A Florida man was shot and killed earlier last week during a reverse sting operation in which undercover police attempted to sell narcotics to unsuspecting passersby and arrested those who took the bait.
A report from the Florida Times-Union indicates that 48-year-old Andrew Anthony Williams was gunned down by Putnam County Sheriff’s deputies the night of Friday March 6, when he attempted to hightail it out of the situation after being informed that he had just purchased dope from a cop.
Sheriff’s deputies posing as drug dealers had already conned 10 other people into taking up accommodations at the county jail by the time they encountered Williams later in the evening. However, unlike the others, Williams made the decision to mash on the gas in order to avoid being caught in the underhanded scam.
His getaway was unsuccessful, which is mainly attributed to the fact that he struck a tree while fishtailing out of the drug sting. A report from the Sheriff’s office said that’s when Williams “backed up toward the deputies, then put the vehicle into drive and turned toward some of them.” Feeling threatened, four deputies showered Williams’s vehicle with bullets.
However, other accounts of the botched drug bust reveals that Williams may have only hit the tree in order to avoid running over several officers. In the end, the result is the same: Williams was killed in the name of drugs he had in his possession only because cops sold it to him, and he was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Williams was hit by so much gunfire that the only figure any news source has managed to articulate has been that he was shot “an unknown number of times.”
The incident was a three-ring circus from the beginning. Not only were deputies using a shakedown tactic that has spawned a great deal of controversy throughout the years, but they were apparently firing rounds at everything that moved. The sheriff’s report reveals that a deputy was wounded by gunfire during the incident, but not by Williams’ shooting at him. The injury was the result of the carelessness of another officer.
It is important to remember that no one would have been injured or killed in this incident had it not been for police employing undercover shakedown tactics to make petty drug arrests. It is apparent now that the drug war is a plague on the social order, and has truly become the representation of anarchy in the United States.
