Broken Beyond Repair

My brother is undergoing chemo treatment for cancer and is unable to tolerate a physical altercation because the chemo has weakened him enough that he would not survive a violent encounter. He is also a business owner, and even does business with the city and the police department. The cops in the smallish town know him for the most part, as he has been doing business there for about 30 years.

For 25 of those years, he has owned a distribution center that is contained in a large building. The main warehouse and his offices take up most of the building. He leases out several smaller spaces that are contained in the building and uses one of the spaces as a gym that is available for his own and his employees’ use. He also has a parking lot in front of the building, and there is a fenced in area where his delivery vehicles are parked at night. There are a pile of security cameras covering every square foot of the place.

The nature of his business is that he frequently has large amounts of cash on the property, sometimes as much as $25,000. His delivery drivers have been robbed a few times, twice at gunpoint. There is an armored car that comes by to pick up the cash on a regular basis, but because of the large amounts of cash, my brother is armed while at work, and he allows his office staff to carry firearms if they have a CCW. My mother used to be his manager, and she carried a gun at work. Yes, we really are a gun owning family. My sister is the only one of us that doesn’t routinely carry a gun.

(On a side note, he once had to make a large deposit, and I helped him out by riding literal shotgun in the back of the van that was carrying the cash. I was armed with a 12ga and a 9mm handgun. We weren’t robbed.)

One of his employees was working late. A pair of vagrants (1 male, 1 female) approached the employee while he was inside of the fenced area and asked for a handout. The employee refused, and the male vagrant responded by saying, “You are lucky that I asked. I usually just take what I want.” The employee called my brother and told him about it, and my brother called the police. When the police arrived, my brother gave the police a copy of security camera video. The police told him that they didn’t know who the pair were, but stated that they would investigate. It turns out that they were lying on both counts.

A week later, my brother was inside the onsite gym and heard a noise outside. He grabbed his Sig 365 and went to investigate. He found the pair outside of the building, but inside of the fenced in part of the property. When they were told to leave, the male of the pair immediately put his hands into a backpack that was at his feet. My brother, who was on the phone with 911, immediately drew his weapon and screamed at him, “Let me see your hands or I will shoot you.” The pair ran off.

When the cops arrived, they made contact with the pair of vagrants just a block away. They told the police that they were in fear for their lives, and that my brother threatened to kill them. One of the cops even admitted to my son that, if the officer had been faced with the same events, the vagrant would have gotten shot. The police began questioning my brother. A friend of his from the police department called him and warned him that the cops were going to try and flip it on him to make him look like the bad guy. It turns out that there was much more to the story. More on that at the end of this post.

When the detective arrived, he read my brother his rights, and that was when my brother told them he didn’t want to answer any questions without an attorney present. It was at that point that the detective told him to put his hands behind his back and arrested him for aggravated battery and intent to cause serious bodily harm. In the arrest report, the detective used my brother’s earlier statements from before his rights were read to him and also the fact that he refused to answer questions without an attorney once he was Mirandized as the reasons for probable cause to make the arrest. That is a blatant violation of my brother’s Constitutional Rights. You have a right to both remain silent, and to have an attorney present while being questioned, and exercising those rights can’t be used against you.

There is, as I said earlier, more to the story. The pair of vagrants were well known to the local cops. They are both known drug users. Even though my brother was not aware of it, they both have multiple felony convictions for burglary, possession of burglary tools, and drug possession (meth), as well as many more arrests that didn’t result in convictions. However, the cops certainly knew them and were lying about not being able to identify them, because the pair of them is being used by the police as confidential informants. This is a case of the police were trying to shield their informants for the attempted robbery from the week before. That is also important.

Pointing a firearm at someone is, under Florida law, NOT lethal force. Especially when they are on your property and in the process of committing a felony, and you (the property owner) have reason to believe that they are willing to commit violence AND are making furtive movements as if to retrieve a weapon.

My brother hired a good attorney, and they didn’t have a single hearing, with the exception of his arraignment. The attorney made her discovery request and demanded all information in the possession of the police, even a copy of the records of the vagant/informants. The police refused. Taking all of the facts into account, the state attorney decided to enter a notice of nolle prosequi.

This cost my brother three months of worry AND about $3,000 in legal fees. He also lost his concealed weapons permit, which was automatically revoked when he was arrested. His insurance company cancelled his company’s insurance policy because he was facing felony charges, and now he has a criminal record, which will cost him more money in the form of increased insurance fees for the foreseeable future.

The lawyer told him that she can get the arrest expunged from his record, but it will cost him another 5 large, and will take about a year. Meanwhile, the druggie douchebags have been arrested two more times since that night.

Tell me again that our legal system isn’t broken and the cops are mostly good guys. As a side note, my sister and I have had T-shirts made with my brother’s mugshot on them. We are going to be wearing them at Christmas dinner.