ATLANTA – A quick-thinking armed homeowner held two inmates accused of shooting to death a pair of armed guards at gunpoint until authorities could come arrest them on Thursday night. The fugitives during an escape from a prison bus in Georgia, authorities said.Donnie Rowe, 43, and Ricky Dubose, 24, were apprehended following a car chase with police about an hour’s drive southeast of Nashville, said Stephen Emmett, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Atlanta.Authorities were responding to a report of a home invasion in the area of Shelbyville, Tennessee. The fugitives entered the home of an elderly couple, tied them up and stole their car, leading police on a car chase, Emmett said.The fugitives then crashed the car on Interstate 24 and fled on foot into a wooded area before entering a property in the area of the community of Christiana, outside of Murfreesboro, Emmett said.The pair then traveled in a stolen vehicle to Tennessee and tried to to steal another vehicle. But the homeowner stepped out and held the men at gunpoint, with the assistance of another neighbor, until police arrived.”This is a great day in Tennessee,” Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesman Lt. Bill Miller said in a press conference. “This ended as well as it could ever have been imagined.”A photograph posted on the website of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed the two suspects handcuffed and lying on the ground shirtless with about a dozen law enforcement personnel surrounding them.”With the crimes committed in Georgia, we know they could’ve done that here,” Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director Mark Gwyn told the newspaper. “Yes, it feels good (to capture them), but there’s a lot of hurt people in Georgia that feel this pain for many years.”The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, citing Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernan Keenan, reported that gunshots were fired.The two men, who were serving time for armed robbery, escaped on Tuesday in rural Putnam County, about 70 miles southeast of Atlanta, as they were being transported between two prison facilities with 31 other inmates.After their escape, Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills described the prisoners as “dangerous beyond description” and said a day later that the search for them had been expanded nationwide.Sills said the fugitives each had 9 mm guns they took off the prison officers they killed.Ricky Myrick, assistant commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections, told reporters on Wednesday that the inmates were most recently cellmates at Baldwin State Prison and had been cellmates at other Georgia prisons.”They have known each other for quite a while,” Myrick said.Authorities described the pair as “dangerous beyond description,” lauding investigators and the homeowner to held them until arrest. Still, the deaths of the two Georgia guards are mourned.”The pain endured by the families and loved ones of Sergeant Christopher Monica and Sergeant Curtis Billue endures, however,” Georgia Governor Nathan Deal said in a statement.
