The tragic case of a Sheriff’s Deputy assasinating an innocent American in the Air Force has produced a statement that begs how the Sheriff will overhaul the entire system.

SHALIMAR, Fla. (May 31, 2024) – The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) has terminated Deputy Eddie Duran following the completion of an administrative internal affairs investigation into the death of Roger Fortson on May 3. The administrative investigation determined the deputy’s use of deadly force was not objectively reasonable and therefore violated agency policy.

The OCSO administrative internal affairs investigation, opened immediately after the shooting, is separate from the active criminal investigation that remains ongoing with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Notably the Sheriff’s office has boiled the assassination down to a simple statement.

“This tragic incident should have never occurred,” said Okaloosa County Sheriff Eric Aden. “The objective facts do not support the use of deadly force as an appropriate response to Mr. Fortson’s actions. Mr. Fortson did not commit any crime. By all accounts, he was an exceptional airman and individual.”

So why then did Aden’s team use such excessive force to assassinate “an exceptional airman”? An airman. A specialist, trained professional, for high risk situations demanding clear thought and purposeful action.

To put this in perspective, look at another recent incident involving OCSO. Have you ever heard the sound of an acorn falling on top of your car? Can you imagine that?

Two OCSO deputies bizarrely claimed that they heard gunfire and started shooting at their own car despite absolutely zero actual threat, and with risk of hitting the suspect they had just searched, handcuffed and put in that car.

Now imagine barrel rolls, yelling “I’m hit” and dumping a magazine into your own police car after… SQUIRREL.

Really. The video of these two is a keystone kops komedy. They even thought the sound of an acorn hitting a car roof meant that they were “hit” and they then fantasized about their vest stopping a bullet. They thought they were about to die. They actually were just scared out of their mind in the middle of the day by a squirrel.

“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 said.

Sheriff Aden’s justification of outrageously unprofessional staff behavior, attributing it to their absolutely false and unjustified beliefs in an imminent danger, underscores systematic deep-seated anxiety and lack of proper judgment under his watch. OCSO created dangerous conditions for unnecessary violence and threats to society.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that this new investigation report reveals the Sheriff’s office has a culture of “shoot first to kill innocent people and ask questions later.”

According to the internal affairs report, Duran told investigators that when Fortson opened the door, he saw aggression in the airman’s eyes. He said he fired because, “I’m standing there thinking I’m about to get shot, I’m about to die.

“It is him or me at this point and I need to, I need to act as opposed to react,” he told investigators.

Acorn eyes?

Absurd. Duran was literally reacting to a call. He arrived, banged on the wrong door and then killed an innocent man for no reason.

He was reacting extremely unprofessionally. Why was he even there, reacting in the first place? Apparently it was to unload his gun, perform extra-judicial assassination of someone he fraudulently had been trained to see as a threat.

Fortson, who had no criminal record, lived alone and had no guests that afternoon. He was on a video call with his girlfriend, who told investigators they had not been arguing. She said Fortson was playing a video game.

An apartment complex manager called the sheriff’s office at 4:24 p.m. and Duran arrived three minutes later. He met the manager in the parking lot and she directed him to Fortson’s fourth-floor apartment, telling him there are frequent arguments, body camera video shows.

However, 911 records show deputies had never been called to Fortson’s apartment previously but they had been called to a nearby unit 10 times in the previous eight months, including once for a domestic disturbance.

Duran and Foreman couldn’t have been farther apart in background and training. A trigger-happy and clumsy deputy, who Sheriff Aden deployed despite obviously unprepared and overwhelmed with fear, unloaded his gun without justification into a calm, smart and quiet professional.

Foreman served as a special missions aviator on the AC-130J Ghostrider with the 4th Special Operations Squadron. He had earned the Air Medal with combat device.

Remember the “free fire zones” of Vietnam? That’s life in Florida now, apparently, under the OCSO.

Related area news:

…an investigative report linked two city officers with the secret hate society that once was violently active in the area. […] The Florida Department of Law Enforcement sent the police chief a report linking the officers to the Klan based on information from the FBI.

And also related, clumsy unprofessional American law enforcement in targeted assassination of Black men in the military has been a known long-time problem.

In brief, Williams was a black 21-year old man in May 1960 (serving as a U.S. Army Paratrooper) when two white police officers apparently pulled him into a County jail at night where he was beaten to death by police clubs.

Don’t underestimate Duran’s statement of “him or me at this point and I need to act” or Aden’s own racist-sounding statement of “totality of circumstances surrounding this fear” as anything less than politically motivated.

• Brookings: A crisis within a crisis: Police killings of Black emerging adults
• NIH: Why Police Kill Black Males with Impunity
• Harvard: …police killings of Black men and the history and cognitive forces behind racial bigotry and violence…

Last year Microsoft was blamed for a weakness that enabled Russia to attack Germany, including systems for a centrist political party.

In that case, the government blamed a Russian military intelligence unit for orchestrating the hack and summoned a high-ranking Russian diplomat to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. That hack also targeted German companies in areas like logistics, defense, aerospace and IT services sectors. The SPD later said that a security vulnerability, not identified at the time, in Microsoft software had enabled the hack.

