Man tells cops he fired off gun as warning, not to hurt anyone
Ex-football star wanted rival to keep away from mother of his child.
JUPITER — When Michael Fleurizard fired a gun Monday afternoon in a Jupiter neighborhood, he wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, he explained to police. He only wanted the man who’d slept with the mother of his child “to know it wasn’t OK to mess with his family.”
Fleurizard, 26, of West Palm Beach, was arrested Monday along with that man’s former girlfriend, who is accused of handing Fleurizard the gun, coming along for the 3-mile police chase and hiding drugs between her legs.
Ellen Fitzpatrick, 21, of Jupiter Farms, faces multiple drug-related charges. A judge ordered that she be released from the Palm Beach County Jail under supervision after posting an $11,000 bond.
Fleurizard, a former William T. Dwyer High School football standout, will remain in jail, a judge ordered, because he had just been released from prison in June. Fleurizard faces a slew of charges, including multiple counts of aggravated assault and driving-related offenses.
Jupiter police received multiple calls shortly before 4:30 p.m. Monday about a shooting on Summer Avenue, north of the Alternate A1A Bridge, according to department records.
One was from the man Fleurizard and Fitzpatrick seemingly targeted. He’d been visiting with someone at a home on that street and asked a friend to pick him up.
That friend told police that while he was waiting for the man, Fleurizard approached him “demanding to know who was in his car.” The driver answered that he was alone and Fleurizard left in a BMW.
His friend eventually got into the car and the driver began to
leave. As he did, the BMW raced up behind the car, then passed it and blocked it at a stop sign.
Fleurizard, whom the passenger knew as “Slim,” got out of the BMW and Fitzpatrick handed him a gun through the window, witnesses said. Fleurizard then approached the passenger side of the other men’s car and screamed at the driv- er’s friend.
Fleurizard was “furious” the man had slept with the mother of his child, the man told police. And Fitzpatrick was upset he’d ended their relationship, he said.
Fleurizard made the gun noticeable, at one point twirling it around his ear, witnesses said. When the driver saw the gun, he threw the car in reverse, crashing into several mailboxes as he tried to get away. Fleurizard fired a shot, then jumped back behind the wheel of the BMW and sped off after the men’s car out of the neighborhood.
Police found one spent shell casing in the area, records show.
Fleurizard raced after the car, at one point forcing it onto a curb. He admitted to chasing the men’s car through town — crashing into multiple cars along the way — until Jupiter police stopped him in the parking lot of the Culver’s frozen-custard stand on Military Trail.
Gun drawn, an officer approached the BMW and yelled for everyone inside to put up their hands. Fleurizard riffled through theSUV until, finally, he stuck his hands out the driver’s side window.
An officer “immediately recognized Fleurizard.” He was “a regular violent felony offender,” the officer wrote, and didn’t have a valid driver’s license.
The officer held him and Fitzpatrick at gunpoint until backup patrols arrived.
When questioned, Fitzpatrick told officers they’d find text messages and phone calls between her and her ex-boyfriend from the previous night. She said she was trying to set up a fight between him and Fleurizard.
Fitzpatrick does not face charges related either to the shooting or the chase.
As officers led her into the police department, they noticed she wasn’t walking normally. She told the officer, “I have (expletive) on me.” The officer asked if she meant marijuana.
“Not just that,” Fitzpatrick responded.
The officer found 23 small bags of heroin, a bag of cocaine, multiple crack cocaine pieces and three oxycodone pills between her legs. She said the drugs were hers and that she sold them.
The office also found $330 in cash in her bra.
Records show that Fleuri- zard was released from state custody in June after serving a year sentence for drug-related offenses. He previously served a five-year sentence after reportedly trying to run over two Jupiter police officers with his car in 2012.
Fleurizard spent nearly two years in a West Virginia prison after robbing a pizza delivery man in 2010, shortly before he was slated to begin his first year as a defensive lineman for Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va.
The robbery cost Fleurizard a college scholarship.