Hit by a Bibb County Sheriff’s Deputy: The Separate Notice Almost Everyone Misses

By Ben Sessions on October 1st, 2026 in Personal Injury

Here is a scenario we see: someone is hit by a marked patrol car, does everything right, and sends a careful written notice to Macon-Bibb County within the deadline. Months later, the claim is dismissed.

The reason is structural, and it surprises people who have done nothing wrong. In Georgia, the sheriff is not the county.

Why the sheriff is treated separately

The Sheriff of Bibb County is an elected constitutional officer. Deputies are the sheriff’s employees, not employees of the county commission. The Georgia Court of Appeals addressed this directly in Moats v. Mendez, 349 Ga. App. 811 (2019), holding that when a sheriff is sued in his official capacity for a deputy’s negligence, the claim must be presented to the sheriff directly — and that notice to county officials alone does not satisfy the presentment requirement of O.C.G.A. § 36-11-1.

One note on the state of that authority: the Georgia Supreme Court granted certiorari and then vacated the writ as improvidently granted, declining to reach the two questions because they had not been properly raised below. The Court of Appeals decision therefore stands, but it has not been affirmed on the merits by the Supreme Court.

The court described the sheriff as “an elected, constitutional officer … not an employee of the county commission.” That is not a technicality about mailing addresses. It reflects the way Georgia structures county government, and it means a claim arising from the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office requires its own notice, to its own recipient.

The practical rule

If a deputy, a patrol vehicle, or something that happened in the Bibb County jail is part of your claim:

Serve the Sheriff of Bibb County directly, in writing, by certified mail or statutory overnight delivery with return receipt.
Also serve Macon-Bibb County — the Office of the Mayor and the Commission, at 700 Poplar Street — because the county may be an additional proper party and because the consolidated government’s dual city-county character makes the applicable deadline itself an open question.
Do it within six months. Macon-Bibb County’s 2012 charter says the government constitutes both a municipality and a county. Georgia’s municipal statute, O.C.G.A. § 36-33-5, requires notice within six months; the county statute, § 36-11-1, allows twelve. We are not aware of a Georgia appellate decision squarely resolving which one governs a consolidated government. Six months is the assumption that survives either answer.

Serving one and not the others is how these claims are lost.

The second trap: individual immunity

Even with perfect notice, there is a further obstacle worth understanding before you build expectations.

Moats also held that a deputy driving a county vehicle in the course of employment is individually immune under O.C.G.A. § 36-92-3(a) — and that this remained true even where the county had purchased insurance. The practical consequence is that the claim generally runs against the office in its official capacity rather than against the individual deputy’s personal assets.

What can actually be recovered

For claims arising from the negligent use of a covered motor vehicle, O.C.G.A. § 36-92-2 waives local government sovereign immunity up to:

$500,000 for bodily injury or death of any one person in any one occurrence;
$700,000 in the aggregate where two or more people are injured in one occurrence;
$50,000 for property damage in one occurrence.

A local government may raise those limits by resolution, through participation in an interlocal risk management pool, or by purchasing commercial coverage above the statutory amounts. Whether that has happened for a particular loss is a question of fact, and it is worth answering early — it can change the realistic value of a case substantially.

Note also what the waiver covers: the negligent use of a covered motor vehicle. A claim arising from something other than vehicle operation — a jail injury, a use-of-force claim — travels a different route entirely, often through federal civil rights law rather than Georgia tort law, with its own standards and its own deadlines.

What to preserve

Claims involving law enforcement vehicles turn on records that agencies retain on their own schedules, not yours:

Dash camera and body camera footage, which is subject to retention policies that can be short.
CAD and dispatch records, showing whether the deputy was responding to a call and under what priority.
The agency’s own collision investigation, which is often separate from the crash report.
Whether emergency lights and siren were in use — Georgia law gives emergency vehicles certain privileges, but they are conditional, and they do not relieve a driver of the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of others.
Training and vehicle maintenance records.

A written preservation demand, sent early, is often the only thing standing between a case and a video that was overwritten on schedule.

Where to go from here

If a Bibb County Sheriff’s Office vehicle or deputy was involved in your injury, the notice question needs to be handled in weeks, not months, and it needs to be handled in more than one direction at once.

Our Macon office is at 544 Mulberry Street, Suite 319. Free consultation, no fee unless we recover for you. If you are already close to six months from the date of the incident, tell us that when you call. (470) 225-7710.

Sessions & Fleischman, LLC — Macon office: 544 Mulberry Street, Suite 319, Macon, GA 31201 | (470) 225-7710
Responsible attorney for the content of this page: Ben Sessions, Georgia Bar No. 141280.

This article is general information about Georgia law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different and past results do not predict future outcomes.

Contingent attorneys’ fees refers only to those fees charged by attorneys for their legal services. Such fees are not permitted in all types of cases. Court costs and other additional expenses of legal action usually must be paid by the client.