Florida Cops Shoot Unarmed Black Man In His Mother’s Driveway

BY REBECCA LEBER/Think Progress

This weekend, deputies from Escambia County, Florida shot an unarmed man who went to grab cigarettes from the car parked in the driveway of his mother’s home. A neighbor called police at 2 a.m. because he suspected 60-year-old Roy Middleton was stealing the car. Things quickly escalated when two deputies arrived and ordered Middleton to “get your hands where I can see them,” the Pensacola News Journal reports:

[Middleton] said he initially thought it was a neighbor joking with him, but when he turned his head he saw deputies standing halfway down his driveway.

He said he backed out of the vehicle with his hands raised, but when he turned to face the deputies, they immediately opened fire.

“It was like a firing squad,” he said. “Bullets were flying everywhere.”

The deputies reportedly fired about seven shots at the unarmed man; Middleton was shot in the leg, and another five bullet holes hit the car and the side of house.

With the Trayvon Martin case still a fresh memory for another Florida county, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the State Attorney’s office are now investigating the incident. For now, the involved officers are on paid administrative leave.

UPDATE

Sheriff David Morgan told press Monday afternoon the police officers reported the man “lunged out of a vehicle and spun toward them.” The gun shots shattered bones in Middleton’s left thigh, which “will require the insertion of a metal rod.”