Was this officer-involved shooting a crime? The Keys’ state attorney will decide
The Monroe County State Attorney’s Office will decide whether a rare officer-involved shooting last October in the Florida Keys was a crime.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has delivered its report on the shooting, which left a man wounded by gunfire, to prosecutors.
“It will be a lengthy review,” said Larry Kahn, the office’s spokesman on Thursday. We just received the FDLE report this morning and are awaiting the sheriff’s office report.” The FDLE report has not been made public.
Adam Bruce Bounds, 42, was shot by the officer on board his houseboat in Cow Key Channel in Key West on Oct. 15, 2019, during a police welfare check that began after he called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in Tallahassee, police said.
He was shot in the hip and arm, according to dispatch records.
The state attorney’s office review is a matter of procedure, said Gretl Plessinger, an FDLE spokeswoman.
“We always give our cases to the state attorneys,” Plessinger said. “It’s standard practice statewide. Our role is to investigate to determine what happened and then we provide cases to the state attorney’s office for review.”
Bounds called FWC over having missed a court date for owning a derelict vessel, Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay said during an interview with U.S. 1 Radio.
While on the phone to Tallahassee, Bounds threatened suicide, and the local FWC was contacted. They went out with sheriff’s deputies to check on him.
Bounds had gasoline with him and indicated he would light himself on fire and that’s when officers acted, worrying that Bounds was about to set off an explosion, Ramsay said.
Bound says he has been harassed by law enforcement.
“The last two years in the Keys has been nothing less than harassment from FWC at every turn,” he posted on his Facebook page in 2019 before the shooting. “It’s even went to the point to where they boarded my boat and searched it when I was not there.”
After the shooting, Bounds posted, “Cowboys are way out of control and they need to be put on a leash a very short leash.”
This story was originally published March 12, 2020 at 3:16 PM with the headline "Was this officer-involved shooting a crime? The Keys’ state attorney will decide."
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