Posted on 05/08/2024 5:20:05 AM PDT by V_TWIN
PUTNAM COUNTY, Fla. – A man who is accused of trying to speed away from Putnam County deputies before he crashed into a utility pole was arrested early Monday morning on drug and gun charges.
According to the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, the 27-year-old Palatka man was first seen in an SUV on Gillis Street driving slowly with his lights off. When deputies tried to pull him over, he sped off, deputies said.
The man reached speeds of 100 mph, deputies said, before he crashed into the concrete pole in front of ABC Liquor near Highway 17 and State Road 100.
The man then ran away from the SUV, and according to deputies, he briefly had an AR-15-style rifle in his hands as he ran toward the back of the liquor store.
A deputy said he drove across the parking lot while the man ran away and continued to yell at the man to get on the ground, according to an arrest report.
“As I got closer to the subject, I was able to utilize my TASER out of the window of my patrol car and effectively strike the subject with the probes of the cartridge in the back and leg area. The subject stumbled and fell and as I exited my vehicle to take him into custody, he jumped back to his feet to continue running. At this point I immediately tackled him to the ground,” the deputy wrote.
The man was arrested and taken to a local hospital to get checked out for his injuries.
He now faces several charges, including fleeing police, use or display of a firearm during a felony and misdemeanor charges of resisting an officer without violence, drug equipment possession and marijuana distribution.
Palatka is an old Florida logging town on the St. Johns river — and near enough Jacksonville for big city problems to seep into the local community. Indeed, the thinly-inhabited wooded rural acreage around Palatka is well-suited to marijuana grow operations and small meth labs.
Taser range is relatively short—maybe 25 feet.
That takes a lot of guts. While you are drawing and aiming a Taser (and we’ve seen how they don’t always work) the bad guy has a rifle. Whoa.
??????
“Palatka is an old Florida logging town on the St. Johns river — and near enough Jacksonville for big city problems to seep into the local community. Indeed, the thinly-inhabited wooded rural acreage around Palatka is well-suited to marijuana grow operations and small meth labs.”
Not even close. Never a logging town, but there was an old cypress mill for processing of lumber, and Georgia Pacific has a pulp, paper, and plywood operation there that employs many people; the river has long been used for transportation of people and goods. And suitable for MJ and Meth? It’s heavily swampy along the river and heavily farmed nearby, and the locals don’t take kindly to strangers doing strange things in strange places.
Yeh, the main thing in Palatka is the pulp mill. My dad used to work for Honeywell and they had the controls there. My Dad used to go down there occasionally for maintenance and service calls. In summer I rode down there a couple of times.
Its rural redneck. Probably thick with grow operations now. So is the Gainesville area and Melrose. Melrose sensamilla used to be the best weed around. 😉
“Yeh, the main thing in Palatka is the pulp mill.”
Everyone has family working at the pulp mill. That mill has supported entire families for at least three generations. My hubby has extended family from near Palatka and many of them have worked at the mill. Those that didn’t work at the mill worked mining peat.
As the county chamber of commerce explains " . . . Palatka and the surrounding area's prosperity was largely due to the use of the St. Johns River and its tributaries. Citrus and timber were shipped worldwide from Palatka . . . " As it happened, citrus and tourism shifted south as Florida developed, leaving timber and light manufacturing. Georgia-Pacific is Palatka's largest private employer today.
My knowledge of the local criminal element in Palatka and environs comes from the attorney I helped get elected as a Republican state representative some years ago. As he explained, the locals worried about keeping drugs out of their schools and away from their kids and were much less concerned with those who supplied illegal substances to the Jacksonville market.
In the attorney's telling, his nominal Democratic opponent's references to the Fourth Amendment and "rural privacy" reflected the concerns of the local marijuana and meth business. His business cards and declared income as a "timber broker" were partly legitimate but were likely also a cover and a way to explain illicit earnings to the IRS. Since law abiding locals knew the game, the GOP attorney expected to win easily -- and did.
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