It’s difficult to muster much sympathy for Jamall Frederick, the 19-year-old convicted felon who was shot multiple times when he allegedly grabbed a handgun and ran from sheriff’s deputies during a traffic stop in Gifford last month.
But this isn’t about him.
This isn’t even about whether the deputies were justified in shooting him, though we still don’t know enough about what happened to say with any confidence that they were left with little choice.
This is about the questions that remain unanswered more than three weeks after the June 11 incident that resulted in deputies filling the night air of a residential neighborhood with two separate flurries of bullets.
This is about Sheriff Eric Flowers not providing any updates on the case since the June 14 news conference when he released an edited version of footage from the deputies’ body cameras.
This is about Flowers not responding to a list of questions emailed to him and his agency last week – a list that included questions not asked during his same-night and three-days-later sessions with the local news media.
Whether the sheriff likes it or not, the county residents who pay his salary have a right to know how many times Frederick was shot, where on his body he was struck by deputies’ bullets, his current condition and whether he has been released from the hospital.
We certainly have a right to know how many rounds the deputies fired that night.
The sheriff said at his news conference that investigators would ask the deputies involved in the traffic stop what they saw as they shot and pursued Frederick in the darkness.
What exactly did they see? Did Frederick ever point a gun at them? Or when he turned to look over his right shoulder while fleeing, was he merely checking to see if the deputies were gaining on him?
Perhaps he turned because he was struck by one of the first bullets fired by the deputies, who began shooting almost immediately after he started running.
Flowers owes us answers.
He also should explain why he repeatedly tried to link the deputies’ thought process during the traffic stop to a gun-related “homicide” that occurred in the same neighborhood two days earlier, when he knew, or at least strongly suspected, the June 9 shooting was self-inflicted and possibly accidental.
“I told him not to make that inference,” said Tony Brown, president of the local NAACP chapter. “I told him: Don’t put that false narrative out there.”
Brown has publicly criticized the deputies’ actions, particularly their decision to “fire gunshots indiscriminately and recklessly in a residential neighborhood – a walking neighborhood – at 9 o’clock on a Saturday night.”
He said the deputies’ willingness to riddle the scene with bullets showed a “disrespect” for the community.
“We believe they fired as many as 40 rounds,” Brown said. “We counted 23 bullets that hit a nearby home under construction. Then add the bullets that him. Beyond that, we still don’t know.”
But he wants to.
Brown said he’s so troubled by the deputies’ lack of concern about the possibility of collateral damage that he has spoken with national and state NAACP leaders and they will ask both the U.S. Justice Department and Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the incident.
Obviously, he doesn’t trust the Sheriff’s Office’s Internal Affairs Division.
“I’ve told this sheriff exactly what I told the previous sheriff: When you do your job right, I’ve got your back. But when you do it wrong, I’m going to be your worst enemy,” Brown said.
“Those deputies put my community in danger, and the sheriff said they did no wrong,” he added. “All that does is give a group of rogue cops the go-ahead to have open season on our community, knowing there won’t be any consequences.”
While Brown acknowledges that Frederick was wrong to grab the gun and flee, he also expressed concern that the deputies began shooting almost immediately, even though Frederick was running away from them.
“You see him get out of the car and start running,” Brown said, referring to the body-cam footage released by the Sheriff’s Office. “Count one, one thousand … two one-thousand … You don’t get to three before they opened fire.
“The video is vivid until he took that second step,” he added, “but there was no way he turned to shoot at them.”
To be sure, the footage is inconclusive, despite Flowers’ assertion that Frederick, after moving a gun from his left to right hand while running away, can be seen “turning back to face the deputies.”
Frederick does turn his head, as if looking back over his right shoulder, but even when the video is viewed in slow motion, he doesn’t appear to be facing the deputies or pointing a gun at them.
Flowers admitted during his June 14 news conference that “nothing in this video” shows Frederick “pointing the gun.”
The video does show, however, that the deputies did not conduct what in law-enforcement lingo is known as a “felony stop,” – sometimes called a “high-risk stop” – a tactic officers are supposed to employ when stopping a vehicle containing a driver and/or passengers suspected of having committed a felony.
Remember: Flowers said his deputies train for such scenarios, adding that those involved in the traffic stop were “actively watching” the car because its driver and/or passengers were suspected of having been connected to a “flurry of shots” earlier and “some burglaries that were occurring in our community.”
So why not follow their training and conduct a felony stop?
If they had, the deputies would have remained at least two car lengths from the suspects’ vehicle, providing them with a safer position from which to control the situation.
Frederick still could have grabbed the gun and run, but if he did turn and shoot, the deputies were farther away and could use their vehicles for protection. It’s also possible that he might have reassessed his chances.
We don’t know.
Nor do we know how many deputy-involved shootings occurred in our county since Flowers took office in January 2021, or if any of the deputies in the June 11 shooting were also involved in the March 26 fatal shooting of a patient at the hospital, or why the sheriff shared the body-cam footage with Brown one day before releasing it to the public.
We don’t know because Flowers didn’t respond to my questions.
And I have more now:
- Where did deputies recover Frederick’s gun, and was he still armed when a second round of shots were fired by deputies as they pursued him deeper into the darkness?
- Why didn’t the Sheriff’s Office release any video of the latter part of the deputies’ pursuit and Frederick’s capture?
- What was edited out of the footage that was made public?
Flowers was correct when he said that the entire incident could’ve been avoided if Frederick had obeyed the deputies’ command to not touch the gun.
As the sheriff put it: “The second he armed himself, he changed the scenario.”
That may be true.
But about all that we know for sure is that the innocent bystanders who live in that Gifford neighborhood got very lucky.
And no matter how much our sheriff might want this story to go away, they – and we – deserve something, too.
Answers.