EATONTON — Jim Mallet won’t soon forget what he witnessed Tuesday morning when he spotted a state prison transit bus stopped in the roadway of Ga. Route 16 not far from his home at Lake Oconee in Putnam County.

“When I road by, somebody hollered out, ‘Help,’” recalled Mallet during an interview with The Union-Recorder. “I heard them, so I reluctantly backed up and got out of my truck and talked with them. They said, ‘Call 911.’”

Mallet said he quickly walked back to his pickup truck and dialed for help.

“I sat there for a while and still didn’t know what had happened,” Mallet said. “But I kept watching in the mirror. The driver was not moving at all. So my thought was — it’s a medical emergency.”

He then got back out of his truck, thinking he might be able to render some sort of aid.

The first thing he recalled seeing was a lot of blood.

“I knew then that something else had happened,” Mallet said. “Then they hollered the gun is on the side of the road, which is where it was at.”

Mallet then saw that two state corrections officers had been shot.

“Obviously, nothing could be done for them,” he lamented.

Mallet said it appeared to him that the inmates aboard the bus were trying to be helpful.

“But in my mind, I didn’t know what had happened, and I didn’t know if the shooter was still on the bus,” he said. “Obviously, there were shots fired, because there was windows that had been shot. I saw the one guard close to the door blocking the door and then the driver, who was still in his seat not moving.”

Mallet admitted that what he had witnessed frightened him.

“I was scared, because I just didn’t know,” Mallet said, noting that one of the inmates on the bus told him that one of the escapees had run toward a wooded area, away from the roadway. “They said, ‘He ran that away.’”

In order to protect himself as best he could, Mallet said he got back into his truck and waited for deputies with the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office to arrive.

When he later found out that there were two inmates, Mallet said he was a little more curious as to what had really happened.

Mallet learned that the two state corrections officers on the bus had been overpowered by two inmates, who later shot the guards to death before they fled the scene.

Mallet said he originally had planned to go to a Hallman’s Building Supply to get some items and then go to the Waffle House at Harmony Crossing to for a meeting.

The Putnam County resident, a retiree, said he witnessed the tragedy shortly before 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Store clerk recalls talking with man whose car was stolen at gunpoint

Mistery Pierce, kitchen manager at Long Shoals Country Store, near where the two escapees made their getaway in a stolen car, talked about a man she saw crying outside the store when she got to work.

Pierce, who lives nearby, said she saw the man sitting at a table after her sister dropped her off at work about 7 a.m.

“He (the man) was very upset,” Pierce said, “He was shaking, and so I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he had just gotten his car stolen at gunpoint.”

The man turned out to be Phillip Beasley, originally from Greensboro, but who now lives near the Putnam-Hancock County line.

“He said two inmates had escaped and they stole his car at gunpoint,” Pierce told The Union-Recorder.

After Beasley told Pierce that he already had talked to deputies with the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office about the case, she said all she could do was offer Beasley her condolences.