Before Sheriff Eric Flowers stepped to the podium Friday, reporters in the room for his “press conference” already had been told he would not answer questions.
It was an opportunity for Flowers, with three weeks to prepare, to spin his version of what happened at the Bermuda Club on Nov. 21, when a veteran deputy and locksmith were fatally wounded by a gunman during an eviction proceeding.
But the local news media was not allowed to ask him about the explanations and conclusions he presented during his 15-minute briefing on the Sheriff’s Office campus – so it wasn’t really a press conference.
That restriction certainly made it easier for the sheriff to defend his statement that the shooter, Michael Halberstam, wasn’t “on our radar,” as Flowers told reporters during his initial press conference three hours after the tragic incident on the island.
According to Flowers, Halberstam wasn’t on the Sheriff Office’s radar because:
- He had not been arrested here.
- He had not been detained under Florida’s Baker Act, which authorizes police to commit people to a mental health facility for up to 72 hours, if they’re deemed to pose a danger to themselves or others.
- He had not been subjected to a risk protection order – generically known as a “red flag law” – which authorizes police to seize firearms and ammunition from people deemed to pose a danger to themselves or others.
“None of those things occurred in this case,” Flowers said, adding that while his agency had received calls about Halberstam before the shooting, none rose to the level of an arrest, Baker Act or risk protection order.
“I promise this community that if somebody came forward with information that would have been at the level for us to make an arrest, conduct a Baker Act or to get a risk protection order, our team would have done that,” the sheriff said.
“Nothing that the shooter did prior to that day …,” he continued.
Then, suddenly, Flowers stopped himself and deftly steered his remarks to what he saw on the deputies’ body-cam videos from inside the residence, where, he said, Halberstam’s mother – who owned the home and sought the eviction – said her son wasn’t aggressive.
“She’s telling the deputies there’s nothing to worry about,” Flowers added.
Was Halberstam’s mother, Bradley, merely trying to protect her son from potential harm? Or might it have been nothing more than wishful thinking?
Reporters attending last week’s briefing weren’t allowed to ask.
Nor were they allowed to question Flowers about the mother’s 911 call from the home on Nov. 5, when she requested help and a Sheriff’s Office dispatcher asked if her son had access to any weapons.
On that call, Halberstam’s mother can be heard telling her son to “Please move out,” and “You’re mentally ill,” and “Go get help, Michael. You’re sick.”
She also told the dispatcher she felt threatened and was so concerned her son might harm her that she locked her bedroom door at night.
As for the dispatcher’s question about Halberstam’s access to weapons, she replied: “I don’t know what he has access to. He locks his bedroom door. … I don’t know what’s in his bedroom.”
The 911 call was included in a nearly six-minute, mother-and-son verbal exchange, a disturbing conversation that Halberstam recorded and had posted on his Facebook page the same day.
How did that recording – the first of seven calls for service at the Halberstam home in November prior to the ambush that took the lives of Deputy Terri Sweeting-Mashkow and local locksmith David Long – not put Halberstam on the agency’s radar?
Flowers played down her calls to the Sheriff’s office as part of the standard eviction process, during which he said his deputies experienced “no issues” with Halberstam until the ambush.
He then went on to talk about the more than 500 evictions the Sheriff Office had conducted in the past two years without any need for use of force.
“An eviction is a civil process,” Flowers said. “It is not a criminal process. This is not something we deploy our SWAT team for.”
But shouldn’t this eviction have been treated differently – because of the alarming recording Halberstam posted on Facebook, his mother’s fear for her safety, and her inability to rule out the possibility that her son had access to weapons?
The sheriff also conveniently failed to mention during his briefing a local news report last week that revealed Halberstam had harassed and threatened co-workers at the UPS Customer Center in Gifford before he was fired in June 2022 for physically attacking a driver inside a truck.
According to the story, UPS employees reported Halberstam to the Sheriff’s Office five times after he was fired, and deputies were stationed at the 41st Street workplace for two weeks after he left to prevent any potential retaliation.
Similar stories have been posted on Facebook by others claiming to have worked at UPS with Halberstam. Also, Halberstam had posted on his Facebook page a news story about the deadly crash of a UPS cargo plane Nov. 4 in Louisville, adding the caption, “karma.”
Yet, there was Flowers at the podium, telling reporters there was no reason for Halberstam to be on his agency’s radar – because he hadn’t been arrested, or subjected to a Baker Act, or disarmed under a risk protection order.
And nobody could question it.
Similarly, nobody there could question Flowers’ remarks to a local AM radio show, where he told host Bob Soos three days after the Bermuda Club incident that it didn’t matter whether Halberstam’s mother warned deputies that her son might be armed.
“Every call that we go on, we assume there are weapons …,” Flowers told Soos’ audience on the morning of Nov. 24. Therefore, the fact that the mother told deputies at the scene her son was “not aggressive” also should’ve been irrelevant.
Why, then, was Long, a civilian locksmith, allowed to walk into a scene that obviously hadn’t been secured?
Flowers still hasn’t provided our community with a satisfactory explanation.
He did, however, seize the opportunity – at a time when our grieving community has rallied around the Sheriff’s Office – to take a verbal shot at critics who dared challenge his request for a massive budget increase.
“The same critics who mocked me for demanding more resources for our agency,” Flowers said, “are now the same people criticizing our agency, saying that we should have done more.”
That’s baloney: The Sheriff’s Office received a $7 million budget increase for the current fiscal year and had the resources to use any means Flowers and his command staff deemed necessary to handle any such situation.
Our sheriff needs to understand that people are concerned – about public safety, protecting our deputies and doing everything possible to make sure the disaster that occurred at the Bermuda Club doesn’t happen again – and they’re asking compelling questions he doesn’t seem to want to answer.
