ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – A security guard at a strip club shot and killed a man early Saturday morning, Atlanta police said.

Around 3:50 a.m., the guard told officers that he heard gunfire outside Magic City off Forsyth Street SW. When he went outside, he saw a man holding a gun and told him to put it down. But the man refused, leading the security guard to shoot him, he told police.

The person shot didn’t work at the strip club, police confirmed. Officers have not said if the guard will face charges.

The incident is still under investigation. Check back with Atlanta News First as we learn more.

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Jason McKenzie, a pilot and associate director of philanthropy at Augusta University, is being remembered as an “outstanding individual” after he died in a Georgia neighborhood plane crash, his employer, church and friends confirmed to local outlets.

The single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza A36 that McKenzie was flying crashed along Hillcrest Avenue in Augusta on Thursday, May 2, ABC affiliate WRDW reported. The outlet added that he was the only person on board and that “there were no other injuries” on the ground.

“I think that was a miracle,” a neighbor, Lisa Lewis, told WRDW. “I’m just thankful no one else on the ground was hurt.”

Lewis, who lives on Hillcrest Avenue, described the plane as “way louder than normal, and it got louder and louder and it just sounded like it was right outside the window.” After hearing a “loud banging pop sound,” she told the outlet that her electricity went out.

Then, locals spotted the scene of the crash where the flames “were so tall,” Lewis recalled, adding, “It could have been so much worse.”

According to WRDW, the plane took off from Daniel Field Airport in Augusta and was headed for New Haven, Conn. The aircraft only reached an altitude of 625 feet before crashing. Four minutes after takeoff, it clipped a tree and came down between two homes.

First responders are calling McKenzie a hero, per CBS affiliate WAFB, while Augusta Fire Chief Antonio Burden told WRDW that he “can only credit the pilot for that situation — for not involving another structure.”

Dean Newman, a good friend of the pilot who played golf with him and his son, told ABC affiliate WJBF that the “community has really lost an outstanding individual in Jason McKenzie, and he is going to be greatly missed.”

According to CBS affiliate WIAT, the Federal Aviation Administration shared that McKenzie had 800 hours of flying time last year, and the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash.

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In a statement shared on Facebook by Will Dyer, a pastor for First Baptist Church of Augusta, he said McKenzie was a “devoted husband, father, and son” who “loved his community, his work, and his church.”

“Jason McKenzie was my friend,” Dyer continued. “We spoke on the phone almost every week and I never left a phone call with Jason where I didn’t have a smile on my face. My life is better because Jason played a role in it.”

McKenzie is survived by his wife, Stephanie, his son, Patrick, and his mother, Becky, the church confirmed to WIAT.

I was so homesick I had to stop looking at images on social media of my friends in beloved, familiar landscapes of home. At times I felt my life had been reduced to getting stuck in underground car parks in a car that was too big at an exit barrier that would reject my bank card. 

Most of all, I was confused by how very foreign America felt. I’ve consumed huge amounts of American novels, television shows, movies and music, but living here is a very different thing, and in some senses our shared language makes the shock of the foreign even more confusing. This country, I’m learning, is odder and wilder than anything I’d prepared myself for, its food, education, humour, language, climate, landscape and emotional sensibilities all very different to ours, and the fabric of this wildly multicultural society defies definition. 

This also makes it beautiful and exciting: a normal Saturday can involve taking our sons to karate lessons with their Iranian-American teacher, followed by lunch at an Ethiopian café and coffee in a Jewish deli, before driving into rural Pennsylvania to catch the end of an Amish quilt sale and grabbing tacos in a Tex Mex café on the way home. I love the wild sense of possibility here, and the collision of an infinite number of cultures and races, which is unlike anywhere else. 

Looking back, I can see we all, apart from Pete, who was already acclimatised, went through a period of acute culture shock, something that’s subsided slowly, tentatively, as we’ve started to create a sense of home, albeit impermanently, in DC. Autumn brought with it the sugary thrill of an American Halloween, with life-size pirate ships of model skeletons and huge blow-up ghosts decorating houses, and trick or treating – a vast, communal activity, where adults chatted around front-lawn fires while the children darted madly around lugging pillow-cases of candy. 

I love the American impulse to decorate the outside of houses, not just at Halloween, but for any festival, light-up candy canes and life-size sledges on front lawns lingering right into February, when they’re replaced by ditzy pink lights and blow-up hearts, for Valentine’s Day, then swiftly replaced again by bright green shamrocks made from tinsel for St Patrick’s Day. 

In the winter, snow lay thick and bright white for 10 days everywhere, and Dash and Lester earned forty dollars shovelling snow from front yards, like they were in a movie. Early spring has brought the astonishing froth of cherry blossom over the Tidal Basin, and we have favourite walks through Rock Creek Park, which brings a surprising sense of the wild, natural world right into the middle of the city, just blocks from the blacked out SUVs and presidential cavalcades of the White House.  

Everything in America is, of course, bigger, but embracing these seasonal rituals has helped the children feel at home in a city totally at odds with the rural landscape they knew as home. We wanted the children to go to American state schools, and they’ve swapped their village school, where they knew all the 100 pupils, for much bigger schools with an incredibly diverse intake, swapping break for recess, a peg for lockers and PE for basketball, and are learning about periods of American history they knew nothing about. 

The definition of home will always be England, and sometimes I feel gratified by how much the children miss the fields around our house, the green where they played and the village shop where they went for Haribos. I’m pleased that that landscape I love so much is in their souls and is the place they think of when we talk about home, but it’s exciting to watch their horizons literally expanding by the experience of our big American adventure. I still feel homesick, of course, but transplanting our life is also showing me that home can be a feeling as much as a place, and represented by a person more than a feeling, because more than anywhere else, home for me is with Pete.

The Giant on The Skyline by Clover Stroud (Doubleday) is out now