A basketball player from Georgia's Mercer University was shot dead while he sat in a car outside a downtown gas station Tuesday afternoon, authorities said.
The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office said Jibri Bryan, 23, was found dead in a white Chevrolet Monte Carlo in the college's city of Macon at around 4 p.m.
Another man was shot and injured during the incident. Officers believe he may have been in a second car — a white Nissan Sentra — that drove up to Bryan's before the shooting, the sheriff’s office added in a statement.
Investigators are now hunting for that vehicle.
The shooting took place in the parking lot of the Flash Foods gas station, which the Macon Telegraph newspaper said was situated on the "bustling corner" of a busy crossroads between the campus and downtown.
The sheriff's statement did not say whether Bryan was driving the car, but the Macon Telegraph quoted Bibb County Sheriff David Davis as saying the basketball player was sitting in the driver's seat and had suffered a gunshot wound to the head.
Bryan — from Savannah, Georgia — was a guard for the Mercer Bears and a graduate student with a degree in marketing.
"Jibri was always cheerful and greeted everyone in the department with a smile," the university's athletic director, Jim Cole, said in a statement. "He will not only be missed by his basketball family but all of us in the University Athletic Department."
Bob Hoffman, Mercer's head men's basketball coach, called Bryan "a special young man" who "was important to us in every way."