Gridlock Guy: The Skycopter View of Atlanta’s Latest Traffic Craze

The terror that unfolded last Tuesday along a more than 20-mile highway between downtown Atlanta and the Smoke Rise community in DeKalb County cannot be understated. A bus forced into a diversion made its way from the city to the suburbs amid the afternoon rush. We observed these final climatic stanzas from the WSB Skycopter, immediately realizing that this was something we ourselves had never seen before.

The horror began on that infamous news day in Atlanta, when four people were shot to death in the Peachtree Center food court. The scene there initially appeared unrelated to the bus hijacking until Joseph Grier, 39, fresh from giving reporters an eyewitness account of the shooting at the Peachtree Center, allegedly got into an altercation aboard a bus from Gwinnett County Transit around 4:30 p.m. Police say Grier then shot and killed a passenger and held the bus driver at gunpoint, hijacking the commuter bus and its 17 passengers.

The bus stormed rush hour traffic on I-75/85/northbound from the heart of downtown Atlanta and on I-85/northbound to DeKalb and Gwinnett . It was here that we intercepted this surreal incident in the Skycopter WSB.

Skycopter pilot Alex Sprecher, photographer Bart Spradling and I diverted from our original destination on I-285 (a car fire had cut off I-285/northbound on Covington Highway – another day of (slow information, huh?) and took I-85/northbound to Jimmy Carter Boulevard (exit 99).

As we approached a tree bank east of the highway, we saw an armada of police cars closing northbound I-85. Then we saw a bus right behind this place with officers following it. We flew to him, then followed the bus to I-85/north and to the Jimmy Carter exit.

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The bus jumped onto the exit ramp and collided with patrol cars attempting to obstruct it, before turning right and heading southeast on Jimmy Carter Boulevard. Passing motorists generally avoided injury, and we warned them on 95.5 WSB of the impending crisis. A phalanx of Georgia State Patrol cars, aided by cruisers from several agencies, remained in pursuit of that bus.

The pursuit continued on Jimmy Carter Boulevard to where it changed its name to Mountain Industrial Boulevard, crossing the Lawrenceville Expressway. DeKalb roads then suffered their second dose of the same diversion.

I thought the hijacker would order the driver to take the bus on Highway 78 because its speed on the back roads had decreased. But the driver, under threat of being the second shooting victim on his own bus, turned left into the oncoming lanes onto Hugh Howell Road.

They then immediately crossed the center line at Hugh Howell and continued correctly in the eastbound lanes, narrowly avoiding major collisions with undoubtedly terrified passersby.

We must credit the calm and goodwill of bus driver Ernst Antoine. A Haitian pastor, Antoine told Channel 2 Action News that his duty to protect his passengers and those outside the bus drove his decision.

“Because I have to do the right thing, no matter what happens to me,” Antoine said. Antoine’s daughter said her father had only traveled this route for three months, but had been driving buses for 20 years.

Officers attempted several times to pull alongside the bus and slow it down, and were eventually able to restrain it and inflict enough damage to stop it. Officers entered the injured bus on Hugh Howell Road near Rosser Road, a heavily laden stretch of trees and shadows in the Smoke Rise neighborhood east of downtown Tucker.

From our vantage point, more than 1,000 feet above the fray, there appeared to be no elongated standoff. Police entered the bus and eventually removed the suspect, Grier. EMS responders treated a passenger, Ernest Byrd Jr., 58, who was shot in the leg by a gunshot from his own weapon, allegedly by Grier. Byrd Jr. later died.

I called the play-by-play of this chase from the WSB Skycopter not knowing there was a driver at gunpoint or a suspected hijacker who had just seen people being shot above in downtown Atlanta. Grier told reporters downtown that he was bipolar and no longer taking medication, and that he wished he had a gun and could have stopped the Peachtree Center attacker.

Instead, Grier is accused of later shooting Byrd Jr. for intervening in his own outburst. Antoine, for his part, did not let himself be consumed by the moment and decided to act with others in mind.

The shootings and bus hijacking of June 12, 2024, will be unforgettable for many Atlantans, especially those stuck on the bus or at Peachtree Center — or in stopped traffic with a gunman ordering that bus to continue toward them.

Being airborne over a bus hijacking will take place at my “Mount Rush Hour” right next to the March 2017 I-85 Bridge Fire, the January 2014 Snowpocalypse, the I-285 plane in May 2015 and floods in September 2009.

But no one should forget what motivated the threatened Gwinnett Transit driver that fateful afternoon. Antoine’s duty to others saved lives. And wouldn’t our roads – and planet Earth, for that matter – be much safer if every driver applied this filter?

Doug Turnbull, the PM Drive Skycopter anchor for Triple Team Traffic on 95.5 WSB, is the Gridlock Guy. Download the Triple Team Traffic Alerts app to automatically hear reports from the WSB Traffic Team when you drive near hot spots. Contact him at [email protected].