Police in Jasper, a small town at the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Georgia, said they were responding to a shooting Tuesday at a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic, and at least one person was flown to the hospital.
Jasper police were sent to the VA clinic around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, the city said in a statement on its Facebook page. The officers found and confronted the suspect, who was shot, the statement said.
Calls to the Pickens County VA clinic were routed to recordings on Tuesday afternoon and no one answered the phone.
The outpatient clinic in Jasper offers services that include primary care and specialty health services, including laboratory, telehealth, and mental health care, according to its website.
Jasper, a town of about 5,000 people, is roughly 60 miles north of downtown Atlanta. Signs on a highway through the town call it Georgia’s "First Mountain City" as the Appalachians come into view.
Photographs from the local newspaper, the Pickens Progress, showed more than half a dozen law enforcement officers wearing tactical vests near a strip mall in the town.
The clinic opened in the summer of 2020, the Department of Veterans Affairs said in a news release announcing its grand opening.
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Martin reported from Kennesaw, Georgia.
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