Truck Driver Killed During Armed Robbery On Florida Blvd Today Was Trying To Fix His Tire

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A truck driver repairing a tire on his 18-wheeler early Tuesday morning while waiting to offload a delivery to a Florida Boulevard warehouse was robbed and then fatally shot, police said.

Keith Odom, 49, of Jonesborough, Tennessee, was shot around 8 a.m. while making the repair in the parking lot of the Longbow shopping center in the 12300 block of Florida Boulevard where he was waiting to make a delivery to Barton’s Surplus Warehouse. He died later in a hospital, said Sgt. Don Coppola, a Baton Rouge police spokesman.

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Hill said he was told the truck driver was patching a tire before the shooting. A blood-stained receipt from Advance Auto Parts naming Odom as the customer and had a timestamp of 7:44 a.m. Tuesday for tire repair materials lay on the ground next to the truck.

Two employees who work at another business in the Longbow shopping center told The Advocate that just before the shooting they saw a man in a black hoodie and a backpack pacing around the parking lot. They said he looked out of place, and referred to him as an "anomaly."

Within minutes, people started banging on their door, yelling that someone had been shot, the employees said. When the employees looked out the front door, they saw the victim lying in the parking lot and the man in the hooded sweatshirt running across the parking lot toward the Citi Trends store.

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Odom’s parents in Jonesborough, Tennessee, were forced to adjust to the idea that their “teddy bear” and only child wasn’t coming home on Tuesday night.

“We know that those things do happen,” said Kenneth Odom, Keith Odom’s father. “His mother and I are trying to accept what happened and that he won’t come back through the door at 10 p.m. tonight.”

His son planned to drive back to Tennessee Tuesday before leaving again Wednesday.

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