Police move onlookers farther away from the scene of a Tuesday slaying at First Avenue and Seventh Street Southwest. A short time later a second man was shot about a quarter mile from this location.

MOULTRIE — With five gunshots ringing out nearby in rapid succession, police already in the middle of investigating a fatal Tuesday afternoon shooting began yelling for onlookers to disperse and return to their homes.

That barrage of gunfire came about an hour after police were dispatched to First Avenue and Seventh Street Southwest to investigate the first of the two afternoon shootings.

The location where police marked off the second perimeter with yellow tape — in the 100 block of Fourth Street Southwest — was barely a quarter mile away from where the first man was slain at about 3:10 p.m. More than a dozen officers were massed that close to where the brazen second daylight shooting took place.

Both victims were identified as black males.

One woman at the scene of the slaying told The Observer that she was a short distance away when the first set of shots of the afternoon rang out.

“I was at the stop sign,” said the woman, who did not want to give her name for fear that her family could be targeted. “I heard four shots — pop, pop, pop, pop; then it stopped. Then three more — pop, pop, pop.

“My little girl said it’s fireworks. I (told her) there’s a difference between fireworks and gunshots.”

When she returned to the area a few minutes later after picking up another child from school she saw police cars and realized that someone had been shot.

The woman, who has relatives living nearby, said that the resident’s grandchildren, nieces and nephews often would be out playing at that time of day and could have been in the line of fire if that had been the case.

“If it had been a warm, sunny day they would have been out there,” she said.

There apparently was no connection between the victim and the resident of the house.

Colquitt County Coroner Verlyn Brock confirmed that one man was dead, but officials were not releasing his identity.

At the Fourth Street location, where an apartment building and several houses were surrounded by yellow crime scene tape, anxious residents returned from work to find they could not enter their homes. A group of about a half-dozen parked at the nearby Woodmen of the World Park and waited for police to finish their work.

Onlookers identified the second man shot, who was transported to Colquitt Regional Medical Center, as Darien Williams. A person by that name was in critical condition at Colquitt Regional on Tuesday night and was scheduled for transfer to a Macon hospital.

The Moultrie Police Department requested that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation take the lead role in investigating the shootings.