Store gunfire explodes into road havoc
Drama begins with sudden shooting of woman, ends in death in fiery car.
LANTANA — Moments of chaos ended in crunching metal and death at midmorning Wednesday when police say a man blamed for two other shootings in the previous 24 hours fatally shot a woman outside a Lake Worth grocery store, then raced the wrong way down northbound Interstate 95 and got into three separate head-on crashes with at least six other motorists.
Minutes later, a Palm Beach County sheriff ’s deputy shot and killed him on the interstate near Lantana Road, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said.
The crashes and shooting shut down the interstate in both directions for more than two hours and left northbound lanes closed for more than six hours in a 4-mile stretch between Gateway Boulevard in Boynton Beach and Sixth Avenue South in Lake Worth. It has been several years since Palm Beach County has seen such a disruption to its main north-south artery.
The Sheriff ’s Office, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue and the Florida Highway Patrol laid out what
they say is a brief timeline that ended in pandemonium:
At about 9:30 a.m., authorities heard that the man shot a woman at a shopping center in the 1600 block of South Dixie Highway in Lake Worth, just north of Lantana.
When Fire Rescue workers arrived, the woman was gone; people told them she had been driven to a hospital. But she was in the car with the man who shot her.
“About 15 minutes after that, we started getting calls that there was a vehicle, a black Nissan Rogue, on the northbound lane going south,” Bradshaw told reporters along the highway’s off-ramp. The Sheriff ’s Office said late Wednesday that it believes the man entered I-95 at Southern Boulevard.
A Palm Beach Post editor said he was heading to work at about 9:45 a.m. and was northbound just north of 10th Avenue North when a black SUV raced south past him in the breakdown lane, coming so close it shook his car.
The chase ended with the three crashes near Lantana Road, where the motorist’s car became disabled and caught fire. Several deputies and a Florida Highway Patrol trooper confronted the driver, whom authorities hadn’t identified as of Wednesday evening. The trooper tried to subdue him with a Taser, but it misfired, Bradshaw said. At that point, he said, a deputy standing alongside shot and killed the man.
Bradshaw did not identify either the deputy or the trooper. He did not say if the driver was armed, but said, “There was enough to let the deputy know he needed to do what he needed to do.”
Bradshaw said the deputy who shot the man “said he was in fear of his life and the life of the trooper and opened fire.”
The Sheriff ’s Office said deputies pulled the woman from the burning car, but she was dead.
One motorist was taken to a trauma center, and another was taken to a hospital with non-traumatic injuries, Fire Rescue Capt. Albert Borroto said. He did not identify either hospital, and authorities did not provide updates on their conditions late Wednesday.
The deputy is on paid administrative leave, which is standard in such incidents, the Sheriff ’s Office said.
The agency said the motorist is believed to have been the gunman in two other separate shootings, one Tuesday afternoon in West Palm Beach and one early Wednesday in Boynton Beach.
The West Palm Beach shooting was on South Dixie Highway near Southern Boulevard, West Palm Beach police said.
The victim, who had nonlife threatening injuries, likely knew the gunman, authorities said. Bradshaw deferred details to West Palm Beach police, who had not elaborated on that incident as of Wednesday afternoon.
And a 21-year-old man was shot at about 1 a.m. Wednesday south of Hypoluxo Road, but also had non-life threatening injuries, Boynton Beach police said.
Authorities initially blocked both directions of I-95, then reopened southbound lanes, but said northbound lanes would stay closed through the afternoon. They later extended the closed stretch south from Lantana Road all the way to Gateway to relieve bottlenecks from motorists getting off the expressway. Adding to the misery: A separate rollover crash at about 1 p.m. blocked I-95 two more exits south at Woolbright Road.
All lanes were open in both directions by about 4:30 p.m.
On the Lantana Road overpass, a woman hugged her sister as deputies and troopers combed the pavement for clues.
Their father, driving to work, had had a car flip onto his Audi. The woman, who did not want her name used, said her father was OK.
Kip Wright of West Palm Beach said he saw the car catch fire as he drove south to his Delray Beach office and had to dodge debris.
Back at the shooting site in Lake Worth, after the crime tape came down Wednesday afternoon, a clerk at My Neighborhood Grocery said the dead man and the woman were both in their 30s and that they came into the store together twice in a half-hour stretch Wednesday morning.
On the second visit, the clerk said, they used an ATM
A trooper tried to subdue the man with a Taser, but it misfired.
and bought cigarettes. The clerk, who asked not to be identified, said there were no signs that the man was about to shoot the woman.
She said the two walked outside and then she heard a gunshot. She said she watched the man lift the woman, who’d been shot in the head, off the pavement, then place her in the vehicle and speed off.
The clerk said witnesses tried to keep the man from fleeing but were unsuccessful. She said she “wanted to cry” when she saw the woman on the pavement.
“The lady was talking to me. Then I see her on the ground,” she said.
The shooting is believed to be the first in the line of duty by a law enforcement officer in Palm Beach County since July, when Palm Springs police said an officer shot a man who tried to back into officers in a truck that turned out to be stolen. The man was not seriously hurt.
On May 15, two West Palm Beach police officers shot Leonardo Anthony Matos after he allegedly rammed his SUV into two patrol cars. And on May 12, Palm Beach County sheriff ’s deputies shot and killed Phillip O’Shea, who led police in several jurisdictions on a hunt after an alleged robbery in suburban West Palm Beach.
Boca Raton police said the Lantana incident is not believed to be in any way related to the fatal shooting of a motorist at about 4:30 a.m. Wednesday on northbound Interstate 95 near Clint Moore Road.