Elderly Man Dies In Gunfire Exchange With Undercover Officers

News4Jax.com ^ | January 28th, 2007 | Staff

[FreedomCalls]

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- An elderly man is dead and two Jacksonville Sheriff's Office detectives are on administrative leave after an undercover narcotics investigation ended in gunfire late Saturday.

According to the JSO, detectives Donald Maynard and James Narcisse had been working undercover for about three hours in the 2300 block of Westmont Street when 80-year-old Isaac Singletary approached them with a gun just before 6 p.m.

The officers said they ordered the man to put down the gun. However, Singletary did not drop his weapon and gunshots were exchanged.

Singletary was shot several times. Paramedics rushed him to Shands-Jacksonville Medical Center, where he died.

Less than 24 hours after the fatal police shooting left his uncle dead, Gary Evans told Channel 4 he's mad.

"Eighty-years-old, and they had to shoot him twice or more in order to subdue him. I'm very upset about it," Evans said.

He said his uncle was territorial and mad about the drugs on his street, and would often take his gun and try to scare the drug dealers away.

On Saturday, things went terribly wrong.

"My uncle asked the officer, which he didn't know at the time he was a police officer, to leave his property and he didn't," Evans said.

Neighbors told Channel 4 that Singletary was very protective of his property.

"You don't expect somebody to come pointing a gun at you, and once they do that, the officers will tell them to drop the gun," JSO Chief Dwain Senterfitt said. "We're still investigating what statements were made, but obviously, at that point, the officers' lives were in danger."

Police said they are still trying to figure out if the undercover officers had time to tell Singletary they were undercover officers. They said the detectives had to hid behind a tree to avoid being shot by Singletary.

According to police, the officers had been in the neighborhood since about 2:45 p.m., and had made five drug-related arrests.

"In the course of our undercover activity and making several arrests in this neighborhood, a man we now know to be a resident of that area, Mr. Isaac Singletary, was shot by officers," said Director of Investigations and Homeland Security Micheal Edwards.

Saturday's shooting was the third JSO-involved shooting in three weeks. Unlike last week's case at the Sable Palm Apartments, there is no dispute whether Singletary had a gun.

"There was a confrontation between them and an exchange of gunfire," Edwards said.

However, the question of who fired the first shot remains unanswered.

"He shot at my uncle first. He was the first one to shoot, and my uncle returned fire," Evans said.

"As you know, our investigation into any shooting must be thorough and methodical. At this time, there's a limited amount of information we can share," Edwards said.

As the details of the shooting are being hashed out, scared neighbors and sad family members remember Singletary.

"I looked in his eyes I saw his pain. I felt the pain for him. He never bothered anybody. He's never done anything to anybody. He didn't want anybody in his yard," said neighbor Antionette Douglas.

[Razz Barry]

In spite of all of the nonsense on the earlier part of the thread, still I felt that the "libertarian" retards were not truly stepping up to the plate. No longer. Excelsior!

How long have you worked in law enforcement?

[TKDietz]

"I think most marijuana is either grown inside the US or imported from Canada actually. I don't think Coca or Poppy grows very well in the Mexican climate."

Coca is not grown in Mexico. Opium poppy fields are grown there and Mexico is a major heroin producer. Our government at least seems to think a huge portion of the marijuana consumed in this country is also grown in Mexico, and THC potency numbers our government collects really make it doubtful that most marijuana on the market in this country is high grade marijuana grown in Canada or the United States. Average THC levels of all marijuana seized in this country are actually pretty low, less than 6%, and that's when they include all the super potent stuff they seize. That grown in Canada is predominantly indoor grown high powered stuff. From what I've read it averages in the neighborhood of 15% THC and some samples they've found are a good bit stronger than that. "Commercial grade" marijuana tends to be seedy compressed pot associated with Mexico. According to our government's data on potency of marijuana they seize "commercial grade" marijuana averages around 5% THC, considerably lower than high powered indoor grown sinsemilla or even the less potent outdoor grown sinsemilla grown here or in Canada, and only a little bit lower than the average of all marijuana seized, which indicates to me that the lion's share of that seized is in the "commercial grade" category. Mostly the commercial grade marijuana is grown in Mexico, but a portion of that that makes it here through Mexico is grown in other parts of Latin America or the Caribbean.

Most drugs come up here through Mexico, and Mexican organized crime are increasingly controlling wholesale distribution networks for drugs within this country. Mexico is a drug producing nation that happens to be the only other nation on our southern border. Several other Latin American countries also produce a lot of drugs and for the most part those drugs that make it here come up through the Mexican bottleneck and are smuggled into this country by Mexicans who control the smuggling routes.

I work as a public defender in a town on a major interstate highway and I've handled thousands of pounds worth of marijuana cases over the years where "drug mules" have been stopped carrying large loads of pot. It's always seedy compressed Mexican pot. I do not live in a border state and I would imagine that if I worked somewhere near the Canadian border I'd see some Canadian marijuana, but I doubt there are as many loads and I doubt the average weight of the loads is as high as it is with the cheapo seedy Mexican brickweed. You can easily fit two or three hundred pounds of highly compressed marijuana in the trunk of a car, but that weight in fluffy buds would take up considerably more volume. They don't "brick up" high priced marijuana because that would kill the value of the product.

I haven't looked at that numbers recently but I know our customs officers and law enforcement seize well over a thousand tons of marijuana coming from Mexico every year. Much of that grown in Canada is destined for the United States but still it is believed that Canadian marijuana makes up less than 5% of the marijuana found on U.S. markets. I couldn't say off the top of my head what the government estimate is on how much of the marijuana sold here comes from Mexico, but I think it's more than half. These estimates are really just educated guesses though and they vary considerably. The last government supply estimate I read on the amount of marijuana available on the market here in this country in a year was between 12,000 and 25,000 metric tons. I suppose it's pretty hard to come up with exact estimates when the product is illegal and all production and distribution is done in secret.