A cashier in DeKalb County, Georgia, was just trying to do her job and enforce a grocery store mask mandate, now she is dead. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes, “The shopper, identified as Victor Lee Tucker Jr., 30, of Palmetto, left the Big Bear supermarket after the argument but came back with a gun, according to the GBI. The volatile incident also resulted in injury to an off-duty sheriff’s deputy working as a security guard, who tried to intervene and was shot during an exchange of gunfire.”
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation says the deputy, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, exchanged fire with the suspect and both were wounded. A second cashier was also grazed by a bullet. Both the suspect and deputy are recovering in the hospital. Both are expected to be okay.
Today, a cashier WAS KILLED because she asked someone to wear a mask.
This is the confluence of our country’s worst instincts – misinformation, firearms, & unbridled anger.https://t.co/Mk8JrJmwKi
— Megan Ranney MD MPH 🌻 (@meganranney) June 15, 2021
This is far from the first mask dispute, but it is the first deadly shooting to arise out of one. The New York Times reports:
Enforcing the wearing of masks in public places became, at times, dangerous.
An Iowa man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for assaulting and spitting on another man last year in a fight over how he was wearing his mask. An 80-year-old man died after he was pushed to the ground by a fellow bar customer whom he had asked to put on a mask.
A Georgia cashier is dead and two people were wounded after a shooting broke out following an argument inside a store over its COVID-19 mask policy, authorities said. @VictorOquendo has more. https://t.co/VkjNL7eCpN pic.twitter.com/goHqpfOrxp
— Good Morning America (@GMA) June 15, 2021
Watch more above from the CBS in Atlanta.