A Prichard sanitation employee who was shot while driving a city garbage truck this week is now facing ten criminal charges himself, after investigators concluded he started the encounter by using the heavy vehicle to force a family off the road, then opened fire on their car.
Mobile County Sheriff Paul Burch said Clifton DuBose, 54, will be booked into Mobile County Metro Jail once he is released from a local hospital, where he was treated for a gunshot wound sustained during the bizarre encounter on Jarrett Road. DuBose, an employee of Prichard’s sanitation department, is charged with five counts of reckless endangerment and five counts of shooting into an occupied vehicle.
A confrontation on Jarrett Road
According to Burch, the trouble began at around 2 p.m. Tuesday, when DuBose allegedly used his city sanitation vehicle to run a smaller car carrying a man, a woman and three children off the roadway. The couple got out and confronted the sanitation driver, and a verbal argument followed.
“Based on the investigative details we have right now, when the verbal argument ended, the male driver of the small vehicle was walking back toward his vehicle and the sanitation driver exited his vehicle and pointed a gun at the back of the male,” Burch said.
At that point, authorities said, the woman who had been riding in the smaller car pulled out her own weapon and fired two shots, one of which struck DuBose. Rather than retreat, DuBose allegedly opened fire on the couple, sending several rounds into their vehicle while the three children were still inside. No one in the family was reported struck by the gunfire.
More trouble for the accused
The sheriff’s office said the case against DuBose is not his only legal problem. His driver’s license was either suspended or revoked at the time of the incident, Burch said, and he was already wanted on domestic violence charges when the shooting occurred.
Because DuBose remained hospitalized at the time the charges were announced, he had not yet been booked into Metro Jail. Officials said the booking would take place after his medical release.
City hall responds
News of the incident reached the public in unusual fashion. Mayor Carletta Davis broke the word Tuesday afternoon in a post on her official Facebook page, though her initial message did not identify the employee or describe the circumstances, saying only that a city worker had been injured in an on-the-job shooting.
“The employee was transported to a local hospital, where he is receiving medical care,” Davis wrote. “Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his loved ones as we pray for a full and speedy recovery.”
The fuller picture that emerged from the sheriff’s office hours later transformed what appeared to be a workplace tragedy into a criminal case against the wounded worker himself, with the family he allegedly forced off the road now on the other side of the investigation.
The charges he faces
Under Alabama law, shooting into an occupied vehicle is a felony, and each of the five counts tied to the rounds fired into the family’s car carries potential prison time on its own. Reckless endangerment, charged here five times, covers conduct that creates a substantial risk of serious physical injury to others — one count for each member of the family prosecutors say was endangered.
The case also raises uncomfortable questions for the city about how an employee with a suspended or revoked license and an outstanding domestic violence warrant came to be behind the wheel of a city truck that afternoon. Prichard officials had not addressed those questions publicly as of the latest updates in the case.
For the family on Jarrett Road, the episode ended without physical injury but with a roadside confrontation that turned into a shooting — and a sanitation route that now sits at the center of a ten-count criminal case.