Testimony: Man knew he had been shot by deputy
‘You guys shot me,’ Seth Adams said as he lay bleeding from his chest.
WEST PALM BEACH — Lying on his back, bleeding profusely from two bullet wounds in his chest, 24-year-old Seth Adams said he knew he had been shot by a Palm Beach County sheriff ’s deputy when another officer arrived at his side, offering help.
“You’re not here to help me. You guys shot me,” sheriff ’s Agent Bryan Schumm on Thursday told a federal jury, summing up Adams’ words when he found him at A One Stop Garden Shop in Loxahatchee Groves in May 2012 after he had been shot by sheriff ’s Sgt. Michael Custer.
Despite his injuries, which were ultimately fatal, Adams was coherent, Schumm testified in the trial of a multimillion-dollar wrongful death lawsuit Adams’ parents filed against Custer and the sheriff ’s office. Shot twice in the chest and once in the arm, Adams ran about 150 yards before collapsing, Schumm said.
The agent, who was part of an undercover team Custer led that was investigating burglaries in the area, said he took off his T-shirt, using it to staunch the blood flowing from Adams’ chest. “I said, ‘Seth, you’re going to be all right. Just keep breathing,’” Schumm told the jury.
Schumm’s testimony came on a day attorneys representing Richard and Lydia Adams began showing the nine jurors evidence that they say proves the shooting at the family-owned garden center where Adams lived and worked couldn’t have played out the way Custer says.
Mary Bain, a crime scene investigator for the sheriff ’s office, testified that the blood trail she uncovered extended from the parking lot behind Adams’ blue Ford Ranger truck to inside the nursery where Schumm found Adams clinging to life. No bloodstains or “blood-like substance,” as she called it, were found on the door of Adams’ truck or inside on the seat.
If, as Custer claims, he shot Adams after pinning the young man in the truck’s door frame, some blood would have been found on the inside of the door and the seat, claimed attorney Wallace McCall, who represents Adams’ parents, who live in Palm Bay.
In a videotaped statement that was played to the jury this week, Custer said he believed Adams was grabbing a gun out of the truck. When Adams spun toward him, he fired four times, he said. Adams was unarmed.
Bain also testified that no shell casings were found near the door of the truck. Instead, she said, three were found at the back of it and another was found near a rear