Suspect crashes in East Ridge

Some East Ridge residents had a startling beginning to their Sunday morning after a car driven by a shooting suspect ran off the road and damaged two homes in the 1200 block of South Seminole Drive.

Police said Scott Benn, 25, who is suspected of shooting Dale Edmonds, lost control of his car and ran off the road just after 10 a.m. The car hit a support pole for a carport and the rear end of a car parked in that carport. It finally came to a halt amid a bush next to an adjacent house, narrowly missing a bedroom window.

East Ridge Assistant Police Chief Stan Allen said Benn was taken to a local hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. He was later taken to the Hamilton County Jail where he was charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and theft of property.

Edmonds, 56, suffered a single non-life-threatening gunshot wound.

By Sunday afternoon, all that was left were muddy tire tracks, a mangled bush and caution tape as a warning to not walk under the carport.

Harold Sayne was standing on his porch with another neighbor talking about the damage to his house.

“He come down this road too fast, I guess,” Sayne said. “He came across, hit [my neighbor’s car], then, the [pole] that supports the porch there, hit that and it’s laying up here on my roof.”

The steel pole had catapulted onto Sayne’s roof when the car ran into it. He was in bed when it happened.

“It rattled the house so hard it ‘bout knocked me out of bed,” he said. “I thought a tree had fallen on the house.”

He initially didn’t see the car, but he heard his wife go out the back door to the porch.

“The young man was out there bleeding all over the porch,” Sayne said. “So my wife took a towel out there to compress the wound and try to slow the bleeding down.”

Sayne said he thought the man had been hit by a car at first and later learned he was the suspect in a shooting. The man was bleeding from the side of his head and seemed to be in shock. Sayne said the injuries were caused by the crash.

“He was crying and carrying on,” he said. “He was hurt pretty bad.”

Sayne, who has lived in his home for 15 years, said cars running off the road and into his and his neighbor’s yards is a fairly regular occurrence.

“I bet her mailbox has been knocked down 20 times,” he said. “I used to have trees out here … We’ve had cars come through here, and I’ve always worried about them coming down through there.”

But nothing as serious as Sunday morning’s crash has ever happened, he said. And he’s not worried about future safety.

“It was kind of like a freak accident,” he said.