TRION, Ga. - When she heard officers opened fire Monday afternoon, Deborah Campbell switched on the TV. She hoped she wouldn't see her son.
She knew police had been looking for 31-year-old Thomas Zane Campbell since March 28, when he skipped the last day of his trial in Catoosa County Superior Court. He told his father his chest hurt, that he needed to go to the hospital. But after a jury convicted him of three counts of possession of a firearm by a felon, and after a judge sentenced him to 13 years in prison, his parents said they couldn't find him.
Thirteen days passed. Then, around 4 p.m. Monday, Deborah Campbell heard about the officer-involved shooting. She felt numb.
"I don't know why. I can't tell you why. I just knew it was him," she said.
Soon after, a detective called her, confirming her son had been shot on the 3000 block of Halls Valley Spur in Trion. The pilot of a Life Force helicopter was flying him to Erlanger hospital.
It's not clear how law enforcement officers knew Thomas Campbell was in Trion, hiding in a house with a long, wooded driveway. But members of the Chattanooga U.S. Marshal's Office and the Atlanta U.S. Marshal's Office Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force had gone there to arrest him, according to a news release from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
"A confrontation ensued" when officers noticed he had a gun, Chattooga County Sheriff Mark Schrader said. Some officers fired shots. Schrader later asked the GBI to investigate what happened.
Greg Ramey, special agent in charge of the GBI's regional office, said he could not provide details about what led to the shooting Tuesday because investigators have not interviewed all of the officers who were on scene.
"We're really early in [the investigation]," he said. "We can't release a lot of information right now."
Thomas Campbell's father, Clarence Campbell, said his son was shot five times: once in each leg, once in each arm and once below the right shoulder. After the shooting, Clarence Campbell waited at the hospital until midnight but was not allowed to see his son.
On Tuesday, he returned to the hospital and waited as surgeons worked on his son for hours. Finally, around 5 p.m., he was allowed to see him for about 10 minutes.
Thomas Campbell was still sedated, his father said. His neck was wrapped in a brace, and his arms were restrained. His fingers and left bicep were swollen.
"Zane is a good kid," Deborah Campbell said. "This should not have happened the way it happened."
Troubled past
After graduating from Gordon Lee High School, Thomas Campbell's parents said he became addicted to pain killers. Run-ins with the law followed.
Among other cases, he pleaded guilty in Walker County in November 2008 to drug possession, DUI, attempted burglary and theft by receiving stolen goods. A judge sentenced him to 10 years of probation, as well as stints in boot camp and a substance abuse treatment center.
As a result of his criminal history, he couldn't possess a firearm. But in November 2015, police records show, investigators with the Catoosa County Sheriff's Office found him with a handgun while they were looking for someone else on Potts Road in Ringgold. Days later, around the same place, a member of the Department of Natural Resources spotted him with a Winchester rifle.
After sitting through the first day of his trial on March 27, Thomas Campbell panicked, his father thinks. They were in the courthouse parking lot when he said he wasn't going inside. Clarence Campbell tried to convince him to stick it out, but he said he thought he was going to have a heart attack. He drove away.
Clarence Campbell thinks his son was regretting a decision he made months earlier. Prosecutors offered him a plea deal in which he would only be sentenced to six months in a probation detention center. Now, the trial didn't seem to be going so well. He faced more than a decade behind bars.
"In his mind, he was going to win: He was innocent," Clarence Campbell said. " The boy never used that weapon in a crime. He never robbed anybody."
After the conviction, Deborah Campbell said she tried calling her son. She's not sure if he abandoned his phone, or if he was in an area without cell service. But her calls didn't go through, she said. On Monday morning, she sat down to write him a letter, though she didn't know where to send it.
"I told him I loved him," she said. "I told him I supported him 100 percent, that I was proud of him and somehow we could get through this."
Contact Staff Writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.