Cop from Snellville shot on job

By Melissa Wilson (332)

Tuesday, July 31, 2007
© Copyright 2013 Gwinnett Daily Post

SNELLVILLE - Last week Rick Fikes received the call a parent never wants to hear: "Your son's OK, but he's been shot."

"After I talked to him, I heard his voice. After that at least I was breathing again," Fikes said of his reaction when he heard his son, David, a 22-year-old police officer in South Carolina, had been shot while on the job. "It's something I never want to hear again."

The Snellville dad said David had been an officer for the Anderson Police Department in Anderson, S.C., only a short time - four months out of the police academy - when a response to an armed robbery last week at a pub left the officer with three shots to the chest in his bullet proof vest and two shots to the arm.

"As far as being OK, I'm doing good," David Fikes said Monday. "I'm planning to go back to work."

Fikes, a 2003 Shiloh High School grad, said he couldn't talk much about the incident due to ongoing investigations.

Fikes father said David plans to go back to work Wednesday with as much zeal and excitement as before the incident.

"Between the grace of God and whoever invented Kevlar, he (David) is here to have a lot to tell about it (the incident)," Rick Fikes said. "David told the police chief, 'You know, I know some people would be scared to go back, but that's not me.'"

Rick Fikes said although proud of his son, he and his wife, Karen, have reservations about him going back to work.

"Obviously we are worried and have always been worried about him when he works," Rick Fikes said. "We're all going to be up the night he goes back, but he's his own man, he's 22 years old, I can't tell him what to do."

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