Shoot first, think later. That seems to have been the mantra of a Florida cop who unloaded his gun into his own cruiser after being freaked out by a falling acorn. Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office deputy Jesse Hernandez resigned during an investigation into an embarrassing incident that could have left an unarmed man dead or seriously injured.
The episode occurred near Fort Walton Beach last November when Hernandez and another officer, Sergeant Beth Roberts, were responding to a report from a woman that her boyfriend had stolen her car, and was sending threatening messages. When the boyfriend, Marquis Jackson, turned up at the house in McLaren Circle, he was detained, searched, handcuffed, and placed in the back of Hernandez’s cruiser, an internal investigation into the shooting found.
But as Hernandez approached the rear passenger door of his car, ready to give the suspect a second search, an acorn dropped from a nearby tree, hitting the roof of the car and sending the cop into a panic that had him rolling across the street, repeatedly yelling “shot’s fired! shots fired!” and unloading his weapon into the back of his own Dodge Durango.
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And just to pile further humiliation on Hernandez, he then claimed to have been hit and fell to the ground, even though no one was shooting at him. But hearing the commotion, Sergeant Roberts genuinely believed Hernandez was being attacked and proceeded to fire her own weapon in the direction of the cop car.
Jackson – who must have been terrified, but was thankfully unharmed – was shown to have had no weapons in his possession at the time, but in the cops’ defense, they had heard that he owned a silencer. Not that it’s much of a defense for discharging a huge amount of ammunition at an unarmed man without stopping to think first. It sounds like Jackson is preparing to file a suit, and is likely to make a few bucks out of the matter.
An internal investigation by Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office Professional Standards determined Hernandez’s actions were not made with malice, but that the use of force “was not objectively reasonable.” The same investigation cleared Roberts of wrongdoing.