A 22-year-old man was fatally shot in a national forest in Alabama last week by a woman pretending to be a stranded driver after the man and his girlfriend pulled over to help, the authorities said.
The man, Adam Simjee, and his girlfriend, Mikayla Paulus, both students at the University of Central Florida, were driving in Talladega National Forest, about 80 miles east of Birmingham, on the morning of Aug. 14 when they were flagged down by a woman claiming her car would not start, according to a statement from the Clay County Sheriff’s Office posted by television station WBRC.
The woman, Yasmine Hider, pulled out a gun and made the couple walk back into the woods, according to the statement. Mr. Simjee then pulled out his own gun, leading to an “exchange of gunfire” in which Ms. Hider was shot several times in the torso and Mr. Simjee was shot in the back, the statement said.
Ms. Hider was transported to a Birmingham hospital where she had surgery for her injuries. The authorities said she may be part of a group of people “living off the grid” in tents in the national forest who were reported to be “armed and potentially violent.”
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A tracking team from the Alabama Department of Corrections found what the authorities described as a “base camp” about half a mile from the scene of the shooting where they said they found Ms. Pinkins near a group of tents.
As officers ordered her to the ground, “a 5-year-old child ran from the woods holding a loaded shotgun,” the sheriff’s office statement said. The officers instructed the child, later identified as Ms. Pinkins’s son, to put down the shotgun but he kept going toward his mother before eventually putting it on the ground, officials said.