PIEDMONT, Alabama — An off-duty Anniston police officer used a belt and part of a yard post to improvise a tourniquet after an 18-year-old was accidentally shot in the leg at a Piedmont gas station, according to a new local report.
WBRC reported that Officer Jeffrey Finley was at a Mapco station on his day off when he heard someone pleading for another person not to leave.
Officer says he moved quickly to control the bleeding
Finley told the station he saw a young man slumped over in a truck, a firearm inside the vehicle and blood in the man's lap. The officer pulled him from the truck, placed him on the ground and focused on stopping the bleeding before the injury could become worse.
Finley said he obtained another person's belt, broke a yard post in half and used the wood as a windlass to tighten an improvised tourniquet.
The wounded man was identified in the local report as 18-year-old Elijah Young. WBRC said he was airlifted to an area hospital for treatment.
Police determined the discharge was accidental
Piedmont Police Chief Nathan Johnson told WBRC that Young's own firearm discharged while he was showing it to a friend. Johnson said the police investigation determined the shooting was accidental.
The chief called the incident a reminder that firearms must be handled safely. Finley emphasized a second lesson from the response: when someone's life is in danger, an officer's duty to act does not end with the uniform or the shift.
The public account did not provide a detailed medical diagnosis, and ThinBlueNews is not adding medical conclusions beyond WBRC's reporting. The officer's rapid first aid is the focus of this article; the report does not include body-camera, dash-camera or incident-rescue footage.
Sources reviewed
- WBRC — Off-duty police officer helps save teenager who accidentally shot himself
- WBRC / Gray Media — source still of the Piedmont Mapco location
Editorial note: This article uses original aggregation and direct attribution to a named local report carrying on-camera accounts from Officer Jeffrey Finley and Piedmont Police Chief Nathan Johnson. The featured visual uses WBRC's real source-report still of the location and clearly states that it does not depict the shooting or emergency aid. No AI-generated incident image or unrelated representative scene was used. Because the source package contains interviews and location imagery rather than bodycam, dashcam or incident-rescue footage—and the article's facts are fully reported in text—the video-embed gate does not apply.
If an agency representative, responder or reader sees anything that should be corrected or updated, please contact ThinBlueNews through our corrections and editorial standards page.