Man who shot at car, barely missing child, arrested

Police: He tried to rob Carroll County auto parts store.

A man accused of shooting at a car with three children inside earlier this month was arrested Tuesday during an armed robbery in Carroll County, police say.

Dante Starks, who is also wanted on armed robbery charges in Douglas and Fulton counties as well as in the cities of Villa Rica and Tyrone, tried to rob an auto parts store on Music Mill Road in Bremen about 8 a.m., according to a police report obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The crime was similar to one Tyrone police believe Starks committed on Dec. 18. After an armed robbery at an O’Reilly Auto Parts store in Tyrone, Starks tried to drive out of the parking lot, The AJC previously reported.

As the suspect attempted to leave, a citizen tried to stop him by ramming his SUV into Starks’ vehicle, officers said.

Mike McKinney’s children ducked just before the robber fired into his SUV. The shot pierced a window and went through his daughter’s car seat, The AJC previously reported. “If she hadn’t have moved her head,” McKinney said, “it would have been right in her head.”

Bremen police said Starks wore a ski mask as he broke into another O’Reilly Auto Parts store and forced employees into an office Tuesday morning. Officers and Haralson County deputies were alerted when the panic alarm went off, the sheriff ’s office said.

When an employee told responding Bremen Sgt. Michael Bell the store was closed, he asked where the suspect was, according to the report. That’s when Starks stepped out from behind a shelf and pointed a handgun, Bell wrote in the report.

After he was told to drop his gun, Starks ran out the back of the store and was arrested, the report states.

Starks, 35, remains in the Carroll County jail on armed robbery, aggravated assault and false imprisonment charges.