Ex-deputy cleared in shooting
Florida officer shot at handcuffed suspect after acorn fell
A Florida law enforcement officer shot at an unarmed and handcuffed man after mistaking the sound of a falling acorn for a gunshot, according to internal investigation documents.
The Okaloosa County sheriff’s investigation released Friday found former deputy Jesse Hernandez used excessive force. But he and a sergeant who shot at unarmed suspect Marquis Jackson were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, according to Sheriff Eric Aden.
Jackson, who sat handcuffed in the back of the patrol car as deputies opened fire, was not injured. Hernandez resigned while being investigated.
“We are very thankful Mr. Jackson wasn’t injured and we have no reason to think former Deputy Hernandez acted with any malice. Though his actions were ultimately not warranted, we do believe he felt his life was in immediate peril and his response was based off the totality of circumstances surrounding this fear,” Aden wrote. “Just as we have an obligation to protect our officers so they can go home safely to their families, law enforcement has the same obligation to any citizen being investigated for a crime.”
Aden posted online the 44-page investigative report about the situation.
Hernandez started as a deputy in Okaloosa, on the Florida panhandle, in January 2022. On Nov. 12, Hernandez was among the deputies who responded to a residential neighborhood in Fort Walton Beach because a woman said her boyfriend, Marquis Jackson, had stolen her car and was threatening her, according to officials.
The woman showed deputies that Jackson, who was known to carry a gun, had sent her threatening texts and a photo from inside her car, the report said. Deputies thought the photos showed a gun, but investigators later found out it actually showed less than 2 inches of a gray metal cylinder that everyone interpreted to be a firearm suppressor attached to a gun, according to the report. She told officers that Jackson had more than one gun.
After the car and Jackson had been found, deputies patted down Jackson and placed him in the back of Hernandez’s patrol vehicle.
Hernandez was walking back to the patrol vehicle to search Jackson again when an acorn fell on the roof of his patrol vehicle.
The sound can be seen and heard in Hernandez’s body cam, police said, which recorded footage at 33 frames per second. The department analyzed the video frame by frame to determine when the acorn fell and when Hernandez thought he was under fire.
Investigators found that 1.1 seconds passed between the acorn hitting the roof of the patrol vehicle and Hernandez first yelling “shots fired!”
Hernandez quickly drops to the ground and rolls away, the body-cam footage shows. He explained later that he felt like his legs were giving out.
After stumbling for several seconds, he gets on one knee behind the patrol vehicle. Hernandez fires his first shot into the vehicle 8.745 seconds after the acorn hit the vehicle. Just under a second later, the back window of the vehicle starts to shatter.
Sgt. Beth Roberts heard Hernandez with terror in his voice yelling that he had been struck by gunfire and saw him scrambling in the road. “I thought I just saw a deputy get murdered,” she later told investigators.
Analysts found it was hard to tell, but they believe Roberts first fired 0.231 seconds after Hernandez’s initial shot. Investigators said her actions violated no policy.
Hernandez and Roberts were shooting in crossfire positions and without cover. Hernandez fired his last shots lying on his left side in the road, yelling: “I’m hit! I’m hit!” He was, in fact, not hit. Hernandez told investigators three days later he heard “what I believe would be a suppressed weapon off to the side. Definitely heard this noise. At the same time, I felt an impact on my right side, like upper torso area … I feel the impact. My legs just give out.”
Hernandez said he’d never been shot before, so he didn’t know what it felt like. The deputies who responded helped Hernandez into the back of an ambulance that took him to the hospital. “Once at the hospital, he learned he had not been shot,” investigators wrote.
Hernandez said he didn’t have any prior law enforcement experience but attended the U.S. Military Academy and was an Army Special Forces officer for 10 years with two combat rotations in Afghanistan — but, he noted, did not experience any combat.