In the case of Andrew Lee Scott, the young man who was mistakenly shot and killed by Florida sheriff's deputies in Leesburg, Florida, Drew's mother and girlfriend have finally spoken in public.
The occasion was a press conference called by their attorney, Mark NeJame.
Drew's mother said that the sheriff's office still had not contacted her to offer condolences. Sheriff's office spokesman Lt. John Herrell said that the sheriff "plans to reach out to the family and has offered the services [of] the agency's chaplain," according to an article in the Orlando Sentinel. It's been a month, for Pete's sake! When does Sheriff Borders "plan" to "reach out" to the family? Before or after the election, in which his job is at stake? Why didn't he "reach out" a month ago, instead of blaming this whole thing on the victim?
Drew's girlfriend (this article doesn't call her his fiancée) said that she and Drew were "cuddling" on the couch when they were startled by a pounding at the door. Since the door didn't have a peephole, and the porch light was broken, and the deputies were not standing near the window, Drew ran to his bedroom to get his (legally registered) gun before answering the door. Interesting details: he was holding the gun in his left hand while he cracked open the door with his right hand. The shooting started as soon as he opened the door. She was a few feet behind him, and I will suggest that if she had remained on the couch or stood beside him, she would be dead, too.
I'm not too impressed with the attorney. News articles are confused and contradictory about whether he has filed a wrongful-death suit yet, or whether he's just making noise about it. The timing of the news conference is suspect, being a day before an election primary (or is that a primary election?) for Lake County Sheriff. Lawyer NeJame insists that that's purely concidental. And the video of him on Fox News Orlando (announcing a lawsuit six days ago, making things even more confusing) is not particularly awe-inspiring.
NOTE: This is the third article that has appeared on Zyzmog Galactic HQ about the Andrew Lee Scott shooting. Look backwards through the Table of Contents to find the first two.
Showing posts with label wrongful death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wrongful death. Show all posts
Monday, August 13, 2012
Friday, August 3, 2012
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.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Florida deputies shoot and kill wrong man; claim it was his own fault
UPDATE: See "Florida deputies and Andrew Lee Scott - more news" for the view from August 3rd.
Okay, this really happened.
And there has been no hint of compassion, or regret, or remorse, or personal mortification, or anything from the perpetrators. There has been a heap of justification, of blaming the victim, and perhaps even of cover-up.
Sheriff's deputies in Lake County, Florida, were looking for Jonathan Brown, a suspect in an attempted murder. They got information that he was staying in his apartment in the Blueberry Hills apartment complex, in Leesburg, Florida. So they went there, at 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 15. I guess 1:30 on a Sunday morning is a good time to capture a suspect.
They saw Brown's motorcycle parked in the parking lot, and the engine was still warm. They could have staked out the place, and waited 5 or 6 hours for the suspect to appear, and then taken him with a minimum of disturbance to anybody. But oh, no. They got excited. It reminds me of the Sheriff of Nottingham in Disney's Robin Hood: "This time, we got him fer sure!"
So they knocked on the door of apartment 114, the apartment right in front of the motorcycle. Okay, I guess it's a logical assumption to make, right? What a stupid assumption! Sometimes, when you come home after work, somebody else is already parked in front of your apartment, so you park somewhere else. Or you live on the second floor so you park somewhere at random. Or you know the cops are after you, so you try to throw them off your scent, just a little bit. Anyway, they had his address, right down to the apartment number, and it wasn't apartment 114.
(It turns out that Brown was in the adjacent building, where he was arrested shortly after this incident concluded — without deputies banging on his door.)
So, yeah. They knocked. At 1:30 in the morning. According to some witness reports, there was no answer, so they knocked repeatedly. According to other witnesses, they didn't knock; they BANGED, POUNDED, loudly enough to wake other residents. Then they kicked the door open and went inside. Without ever announcing themselves.
Now, imagine what was going on inside the apartment. The resident, who, by the way, is not Jonathan Brown, but a perfectly harmless and innocent man named Andrew Lee Scott, is startled awake by someone knocking on his door in the middle of the night. He sits bolt upright in bed, wondering what's going on and waiting to see if whoever it is knocks a second time.
