Man, 88, claims injury by deputy in tussle

An 88-year-old man spent three days in an intensive-care unit this week after a tussle with an Orange County deputy sheriff who tried to stop him from reaching a fire at his nursery, his family said.

Milt Hess drove around sheriff’s barricades on South Apopka-Vineland road, panicked about his wife, Gail, who had called from their business, Landscape Nursery, and told him it was burning.

“The deputy sheriff ran after and caught me about 100 feet from the nursery property,” Hess said in a statement dictated Friday to his son at Orlando Regional Medical Center. “He grabbed me and said, ‘You’re going to jail.’ ”

The Sheriff’s Office has opened an internal investigation of the incident, spokesman Jeff Williamson said.

“This is truly an unfortunate incident,” Williamson said in an email. “The gentleman, Mr. Hess, arrived on the scene of the fire and had to be [understandably] restrained as he thought his wife was in the building that was on fire.”

“Certainly we would not want to injure Mr. Hess, but we could not allow him to run inside a burning structure which we believed was even more dangerous due to chemicals which may have been inside.”

ORMC refused to allow a reporter to meet with Hess in the hospital, though Hess and his family had consented.

His son, Mark, said the deputy tumbled to the ground onto his dad while handcuffing him, breaking the octogenarian’s ribs and crushing a lung.

In his statement, Milt Hess said he was “dumped” in handcuffs into a patrol car, though he told deputies he was having a heart attack.

“I was in the car hollering, ‘Take me to the hospital, I’m having a heart attack,’ ” he said. “I again asked to be taken to the hospital and the arresting officer told me to shut up and be quiet.”

By then, Gail Hess, 76, started to worry, too.

About 20 minutes had passed since she phoned Milt about the fire. She realized she hadn’t told him she and their daughter, Cerise Niskanen, 54, were safe.

“He’d said, ‘I’ll be right there,’ ” she said. “But then he didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come.”

“Then I saw all kinds of action going that way,” she recalled, motioning to a busy stretch of the road south of the nursery. “I thought, ‘What the heck’s going on?’ I asked a fireman about the commotion. He said some guy’s trying to get by the barricades. “That’s when I took off.” When she spotted her husband of 44 years, he was propped against a sheriff’s cruiser, holding his chest.

He was struggling to breathe, she said.

An ambulance took him to Health Central Hospital in Ocoee where a doctor ordered a chest X-ray, then decided to transfer Hess to ORMC.

Gail Hess said she didn’t understand why the deputy roughed up her husband. She said a sheriff ’s supervisor later came to the hospital to apologize.

In his sheriff’s report, deputy Zachary Erickson said Milt Hess “ignored my commands to stop and continued to run towards the fire. I again yelled out for Hess to stop running which he ignored...”

“I was able to catch up to Hess and grab his left shoulder blade with my left hand. After I grabbed Hess’ left shoulder, he swung his left arm back knocking my hand free...I then got behind Hess and grabbed him with both arms from behind around his chest and told him to stop where he was.”

“Due to the wet grass and Hess’ attempts to break free from my grasp, I lost my footing and we both fell to the wet grass.”

The blaze, believed to be accidental and electrical in origin, caused an estimated $15,000 in damage, according to a fire/rescue report.

The report noted deputies had closed ApopkaVineland Road in both directions to protect fire crews.

Gail Hess said her husband most likely was concerned not only for her and their daughter, but also for firefighters — because fertilizer is stored in the office.