A few days ago, as European elections are coming, another centrist German political party was hacked.

The incident comes almost exactly one week ahead of the European Parliament elections, with polling day in Germany on June 9 as it is in the majority of EU member states.

“The BfV will issue a warning to all [political] parties in the German Bundestag [parliament] regarding the current attack,” the Interior Ministry said. “Our security agencies have intensified all protective measures against digital and hybrid threats and are informing people about the dangers.”

Clearly being in the center, a moderate, means targeting by those who want to force extremism. Hard to hold the middle when Russia is constantly looking for means to help extremist parties.

Emergency responders in Maryland say a Tesla has abruptly crossed or “veered” into the path of an oncoming motorcycle, killing the rider.

Police said officers responded to the intersection of University Boulevard and Kerwin Road just after midnight for reports of a collision between a white 2023 Tesla Model 3 and a black and green Kawasaki motorcycle.

The driver of the motorcycle, Antonio Martinez Gamez, 28, of Silver Spring, was pronounced dead at the scene, according to a news release.

Police said a preliminary investigation found Martinez Gamez’s motorcycle had been heading eastbound on University Boulevard toward Kerwin Road just before the crash. At the same time, the Tesla driver heading north on Kerwin Road turned left onto University Boulevard.

Police said Martinez Gamez “tried to avoid the car, but ultimately struck the driver side of the Tesla.”

Related: Tesla kills a lot of motorcyclists.

For a decade now I have called out very vocally the catastrophically poor engineering culture of Tesla, which has predictably been leading to an explosion of defects and technical debt. In a 2016 security confernce keynote (after just the second Tesla “driverless” fatality) I called them out as a looming Titanic problem.

Unfortunately my warnings didn’t land, and the CEO continued unrestrained. A failure of the industry to self-regulate, or even the government to step in and prevent obvious public harms (e.g. Tesla corrupted the 2016 White House and NHTSA), brings us to where we are today.

There has been a documented lack of quality controls, let alone any real evidence of morality or ethics in Tesla, required for successful engineering. This is how and why it was so easy to see in 2016 and why it has very easily predictable disasterous results. Tests of Tesla “driverless” that I personally was involved with back then very quickly revealed high risk of catastrophy. Many could describe the fraud. But who didn’t listen?

The discussion now is shifting away from esoterism of safety expertise and obscure security conferences, necessarily moving now to law offices, as the big questions about civil and even criminal code enforcement come into focus for the general public.

Notably Elon Musk is engaged in noisy propagandist defense tactics, seemingly very worried about his exploding legal troubles and accountability for his huge mistakes. He’s been on his social media soapbox lately fretting that prosecution of Americans by a jury might lead to conviction of criminals, even though that’s exactly what’s supposed to protect society from people like him.

In fact we have seen dozens of people unnecessarily killed by Tesla in what amounts to be a long-running advance fee fraud scheme based on false “safety” claims about future technology that never arrives. Tesla’s very aggressively positioned legal team meanwhile has very quickly settled two high profile death cases, in an obvious hush and hide strategy.

Take just one example of the trend. Elon Musk overruled safety experts and forced his engineers to remove radar from “driverless” road robots, while also claiming a concern for “safety”. The sad result, from May 2021 to May 2024, was these Tesla robots more than doubled their death toll. Think about the kind of robot company that in five years (2016-2021) already had killed more people than in the whole prior history of robots, and then it removed safety sensors…. Is that not criminal?

Paying the families of victims to stay silent isn’t going to scale well.

I mean imagine the Titanic CEO looking at his ship sunk by an iceberg, and then demanding ships remove telescopes to see even less. Are experts supposed to be surprised to see double the death toll?

The logic supposedly floated by Tesla management about their safety strategy sounds so dumb as to be almost unbelievable (paraphrasing): “humans see with only four highly sophisticated light and sound sensors (eyes and ears) so why can’t we quickly and cheaply replace humans with two cheap video cameras and some rushed software?”

As someone who helped support early development at Space Applications of GPS and modern HUD technology to solve for low-altitide low-visibility transit and prevent further high-cost catastrophes (e.g. Operation Eagle Claw brownout)… the Tesla “know-nothing” PR stunts to trick the public have been for me like a decade of nails on chalkboard.

If I stick two plastic googly-eyes on a car hood and call it “Alice the driverless car” I would be tapping into and manipulating the same human positive belief system that Tesla has been using for its fraud. Social engineering hacks aren’t rocket science, unfortunately. And worse, the counter-measures against advance fee fraud attacks are very difficult, as I’ve discussed here since 2005.

Now, after I recently helped document the constant exodus of top lawyers from Tesla following an exodus of top engineers, I noticed that the lawsuits are piling up as fast or faster than the technical debt and deaths.

Expect 2024 to go up, way up.

A rising curve of legal trouble probably looks sadly familiar to regular readers of this blog, who monitor tesladeaths.com along with me. Here’s the chilling reminder again that in 2016 we could have done more and prevented hundreds of unnecessary deaths.