DEPUTY WHO SHOT MENTALLY ILL MAN WON’T FACE CHARGES
WEST PALM BEACH — A Palm Beach County sheriff ’s deputy won’t face criminal charges for fatally shooting a mentally ill man whose parents summoned officers to their Loxahatchee home in December to stop their 46-year-old son from killing himself, the county’s top prosecutor has decided.
In a memo released Monday, Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said Deputy Justin Rigney was justified when he shot Ricky Whidden four times. When Whidden charged at Rigney with a knife, the 10-year deputy was understandably in fear of his life and had no choice but to fire his service weapon, Aronberg wrote.
Palm Beach Gardens attorney Stuart Kaplan, who is representing the mother of Whidden’s three children in a civil lawsuit against Sheriff Ric Bradshaw and Rigney, called Aronberg’s report a sham.
“There was absolutely no investigation done by the State Attorney’s Office,” he said. “They simply took all the self-serving reports from the deputies and did a nice letter.”
In the report, Aronberg said the deputies did everything they could to subdue Whidden. Sgt. Derek Savage summoned Rigney to bring his police dog. Rigney and three other deputies approached Whidden, repeatedly asking him to drop a knife, which had an eight-inch blade, Aronberg wrote. Whidden refused.
Finally, the deputies shot Whidden with a nonlethal impact weapon, which typically incapacitates people. Instead of stunning Whidden, it enraged him, Rigney told investigators.
“He began to scream and yell and he had a look in his eye like a crazed animal,” Rigney said. “He ... started charging directly at me with a knife raised in his hand, like over his head, over his shoulder, screaming and yelling.”
“I felt he was gonna kill me. I felt I was gonna die,” Rigney continued. “I was faced with no other choice.”
Rigney’s account, echoed by the other deputies, doesn’t jibe with a video of the incident, Kaplan said. Whidden, he said, was shot in the back as he was fleeing deputies. Aronberg’s report says the non-lethal weapon struck Whidden in the back.
Even if Whidden had been contemplating “suicide by cop” as his parents’ claimed, the deputies had plenty of time to defuse the situation, Kaplan said. Or they could have used Rigney’s police dog to subdue him.
Whidden was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hadn’t been taking his medicine, but never threatened his parents, Kaplan said. “Unfortunately, mental illness in this county is a crime,” he said.
In deciding not to charge Rigney with wrongdoing, Aronberg cited two cases in which mentally ill county residents were fatally shot by deputies. The 2005 shooting of John Garczynski Jr. and the 2006 shooting of Marilou Forrest were deemed justified by appellate judges, he wrote.
Records show the sheriff ’s office paid Garczynski’s family $100,0000.
In the other case, Forrest, like Whidden, was delusional and had a knife. In dismissing the lawsuit filed by her husband, Richard Furtado, the 4th District Court of Appeal wrote: “Looking at the totality of the circumstances, the decedent posed a threat to herself and to the deputies because the undisputed facts established that the decedent was suicidal, had armed herself with knives and was suffering from delusional paranoia.”
The suit Kaplan filed against the sheriff ’s office is pending in U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach. In it, Rigney and Bradshaw have denied wrongdoing.