Fearing that it might be a burglar, he grabs the gun he keeps — legally — for self-defense, and creeps towards the front door, ready to defend himself and his family. There's a third knock at the door, and then the door comes flying open. Acting in self-defense, he raises the gun and points it at the intruders who come bursting through the door.
Now we go back to the deputies' side of the story. After they kicked open the door and entered the apartment, they saw someone pointing a gun at them. Gee. Imagine that. In a state with the famous "Stand Your Ground" law, and after they had busted down his door without saying that they were cops.
So they reacted the way any cop would do, when faced with the business end of a gun. They shot him. Cops are trained not to shoot unless they intend to kill, and these cops thought they were facing a murder suspect.
But they shot him four times.
It only takes one bullet to bring someone down. The rest were excessive, panic shots, the result of poor training. (At least it wasn't as bad as the cops in New York City in February 1999, who killed an unarmed immigrant named Amadou Diallo, in the entrance to his own apartment building. At nearly point-blank range, four cops fired 41 shots at him, hitting him with 19 bullets. They were acquitted at trial.)
Still, these Lake County deputies squeezed off four shots, when one would have been sufficient.
After the guy was down, deputies realized they had the wrong man. Andrew Lee Scott was not the man they were looking for. So what did they do next? They conducted an illegal, warrantless search of his apartment. According to their report, they found "drugs and drug paraphernalia," which items they used to justify their illegal entry.
I don't know a state in the Union where possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia justifies a cop shooting you to death. And even if he'd only been wounded, and they had decided to arrest him for the drugs, the charges would have been thrown out of court because of the illegal search. There was no warrant, and no probable cause.
Lt. John Herrell, a Lake County Sheriff's Department spokesman, said "When we knocked on the door, the door opened and the occupant of that apartment was pointing a gun at deputies and that's when we opened fire and killed him." There's a bit of disagreement on this statement. First, I don't know who this "we" is, or whether Herrell was one of the three deputies involved in the incident. Second, news reports don't agree on whether, as Herrell stated, the deputies knocked, the door opened, and the "occupant" was there with a gun pointed at them. Some witnesses saw the kind of damage to the door frame that only happens when a door is kicked in. Other accounts of the event say that the deputies were inside the apartment when the "occupant" confronted them. And other accounts, which must be from the deputies themselves, vary as to whether the gun was pointed at them, or simply in the victim's (or "occupant's") hand.
Like I said, it's a cover-up. Or it will be a cover-up, unless FDLE can move fast enough.
And here's the best part of the whole thing: the sheriff's department lays all the blame on the victim. Herrell said: "It's just a bizarre set of circumstances. The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff or police officer, you're going to get shot." Apparently, that's true even if the cops come busting into your house without saying a word to you at 1:30 in the morning, with their own guns drawn and ready to fire.
(This should remind you of yet another incident, in November 2006, when Atlanta cops conducted a no-knock raid on a house whose only resident was an 92-year-old woman. They rushed into her bedroom, where she fired one shot at them from an old "rusty revolver," and they fired back. They fired 39 shots, killing her with 5 or 6 bullets and wounding each other with the rest. They planted three bags of marijuana in her house to recover as "evidence." They were convicted at trial.)
Not a word has been said about Andrew Lee Scott's mother, wife, girlfriend, or other family members. Scott was 26 years old. Somebody's got to love him and miss him. The sheriff's office has not made any (published) statement of condolences to his family, or regret for the unfortunate incident. All we have gotten from them, through the media, is a weak "Well, it was his own fault." And now that they're under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, they're not saying anything.
Please don't get me wrong: I'm not pro-drug or anti-police. In fact, thanks to the antics of Our Neighbor From Hell, we have become closely acquainted with, and are on good terms with, our local police department. However, we are thousands of miles from Florida, thankfully, and we will never have to deal with Lake County's style of "to protect and to serve."
Let's summarize a few things:
1. They decided to make a move on this guy at 1:30 in the morning. If they weren't cops, the move they were contemplating would be called "breaking and entering" at the least, and a "home invasion" at the worst.
2. They went to the wrong address. They saw the motorbike and jumped to an erroneous conclusion, even though they had the correct address in their hands. By the way, that was simultaneously a perfectly logical and stupid-beyond-common-sense conclusion.
3. They didn't announce who they were. If someone knocks on my door at 1:30 in the morning and doesn't say anything, they had better tell me who they are, or I'll be in fear of my life, too.
