A Florida sheriff’s deputy was killed and two other deputies were wounded while attempting to reach the first officer in what police called an ambush shooting inside a home.
The three deputies were shot at a house in Eustis, Florida, on Friday night, Peyton Grinnell, the Lake county sheriff, said during a news conference at the scene.
Two suspects were killed and a third was wounded when police stormed the home in an attempt to retrieve a deputy who had been shot and was trapped inside, Grinnell said.
Police received a report of a disturbance around 8pm local time. Two deputies went a few houses down the street from the caller and found a door that appeared to have been kicked in.
“When the deputies entered the home, there was a lot of gunfire,” Grinnell said.
One deputy was shot and trapped inside while the other retreated. More officers arrived and formed a team to enter the house and retrieve the deputy, but were met with “a hail of gunfire” and another deputy was struck, Grinnell said.
The male deputy who was the first shot and trapped inside did not survive, he said.
The second deputy sustained a shoulder wound and was in stable condition. A third deputy was hit in the armpit and the groin and stomach area multiple times and was undergoing surgery, said Grinnell, who did not immediately identify the officers involved.
“Just horrific when you have one of your own inside of a home and you can’t get to him,” Grinnell said, explaining that Swat team members were involved in re-entering the house in Eustis, about 37 miles (59km) north-west of Orlando.
“We have equipment for that and that’s the reason we have this equipment, and we tore the home apart to get in there so we could get that deputy out of there,” Grinnell said. “It was a chaotic scene from the start until the end.”
Two suspects were found dead when the Swat team entered the house and a third was transported to a hospital, Grinnell said.
There was no history of violent crime at the home and nothing to indicate the situation would be dangerous, he said.
“They were ambushed,” Grinnell said.
