It was a “very violent scene,” according to Sheriff Peyton C. Grinnel of Lake County in Florida, when talking about an “ambush” shooting inside a home in Eustis where a sheriff’s deputy was killed. The victim has not been identified publicly yet, and two other deputies were wounded—one was in critical condition and underwent surgery and the other wounded in the shoulder. They were immediately taken to hospitals, but the first was pronounced dead at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning.
From the dynamics of the shooting, it seems that the suspects had called the authorities specifically to hurt them.
On Friday night, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office received a call about a disturbance in the Orlando Hills neighborhood around 8 p.m. Then, while authorities were investigating this first case, unrelated to the shooting that later happened last night, they received another alert coming from a house located only a few miles away. When they got to the place, they “saw what appeared to be the back door kicked in, and they could hear a lot of commotion going on inside of that home,” Sheriff Grinnell reported during a news conference. Entering the house by the backyard, deputies were welcomed with gunfire and one of them was wounded. He was trapped there, but a second officer who was with him managed to escape. “It is just horrific when you have one of your own inside of a home and you can’t get to him,” Sheriff Grinnell added. Additional deputies intervened, forming a rescue team “to get back in,” but they were met with a “hail of gunfire.”
When authorities finally got inside the house and the shooting was over, they found two people dead and a third person was “transported to hospital.” Their identities have not been revealed yet, but they are considered the suspects, according to Sheriff Grinnell.
Sheriff Grinnell reported that there had been previous calls to the house regarding complaints about animals, but nothing so worrisome or serious that would have suggested a violent crime.
As Sheriff Grinnell recalls, “it was February 2005 the last time we lost a Deputy Sheriff in Lake County.”
