FULTON COUNTY, Ga. (APBnews.com) -- It was all one big blur, authorities said. His 13-year-old granddaughter was struggling to get out of the car, to escape from one of the men who had held her for days in a cheap motel room outside of Atlanta and sexually abused her.

The police were nowhere to be seen. And the driver wouldn't let her go, authorities said. He pinned the struggling girl inside the car and reached between the front seats for something, maybe a gun.

That's when Wallace Bibbs, a 60-year-old church deacon and retired school principal, pulled out his Taurus 9mm and squeezed off a single round.

'He acted emotionally'

"I understand that he was desperate," said Maj. Wenda Phifer of the Fulton County Police. "He probably thought that he would never see her again, and he acted emotionally."

Now, the driver, identified as Rodricus Martin, 31, is in Atlanta's Grady Memorial hospital, recovering from a bullet wound in his leg and facing a raft of charges including kidnapping, child abuse and statutory rape, authorities said.

And Bibbs, who scoured the dangerous streets of Fulton County's industrial section looking for his kidnapped granddaughter, is charged with aggravated assault, authorities said.

Bibbs, free on bail, could not be reached today for comment. A woman identified herself as his wife declined to comment on the investigation or the events that led to the Thursday morning shooting.

But authorities said the deacon's sojourn into suburban Atlanta's hooker-infested underworld began more than 10 days ago, with a simple family squabble.

Bibbs, the family patriarch, had an argument with his 13-year-old granddaughter, Phifer said, and the teenager angrily stalked out of the house.

When she didn't return within a few hours, the family began to worry and, that night, they called police and reported her missing.

Authorities had no leads on the girl's whereabouts. But Bibbs found a clue.

A few days after her disappearance, the girl had placed a brief phone call to the family. Authorities did not disclose the details of the conversation. She did not say where she was. But Bibbs used his caller ID to trace the number, and found that it was the house phone at a motel in South Fulton.

The deacon knew a little bit about the neighborhood. It is, Phifer said, a neighborhood prowled by prostitutes and their pimps, a place with a bad reputation.

Authorities believe Bibbs was thinking about his safety -- and his granddaughter's -- when he decided to take along a little protection, his 9mm handgun, Phifer said.

'One of them was a bad guy'

Late Wednesday, the deacon drove from his home in Southwest Atlanta to the motel, authorities said. He showed the night clerk a picture of his granddaughter.

"The clerk recognized her," Phifer said, "and also described the men she was with." The clerk even described the cars the three men used.

"One of them was a bad guy, and he was armed," the clerk reportedly told Bibbs.

Bibbs called the Fulton County Police, who arrived at the motel, waited for a while, and left when they couldn't find the girl or her abductors, Phifer said.

But Bibbs wasn't about to give up. He stayed behind, she said.

His diligence paid off.

An escape attempt

About 45 minutes after police left, somebody inside the motel pulled a fire alarm and the place was evacuated. Maybe it was a prank, Phifer said. Maybe it was an attempt by the kidnappers, who had slipped back inside undetected, to create a diversion and escape, she said.

But it didn't work.

Bibbs saw one of the men who had been described to him slip into the driver seat of a Volkswagen Fox, Phifer said. The deacon followed the man in his car, and when the car stopped at a traffic light on the industrial I-20 bypass, Bibbs got out of his car and approached it.

"He could see his granddaughter in the car," Phifer said, "and he told her to get out."

She tried to escape, Phifer said. But Martin who was alone in the car with her, allegedly held her down.

Then, authorities said, Martin reached for something.

A shot and then a chase

It turned out be a cell phone, Phifer said. But, with the clerk's warning still fresh in his mind, Bibbs believed that Martin was reaching for a gun, Phifer said. He fired one round, striking Martin in the leg.

"He didn't know that he had hit him," Phifer said, and it's not even clear whether Martin knew that he had been shot.

Martin sped off, with Bibbs hot on his heels.

Finally, the deacon managed to force Martin's car off the road. He pulled his granddaughter out of the damaged Volkswagen, and then realized that Martin was wounded.

"He called the city of Atlanta police," Phifer said.

Search for accomplices

The granddaughter, whose name is being withheld because of her age, has been placed in the care of her mother, Phifer said.

But authorities have questioned her and said she gave a harrowing account of her ordeal.

The girl told police that she had been manhandled and sexually assaulted by Martin and his two as-yet unidentified accomplices.

Police are still searching for the two men who got away, and also are trying to determine whether the men were part of the neighborhood's thriving prostitution industry, Phifer said.

"That's something we're looking into," the major said.

'Cares about his family'

In the meantime, friends and former co-workers are rallying around Bibbs, saying that whatever he did, he did it to save his granddaughter.

"I know this man quite well," said Sherman Lofton, principal at the Harper-Archer High School in Atlanta and a longtime colleague of Bibbs. "I never heard him say a violent word, but he cares about people. And he especially cares about his family."

"I know this," Lofton said, "if it had been my granddaughter, I wouldn't just have sat around either."

Seamus McGraw is an APBnews.com staff writer (seamus.mcgraw@apbnews.com).