Florida deputies and Andrew Lee Scott - more news

I'll warn you right now that some of my sources for this entry are not terribly objective. One has an obvious bias. But they're doing their best to state facts, and you can determine for yourself the truth of what they say.

First is a report from WOFL in Orlando, originally written on July 15 and updated on July 29. This report states that on the day after the shooting, the owners of the apartment complex were seen installing a new door at the entrance to the apartment where Andrew Lee Scott was killed, "because the one it replaced was full of bullet holes." WHAT?

Were they firing through the door? Why? How did they know, then, that Drew had a gun? And second, what if a second, innocent person had been standing behind the door when the bullets tore through?

The WOFL report also contains a statement from a witness that makes a couple of disturbing claims, but I haven't found a corroborating statement yet, so I'm not going to repeat it.

Second is a report from Central Florida News 13, written on July 23. This report states that Drew's fiancée and family have hired an attorney and will be conducting their own investigation into the shooting. In my original posting, I pointed out that nothing had been said about any girlfriend or family. Now we first hear about them, not from the police, but from News 13. The article also suggests that the FDLE investigation will be completed 30 to 45 days from when it started, which puts it in mid-to-late August.

(By the way, John, the guy is the fiancé. The girl is the fiancée. The difference is subtle, but significant. Blame it on the French.It's their language.)

Third is an article in a blog called "The Right Side of the Lake," written on July 31. This blog carries an obvious bias and has a clear agenda, which is to expose corruption and other badness within the Lake County Sheriff's Department. I won't comment further on that agenda, since I want to focus on this one incident, but it's important to recognize the bias before you read the article. The blog's author places the shooting in context with everything else going on in the department. He makes some claims, based on his own digesting of the facts of the case, which do make it more disturbing.

He says, based on the official incident report, that the "attempted murderer" the deputies were hunting wasn't really an "attempted murderer;" he was an assault-and-battery suspect. The escalation to "attempted murder" happened two hours after Drew had been shot.

He says, again based on the official incident report, that the alleged assault and battery was really just injuries suffered in a fight. Jonathan Brown, the "attempted murder" suspect, had been involved in a fight at somebody else's apartment, and had beaten up the other guy. Two important facts emerge about the other guy: first, his injuries amounted to a scraped elbow and cuts around his eye; second, the fight was because this other guy, the so-called "victim" of the assault, had just finished punching his girlfriend in the face; third, the victim, the guy who punched his girlfriend in the face, was the son of a lieutenant in the sheriff's office.

He quotes sources as saying that "eight to eleven" shots were fired, and that five of those shots, not four, hit Andrew Lee Scott. Unfortunately, he doesn't qualify his sources, other than to say that they're "close to the investigation."

To follow the blogger's train of thought, then, the adult son of a cop beat up his girlfriend, and was then beaten up himself. Other cops, friends of his dad, took off after the guys who beat the kid up, and ended up making a terrible mistake and killing an innocent man instead.

Remember, I pointed out at the beginning that the Right Side of the Lake had a bias and an agenda. Let's wait for the FDLE report before we accept RSoL's conclusions. As my friend Amanda has pointed out, it's way too easy in cases like this to paint the cops as the bad guys because things get distorted or misstated (or omitted) in the media. Let's not rush to judgement.

But let's not sweep it under the carpet, either. Drew's life mattered. His death should matter, too.