Video shows Florida deputy opened fire on Black airman seconds after door opened
A decorated U.S. Air Force combat veteran was shot to death by an Okaloosa sheriff’s deputy inside his Fort Walton Beach apartment just seconds after opening the door with a gun in his hand pointed at the floor, according to a police bodycam video released on Thursday.
That footage and a FaceTime
video that also recorded a portion of what happened raise questions about whether the shooting was justified, as police claim — or whether the sheriff’s deputy was at fault in entering the wrong apartment and catching the airman off guard, as his family’s attorneys say.
Senior Airman Roger Fortson, 23, was shot six times and died at a local hospital, authorities said. Okaloosa County Sheriff Eric Aden did not identify the deputy — who appeared to be white. He was placed on administrative leave, pending a criminal investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The sheriff released the video on Thursday, six days after the shooting — and just hours after the airman’s family and their attorneys held a news conference disputing the sheriff’s initial report that the shooting was selfdefense.
Benjamin Crump, a civil rights lawyer who has handled similar policeinvolved shootings, accused the sheriff of putting out a “false narrative” that cast Fortson as the bad guy, even though he had a legal firearm and was confronted in his own home.
“A lot of people have guns — it’s Florida. The Second Amendment applies to Roger, too. The police should know that,” Crump said, adding that Fortson was a trained military officer.
Okaloosa County, in Florida’s Panhandle, is home to the largest Air Force base in the country, Eglin Air Force Base — and Hurlburt Field, the headquarters of the Air
Force’s Special Operations Command. Thousands of current and former airmen and women live in the area. Fortson, a native of Atlanta, enlisted after graduating from high school in 2019 and was based at Hurlburt in the Special Operations Wing. He was a missions aviator who was injured while serving in Kuwait, according to his family. His sister is a U.S. Marine.