The new father, who leaves behind a 6-month-old son, was returning to the police department when authorities say he was shot and killed in retaliation to an arrest he conducted on his first shift.
The body of 26-year-old Officer Dylan Harrison was escorted from a Georgia Bureau of Investigations Crime Lab in Atlanta to his home in Dublin by a fleet of Georgia State Patrol officers along with other law enforcement agencies Monday following his shooting death over the weekend.
Harrison had just begun his first shift with the Alamo Police Department when he was shot to death early Saturday. He had been ambushed in retaliation for having arrested one of his alleged assailant’s associates just hours earlier, authorities said.
Damion Ferguson, 43, was arrested Sunday and has been charged with Harrison’s murder. He was taken into custody by the State of Georgia SWAT Team and U.S. Marshals Service Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI) said in a statement.
He was also charged with aggravated stalking related to a previous domestic instance, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and he is currently being held in the Laurens County Jail in Dublin, Georgia.
"As a police chief of Alamo, Georgia, I have never experienced a grief that I have felt since Officer Dylan Harrison’s life was taken in our small, quiet town,” Alamo Police Chief Karen Zanders said in a statement. “Despite the sadness that we have endured, I have found a sense of pride in seeing everyone pull together to right this tragic wrong.”
Harrison’s fatal shooting came after an argument while arresting a man in the parking lot of a Circle K convenience store across the street from a police department, during which he discharged his Taser, authorities said. Police said the man was a known associate of Ferguson’s.
Harrison was later shot and killed outside of the Alamo Police Department in what authorities called an “ambush-style attack.” His brother David Harrison told “Fox & Friends” that he had been on his way back to the police station to do paper work.
“Officer Harrison was a husband, a son, and more importantly the father of a 6-month-old boy. His life was taken from him for simply doing his job,” Zanders said.
His wife Kayla Harrison said, “It’s just unimaginable,” according to Fox News.
Despite this weekend’s shift having been his first as an on-duty police officer, Harrison had been in law enforcement since 2018, and held various jobs with the police department and with an Oklahoma Drug Task Force, CBS News reported.
He had begun volunteering with the local fire department when he was just 16 years old, his brother told Fox News.
"He would sit up at night waiting for his radio to go off so he could respond to the call of an accident,” his brother recalled. “He left the house at 3 in the morning to go be the first one on scene to a wreck on the interstate.”
A GoFundMe page was created in support of Harrison's family.
