Walnut Road Shooting Declared Murder-Suicide

The Putnam County Sheriff’s Department declared Tuesday night’s shooting on Walnut Road to be a murder-suicide.

Witnesses said local residents Randall Eldridge and Bobby Andrew Phy got into an argument outside of a house where a birthday party was being held. During the argument, Phy pulled out a firearm and shot Eldridge before turning the weapon on himself and committing suicide. Sheriff Eddie Farris the men had a long history of problems between them.

“They (were not) the best of friends,” Farris said. “And I guess some things had happened over the years so I guess that was brought up and one thing led to another and so here we are with a very bad outcome.”

Farris said both individuals have been sent to the medical examiner’s office in Nashville for an autopsy. Farris said his office is still investigating the incident to ensure the crime scene is consistent with witness testimonies.

“Not that we would think anybody would be telling something that’s not so, but sometimes in a tragic trauma event it’s easy to get things wrong,” Farris said. “And we’re just making sure things are what it appears to be, which we certainly feel that they are.”

Farris said incidents like these hit the community so hard because of how rare they are in the county.

“Obviously if there was any way to prevent this the family members that (were) there certainly would have,” Farris said. “Or if they had time they would certainly have called us and let us deal with it and hopefully stop a bad outcome. But sometimes things just happen really fast and it’s hard to get it stopped and unfortunately this was one of those things.”