thursday marked the 30th anniversary of the death of the first Cobb Police Officer killed by a firearm in the line of duty.
Shortly after midnight, Police Chief Stuart VanHoozer, other police officials and friends and family members of Robert Ingram gathered at the intersection of Marble Mill Road and Marr Avenue in Marietta.
That’s located near the Come-N-Get It Restaurant off the Church Street Extension.
And that’s where around 12:40 a.m. on July 13, 1993, Officer Ingram was checking the identification of a pedestrian spotted near the railroad tracks in what was regarded as a high-crime area.
He was shot and killed by a man with a hidden .380 caliber handgun who had been released from prison.
The suspect took Ingram’s patrol car to get away from the scene, and the abandoned vehicle was seen later in the day. Near Atlanta Road, George Russell Henry, on probation for burglaries and forgery, was arrested the same day and charged with the murder of Officer Ingram.
Officer Ingram, a 1987 Sprayberry High School graduate, was only 24 years old when he died, and he had just gotten married. He had been on the Cobb Police force for two years, after attending Valdosta State University and serving in the U.S. Air Force.
He was posthumously awarded the Cobb Police Department’s Medal of Valor.
Henry pleaded guilty to Ingram’s murder in 1994 and was sentenced to death; he had appealed his verdict until his health-related death on Georgia’s death row in 2014.
The first Cobb Police officer to die in the line of duty was Lt. John William Hood, who was killed in 1960, several days after responding to a drag racing call on Roswell Road between Powers Ferry Road and what is now the Marietta Parkway.
His patrol vehicle was hit head-on by an 18-year-old driver who was speeding more than 100 mph and heading the wrong way and who also was killed in the crash.
Officer Drew Haynes Brown, a DUI officer, was killed in a 1983 crash when his patrol vehicle was struck by a drunk driver.
Cobb SWAT officers Stephen Gilmer and Matthew Reeves were killed in a 1999 standoff during a hostage rescue.
Officer Freddie Norman died in 2009, 21 years after his patrol vehicle was hit by a speeding car on Pat Mell Road. He was rendered a quadaplegic and was suffering from what were believed to be injuries sustained from the crash.
More information can be found by clicking the Cobb’s Fallen Heroes page prepared by the county.
Related:
- Register officially appointed as Cobb public safety director
- Cobb Police K9 dies in hot patrol car after A/C malfunction
- Suspects captured in Windy Hill-Bentley Road vehicle chase
- 1 suspect killed, another injured in shooting at Northeast Cobb home
- Former Cobb Police officer sentenced for assault, child cruelty
- East Cobb man sentenced for shooting at neighbors, police
- Cobb Police capture suspect in Atlanta mass shooting
- Man sentenced to 15 years for stalking Indian Hills woman
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