The two men had few good options. Shot at while driving a white passenger bus down Seminole Street in Midtown Mobile, they did the quickest thing they could think of: they drove straight to Mobile Police Department headquarters and pulled into the parking lot.
The driver honked the horn and called for help, stumbled out of the bus and collapsed to the ground with a gunshot wound to his shoulder. The passenger ran inside the building to alert officers. Firefighters and paramedics responded outside the headquarters on Government Boulevard, where the bus’s glass passenger door stood shattered — a hole, investigators said, left by a bullet passing through the vehicle.
According to the Mobile Police Department, the men arrived at the police complex at around 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in late June with injuries they said they sustained from gunfire on Seminole Street, across from Public Safety Memorial Park. One of the men was directly struck and was transported to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries; the other was grazed by a bullet and declined medical transport. Both were expected to recover.
‘Some sort of altercation on Seminole Street’
Police Chief William Jackson said the shooting stemmed from an altercation on Seminole Street, though investigators did not immediately know what triggered it.
“There was an altercation of some sort that happened on Seminole Street and shots were fired from one person into this vehicle,” Jackson said. “One person was struck and one was grazed. The injuries are not life threatening.”
A witness who asked not to be identified described hearing about three gunshots and seeing a truck pull up behind the bus before someone fired into it and sped away.
“Another truck pulled up behind it, they went around the truck, shot into the truck, got back in the truck, backed up down the road — that’s all I saw,” the witness said.
An arrest by evening
By that evening, investigators had their suspect. Through the course of the investigation, officers identified and located a subject at a home on Lott Street. Joe Lee IV, 59, was arrested and booked into the Metro Jail at 7:50 p.m., charged with two counts of first-degree assault and one count of shooting into an occupied vehicle, according to police and jail records.
First-degree assault is a Class B felony in Alabama, carrying up to 20 years in prison per count, and shooting into an occupied vehicle adds another felony count. Jail records also showed a probation violation flag associated with the arrest, and a judge has held Lee without bond, according to reporting by FOX10.
Help next door
The episode — victims racing to the one building in the city guaranteed to be full of police officers — ended about as well as such encounters can. The police complex sits on Government Boulevard near the Midtown neighborhoods it serves, and officers were able to begin treating and interviewing the victims within minutes of their arrival.
The case now moves to the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office, which will decide how to proceed against Lee. Police did not release the names of the two men who were shot, and said the investigation into the altercation’s cause remains active. Anyone with information was asked to contact Mobile Police or submit an anonymous tip through mobilepd.org/crimetip.
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