4. THEY WERE BANGING ON THE DOOR — REPEATEDLY.
5. They bashed in the door and entered the apartment, according to some accounts.
6. They shot more than once.
7. After they realized their mistake, they searched the apartment.
8. They justified their actions, and they blamed the victim.
9. The sheriff's office is circling the wagons, and refusing to acknowledge possible errors in judgment or training.
10. The sheriff's office is not showing an ounce of sympathy for the victim or his family, and no compassion for anyone but their own people.
IMPORTANT POSTSCRIPT:
I do not advocate any kind of citizen retaliation against the deputies involved in this unfortunate incident. You will notice that I haven't mentioned them by name, even though their names and a great deal of other information about them is available on the Internet. The Internet today is too full of haters and kooks, who would make life miserable for these officers and for their families. That's not the way Drew would want to be memorialized, and I don't think he would advocate that kind of behavior. One innocent life has been destroyed already; let's not hurt anybody else, okay?
UPDATE: See "Florida deputies and Andrew Lee Scott - more news" for the view from August 3rd.
Okay, this really happened.
And there has been no hint of compassion, or regret, or remorse, or personal mortification, or anything from the perpetrators. There has been a heap of justification, of blaming the victim, and perhaps even of cover-up.
Sheriff's deputies in Lake County, Florida, were looking for Jonathan Brown, a suspect in an attempted murder. They got information that he was staying in his apartment in the Blueberry Hills apartment complex, in Leesburg, Florida. So they went there, at 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 15. I guess 1:30 on a Sunday morning is a good time to capture a suspect.
They saw Brown's motorcycle parked in the parking lot, and the engine was still warm. They could have staked out the place, and waited 5 or 6 hours for the suspect to appear, and then taken him with a minimum of disturbance to anybody. But oh, no. They got excited. It reminds me of the Sheriff of Nottingham in Disney's Robin Hood: "This time, we got him fer sure!"
So they knocked on the door of apartment 114, the apartment right in front of the motorcycle. Okay, I guess it's a logical assumption to make, right? What a stupid assumption! Sometimes, when you come home after work, somebody else is already parked in front of your apartment, so you park somewhere else. Or you live on the second floor so you park somewhere at random. Or you know the cops are after you, so you try to throw them off your scent, just a little bit. Anyway, they had his address, right down to the apartment number, and it wasn't apartment 114.
(It turns out that Brown was in the adjacent building, where he was arrested shortly after this incident concluded — without deputies banging on his door.)
So, yeah. They knocked. At 1:30 in the morning. According to some witness reports, there was no answer, so they knocked repeatedly. According to other witnesses, they didn't knock; they BANGED, POUNDED, loudly enough to wake other residents. Then they kicked the door open and went inside. Without ever announcing themselves.
Now, imagine what was going on inside the apartment. The resident, who, by the way, is not Jonathan Brown, but a perfectly harmless and innocent man named Andrew Lee Scott, is startled awake by someone knocking on his door in the middle of the night. He sits bolt upright in bed, wondering what's going on and waiting to see if whoever it is knocks a second time.
Fearing that it might be a burglar, he grabs the gun he keeps — legally — for self-defense, and creeps towards the front door, ready to defend himself and his family. There's a third knock at the door, and then the door comes flying open. Acting in self-defense, he raises the gun and points it at the intruders who come bursting through the door.
Now we go back to the deputies' side of the story. After they kicked open the door and entered the apartment, they saw someone pointing a gun at them. Gee. Imagine that. In a state with the famous "Stand Your Ground" law, and after they had busted down his door without saying that they were cops.
So they reacted the way any cop would do, when faced with the business end of a gun. They shot him. Cops are trained not to shoot unless they intend to kill, and these cops thought they were facing a murder suspect.
But they shot him four times.
It only takes one bullet to bring someone down. The rest were excessive, panic shots, the result of poor training. (At least it wasn't as bad as the cops in New York City in February 1999, who killed an unarmed immigrant named Amadou Diallo, in the entrance to his own apartment building. At nearly point-blank range, four cops fired 41 shots at him, hitting him with 19 bullets. They were acquitted at trial.)
Still, these Lake County deputies squeezed off four shots, when one would have been sufficient.
