(RepublicanDaily.org) – Nashville police are investigating a robbery turned deadly last Saturday night. According to reports, a 20-year-old cashier at Corner Mart shot and killed 25-year-old DeCarlos Groves after Groves drew a gun on him. CCTV footage from the Corner Mart shows Groves vaulting over the front counter with a drawn handgun and crashing on top of the clerk, at which point the cashier takes out a weapon of his own and shoots the would-be thief. Police say they received a call from the cashier immediately after the shooting but note that Groves died on the scene.
The incident occurred around 3:24 a.m., in the early hours of Saturday, July 8. The clerk, Peter Fang, also fired “additional shots” after the initial shots that went off when Groves landed on him, according to police. Nashville police detectives are more fully investigating Fang’s statement that he was acting only in self-defense. Fangs says the gun went off as a result of Groves landing on him and police are studying the surveillance footage and reviewing witnesses and details of the scene to determine exactly what happened.
The robbery comes amid an overall rise in crime in the Nashville area, with police noting that 676 guns have been stolen out of vehicles so far in 2023. Many of these weapons go on to be used in robberies and assaults.
The city has had a rise in homicides so far in 2023 as well, up 8.7% by May of this year from the same period in 2022. Violent crime as a whole was up 4.7% over 2022 numbers. This was 50 homicides up until May 27, 2023, and comes along with a 7.2% rise in rape from 2022 as well and a 33.3% rise in auto theft in the Midtown Hills neighborhood. Nashville is known as Music City for its central role in the country music industry. The city has a population of 692,000, while the greater Nashville area has a population of approximately 1.3 million.
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