On July 9, 1986, Lieutenant Robert Gerald Bridges, a White/Caucasian male officer with the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office, was killed during a SWAT team training exercise in Clayton County, Georgia. The death occurred when live ammunition was inadvertently mixed with training rounds; a fellow officer fired a weapon containing a live round and the shot struck Lieutenant Bridges.

The official cause of death was recorded as an inadvertent shooting. The incident was treated as a tragic accident rather than a deliberate act, and there were no suspects or arrests in the usual criminal sense. The critical issue described in reports is the procedural failure that allowed live rounds to be present during training.

Did anyone who trained with the Clayton County SWAT team in the mid 1980s observe safety lapses or know more about how live ammunition came to be mixed with training rounds?