A reporter with ABC station WATN in Memphis, Tennessee, was interviewing a local woman about the rise in crime when a drive-by shooting erupted in their vicinity and they dove for cover.
“We report about the city’s crime problem almost every day, but today that problem hit home for one of our crews while doing a story about crime in Whitehaven,” WANT anchor Richard Ransom said. “We were interviewing a woman about the Memphis PD’s plan to enforce the city’s teen curfew when out of nowhere a drive-by shooting across the street.”
Yolanda Cooper Sutton was spelling her name for the on-the-scene reporter, Jay Jones, when the spray of bullets very close by stopped them in their tracks and they dove out of camera range.
“Get down, get down, get down, just stay down and get down,” she told Jones calmly. “That’s OK. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Stay down and get down.”
Fox News’ John Roberts spoke with community leader Cooper Sutton who said she was speaking with the reporter about the peak in crime in America. “It has extremely been hard here in Memphis, Tennessee, with the juvenile crime and the gun laws that have been instituted in the state of Tennessee. It’s absolutely reckless,” Sutton said.
She recounted how the interview was just getting ready to start when all hell broke loose. “All of a sudden, just out of nowhere, you hear gunfire and after that, you just see us hit the ground,” Cooper Sutton said. “I knew it was gunshots because it rings around the city like church bells on a regular basis. I just know — now it’s just having to practice to get down like a fire drill here in Memphis because the crime has escalated so much. And I just knew to get down because a moving target is a hit target. And so, the best thing for anyone to do is just to get down. And that was just instincts. Just my instincts kicked in immediately.”
