Louisiana police shoot man wanted in Alabama

SULPHUR, La. (AP) — Louisiana police have shot and wounded a man accused in Alabama of shooting at a district attorney's investigator.

Cody Glenn Light, 35, of Arab (AY-rab), Alabama, ignored an officer's order and raised a gun Wednesday, and the officer shot him in the neck, Sulphur Police Chief Lewis Coats said Thursday.

He says Light had crashed two stolen vehicles during a chase in which he drove through yards and a soccer field

Light was hospitalized. News outlets report that he faces charges of robbery, assault, home invasion and property damage in Louisiana.

Police said he's wanted in Alabama on charges including attempted murder of a police officer. Marshall County authorities had been looking for him since April 19, when a Marshall County prosecutor's investigator was shot at while looking for a stolen vehicle outside a house in Arab.

Neither that investigator nor any of the officers who chased Light in Louisiana was wounded.

Louisiana State Police are investigating the shooting by a Sulphur officer in nearby Carlyss, about 500 miles (800 kilometers) southwest of Arab.

Coats said their first call Wednesday was about a business burglary in which a shotgun was stolen. The thief was driving a black pickup truck matching the description of one stolen Tuesday from a job site near Vidor, Texas, just across the state line, he said at a news conference .

That truck — its tags switched with Alabama tags — was found Wednesday in a canal, after several more calls about a suspicious character. A woman reported that a man in an extended-cab black pickup had pulled into her driveway and made sexual remarks. Another caller reported a shotgun-toting bicycle rider. Three minutes later, police were told that a man with a shotgun had entered woods near a school.

Two schools and a library were put on lockdown.

Officers saturated the area but couldn't find the man, Coats said.

Hours later, he said, an elderly couple reported that a man broke into their house but they pulled guns on him and refused to give him their car keys. He rode an ATV away.

Coats said that at another house, he took a woman's keys and left in her vehicle. "He tried to clip an officer as he passed by," Coats said. A crash later, he was running again.

People called police reporting a gunman on Interstate 10. They weren't able to confirm the reports of gunfire, but he apparently was trying to intimidate drivers into stopping so he could steal a car, Coats said.

He stole a vehicle parked at a trash company and drove through yards, fields and a trailer park before that one crashed.

After that crash, the officer caught up with him, Coats said.

He said fingerprints identified Light and turned up the Alabama warrant.