Atlanta Man Gets Caught In Shooting Crossfire, Becomes Millionaire
Dante Renzulli
PHILADELPHIA (CNN) -- An Atlanta gas station owner is paying out more than $1.5 million, because two customers got into an argument outside the business and tried to kill each other.
Surveillance video captured the wild shootout unfolding in November 2015 near the corner of Benjamin Mays Drive and Fairburn Road.
In the video, we see the driver of a white car and a man in a white T-shirt speaking through his window near the pumps.
After a brief conversation, they got into some kind of disagreement, and it led to both of them drawing guns on each other.
The bullets flew back and forth as the driver circled the block, but somehow, on a busy day with bystanders everywhere, only the driver's friend, Daniel Rosebud, was hit.
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Rosebud was a passenger in the white car, and he took a bullet near his stomach, which required a week of surgery on his intestine.
It's not clear what the argument was about or who fired first, and police never located the man in the white T-shirt.
But those turned out to be just minor details for the jury, who say it's really the gas station owner who is most at fault.
Rosebud's attorney, Michael Rafi, convinced the jury, "This was about ignored warnings and invited danger."
Rafi argued the gas station should have known bad guys were loitering outside, and they should have called 911 to have them moved along sooner.
But gas station employees testified in court, their customer base prefers that they avoid bringing police around.
"It was bad for business if they were to tell these people to leave," explained Rafi.
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Case in point, it wasn't too long ago that activists organized a boycott of a different gas station in DeKalb County because an accused panhandler was arrested in the store.
CBS46 cameras were there this summer when picketers marched on the store, accusing the business owner of not caring enough about the black community.
Unimpressed with the "bad for business" argument, the jury said the Atlanta gas station was 66% responsible for the shooting, while the people who actually pulled the trigger were each 17% responsible.
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