Police detain half-nude man who claimed to have bomb

ATLANTA - Atlanta Police are praising how officers handled an incident involving a partially nude man along Cheshire Bridge Road on Monday.

The encounter between Atlanta Police officers and 39-year-old Terrell Brown started with a 911 call from a woman at the Cheshire Motor Inn. The woman told the operator a naked man was walking around the property on around 8:40 Monday morning. APD Zone 2 Major Vann Hobbs said initially, only one officer responded to the call.

“When you're walking around with your pants around his knees and your genitals exposed, it certainly elevates an officer's senses to the fact that something is wrong. And when the individual asked our officer what he was wearing and why he was in uniform, then ran out into traffic, we know something is wrong,” Major Hobbs said.

At our request, Major Hobbs looked at FOX 5’s video of the Monday morning encounter. He said before the camera was rolling, his officer had already hustled to stop Brown as Brown tried to grab a passing truck on Cheshire Bridge Road. The incident reports indicates Brown appeared upset, confused and under the influence of drugs as he yelled that he had a bomb in his pants. Major Hobbs said the officer called for an ambulance and for back up as Brown became more belligerent. But the officers never thought it was necessary to use a weapon.

“We go by what the person is doing. This man was resisting, but he wasn't trying to hurt the officer. He was just trying to get away. We can't let that happen, so it took several officers to handcuff him, but there was not a need to use defensive force,” Hobbs explained.

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Based on Brown's resistance to getting in the patrol car, Major Hobbs said the officers feared Brown would use his head or feet to break a window. Under a supervisor's orders, they stopped their efforts to place him in the patrol car and waited instead for the paramedics. Brown was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital for evaluation and was charged only with city ordinance violations. Major Hobbs told FOX 5 News the encounter was a text book example of how officers must take control of a situation while weighing the various options for use of force. 

 “They handled this case as it should have been. Sometimes people look at officers and question why it takes so many police to get one person in custody, but they don't know what happened before they arrived or what kind of actions the officer had to make before they arrived. It's very challenging and we're sensitive to that, but that's why our officers undergo constant training,” Hobbs said from this precinct in Buckhead.