After the guy was down, deputies realized they had the wrong man. Andrew Lee Scott was not the man they were looking for. So what did they do next? They conducted an illegal, warrantless search of his apartment. According to their report, they found "drugs and drug paraphernalia," which items they used to justify their illegal entry.
I don't know a state in the Union where possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia justifies a cop shooting you to death. And even if he'd only been wounded, and they had decided to arrest him for the drugs, the charges would have been thrown out of court because of the illegal search. There was no warrant, and no probable cause.
Lt. John Herrell, a Lake County Sheriff's Department spokesman, said "When we knocked on the door, the door opened and the occupant of that apartment was pointing a gun at deputies and that's when we opened fire and killed him." There's a bit of disagreement on this statement. First, I don't know who this "we" is, or whether Herrell was one of the three deputies involved in the incident. Second, news reports don't agree on whether, as Herrell stated, the deputies knocked, the door opened, and the "occupant" was there with a gun pointed at them. Some witnesses saw the kind of damage to the door frame that only happens when a door is kicked in. Other accounts of the event say that the deputies were inside the apartment when the "occupant" confronted them. And other accounts, which must be from the deputies themselves, vary as to whether the gun was pointed at them, or simply in the victim's (or "occupant's") hand.
Like I said, it's a cover-up. Or it will be a cover-up, unless FDLE can move fast enough.
And here's the best part of the whole thing: the sheriff's department lays all the blame on the victim. Herrell said: "It's just a bizarre set of circumstances. The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff or police officer, you're going to get shot." Apparently, that's true even if the cops come busting into your house without saying a word to you at 1:30 in the morning, with their own guns drawn and ready to fire.
(This should remind you of yet another incident, in November 2006, when Atlanta cops conducted a no-knock raid on a house whose only resident was an 92-year-old woman. They rushed into her bedroom, where she fired one shot at them from an old "rusty revolver," and they fired back. They fired 39 shots, killing her with 5 or 6 bullets and wounding each other with the rest. They planted three bags of marijuana in her house to recover as "evidence." They were convicted at trial.)
Not a word has been said about Andrew Lee Scott's mother, wife, girlfriend, or other family members. Scott was 26 years old. Somebody's got to love him and miss him. The sheriff's office has not made any (published) statement of condolences to his family, or regret for the unfortunate incident. All we have gotten from them, through the media, is a weak "Well, it was his own fault." And now that they're under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, they're not saying anything.
Please don't get me wrong: I'm not pro-drug or anti-police. In fact, thanks to the antics of Our Neighbor From Hell, we have become closely acquainted with, and are on good terms with, our local police department. However, we are thousands of miles from Florida, thankfully, and we will never have to deal with Lake County's style of "to protect and to serve."
Let's summarize a few things:
1. They decided to make a move on this guy at 1:30 in the morning. If they weren't cops, the move they were contemplating would be called "breaking and entering" at the least, and a "home invasion" at the worst.
2. They went to the wrong address. They saw the motorbike and jumped to an erroneous conclusion, even though they had the correct address in their hands. By the way, that was simultaneously a perfectly logical and stupid-beyond-common-sense conclusion.
3. They didn't announce who they were. If someone knocks on my door at 1:30 in the morning and doesn't say anything, they had better tell me who they are, or I'll be in fear of my life, too.
4. THEY WERE BANGING ON THE DOOR — REPEATEDLY.
5. They bashed in the door and entered the apartment, according to some accounts.
6. They shot more than once.
7. After they realized their mistake, they searched the apartment.
8. They justified their actions, and they blamed the victim.
9. The sheriff's office is circling the wagons, and refusing to acknowledge possible errors in judgment or training.
10. The sheriff's office is not showing an ounce of sympathy for the victim or his family, and no compassion for anyone but their own people.
IMPORTANT POSTSCRIPT:
I do not advocate any kind of citizen retaliation against the deputies involved in this unfortunate incident. You will notice that I haven't mentioned them by name, even though their names and a great deal of other information about them is available on the Internet. The Internet today is too full of haters and kooks, who would make life miserable for these officers and for their families. That's not the way Drew would want to be memorialized, and I don't think he would advocate that kind of behavior. One innocent life has been destroyed already; let's not hurt anybody else, okay?
UPDATE: See "Florida deputies and Andrew Lee Scott - more news" for the view from August 3rd.
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