SMYRNA, Tenn. Three fast-food workers were found shot and killed Wednesday in an apparent robbery, striking fear again in middle Tennessee where seven restaurant workers were murdered in separate robberies in 1997. The shootings apparently happened after the restaurant closed at midnight, Sgt. Scott Byers said. The first body was found about 2:30 a.m. in the driver’s seat of a car at a BigK discount store behind the Captain D’s. There were indications the man worked at the restaurant, but Byers wouldn’t provide specifics. Police then went to the Captain D’s and found the bodies of two more men in a back room cooler. The men’s families were meeting Wednesday morning with police and grief counselors at a community center. The men’s identities and details about the shootings will be released after all relatives are notified, Byers said. The restaurant is in a business district of Smyrna, 20 miles southeast of Nashville along Interstate 24, crowded with stores and restaurants. Several people concerned that their friends may have been among those killed stood in a parking lot next to the Captain’s D trying to get information. They watched as a priest entered the restaurant, marked off with yellow police crime scene tape, and ambulances arrived to remove the bodies. “It makes me wonder so much if that man they have in jail Paul Reid even did it,” said Mary Miller of Smyrna. “What are the odds of that kind of thing happening again?” Reid, a part-time cook, terrorized Middle Tennessee over three months in 1997, killing seven fast-food restaurant workers at three different restaurants. The deaths included two workers at a Captain D’s restaurant in suburban Nashville. His last of three trials was in May. He was convicted of all seven murders and received seven death sentences, the most of any Tennessee criminal.