ATLANTA – The girlfriend of an Army National Guard soldier who fatally shot a sheriff’s deputy and himself told investigators the gunman “definitely had a drinking problem” and grabbed an assault rifle from his trunk after she made him pull over while he was driving drunk, a Georgia sheriff said Monday.

“She said he had been drinking and he was drunk and that when he gets drunk, he gets violent,” Richmond County Sheriff Ronald Strength said. “Why shoot a law enforcement officer? We don’t have that answer.”

Spc. Christopher Michael Hodges, 26, was randomly firing an assault rifle into traffic from behind his car on the side of an Augusta highway at about 1 a.m. Sunday when Deputy James Paugh pulled over and was shot — apparently not realizing at first that Hodges posed a threat, authorities said.

Read the whole hot breaking news

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. – Two teenagers were in custody in the shooting of a 15-year-old fellow student who was wounded in the neck during a lunch period outside her North Carolina high school, and a sheriff said Monday the pair will be charged.

The 18-year-old and 15-year-old male suspects and the victim attend Cape Fear High School in Fayetteville, Cumberland County Sheriff Earl “Moose” Butler said. Both suspects participated in the shooting and were being questioned, he said. The weapon, a .22 Daisy rifle, and shell casings have been recovered.

Catilyn Abercrombie was in stable condition after surgery at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center, according to Butler, who said she was standing in a breezeway outside the school cafeteria when she was shot.

Read the whole hot breaking news

EARLY, Iowa – Something shocking happened one cold night a decade ago in this quiet country town of 500 people, but even now, just one fact about it all is undisputed:

Tracey Roberts, at home with her three children, fired 9 shots from two guns into her 20-year-old neighbor, leaving him dead on the floor of her bedroom.

Tall and thin with curly brown hair and blue eyes, she was 35 at the time. It wasn’t long before her image appeared in newspaper coverage of the shooting and even on a national TV talk show, where she was celebrated as a heroic mother who acted in self-defense to protect herself and her young children from men who broke into her home and assaulted her.

Read the whole hot breaking news

BANI WALID, Libya (Reuters) – Fighters with Libya's interim government have captured the town of Bani Walid, firing their guns into the air and hoisting the country's new flag over the center of one of the final bastions of Muammar Gaddafi's loyalists.

A Reuters team that drove into the heart of Bani Walid, in desert hills 150 km (90 miles) south of Tripoli, saw no signs of resistance from supporters of the deposed leader who have been holed up inside the town for more than six weeks.

"Bani Walid is completely free. It is liberated, 100 percent," said Mohammed Shakonah, a military commander with the National Transitional Council (NTC).

Read the whole hot breaking news