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 By Michael Webster: Syndicated Investigative Reporter. 

 ATLANTA-Associated Press and others are reporting that undercover plainclothes police officers shot and killed a pastor when according to police the 28-year-old father-to-be resisted efforts to question him about a passenger in his car who was allegedly the target of a drug sting, authorities said.

Jonathan Paul Ayers of Shoal Creek Baptist Church in Lavonia wasn’t even targeted in the probe nor did he have a criminal record yet this tragedy ended in a police shooting in a public gas station Tuesday, Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman John Bankhead said.

But drug task-force agents say they opened fire on the pastor only after he tried to avoid them, putting his car in reverse and striking one of the officers. A video recording of the shooting obtained by the Laguna Journal clearly shows that the plainclothes undercover officers were pursuing Ayers and firing before he put his vehicle in reverse.

One witness asked “those guys looked more like criminals than cops, how was that guy or anyone else to know”? When undercover plainclothes officers are operating it seems they have a responsibility to clearly identify who they are so innocent folks won’t think they maybe being rob”.

Bankhead said agents approached Ayers after he dropped a woman off at a store in downtown Toccoa, which is about 90 miles northeast of Atlanta. The passenger allegedly was the person being investigated by the task force.

A grainy surveillance video from a nearby store shows two drug task-force agents emerge from a black SUV before Ayers’ small car backs up. The two men fire into the passenger side of Ayers’ car, and then it takes off with the agents running behind it, the video posted on WNEG-TV in Toccoa shows. The station owner would not release the video to The Associated Press.

Bankhead said Ayers died Wednesday, about an hour after he had surgery.  He said the agent who was hit by Ayers’ car was treated for minor injuries. More