Bodycam video showed an officer-involved shooting in February, when Officer Benjamin McEwan shot Michael Youmans after a chase ended on Gossett Street. | JSO
Published on March 12, 2025 at 5:45 pm
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The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is investigating its own after three officer-involved shootings in as many days left one man dead on Wednesday, a woman critically injured on Tuesday night, and a truck shot up on Monday.
The trio bring the number of officer-involved shootings in Jacksonville to four midway through March, after a shooting in February left a man injured, police said.
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The latest incident saw a man fire at the officer who pulled him over on a Northside road. That driver died after the officer shot back, police said. JSO Chief Allen Parker said Wednesday it has been “a rough couple of days for us.”
“Luckily our officers are OK, your officers are OK,” Parker said at the scene of Wednesday’s shooting. “Every one of these is an individual incident. They all have different criteria driving them. The suspect has a say in these things. This should have never happened. It was a traffic stop. Why does he shoot at a police officer? It makes no sense. He didn’t have to do that.”
The sheriff’s office‘s public-facing police shooting incident tracker lags behind the events. As of Wednesday evening, the last incident listed was the Feb. 11 shooting on Gossett Street, when Michael Youmans was shot by Officer Benjamin McEwan after a traffic stop turned into a chase. Youmans, 29, was injured in the shooting, then arrested.
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The first of this week’s incidents began at about 4 p.m. on Monday, when a 70-year-old truck driver headed to Cape Coral came into contact with off-duty JSO Lt. Marc Crawford on I-95 South near Atlantic Boulevard, Parker said. Police didn’t specify what kind of “contact” the truck had with the lieutenant’s car, or what led up to what happened next. Crawford got out of his car and pulled his gun.
“He fired four rounds into the truck,” Parker said. “The driver was not hurt, wasn’t injured or anything. The round went into, kind of, the front side where the engine is.”
The truck driver did not have a weapon “that we know of,” police said on Wednesday. It was Lt. Crawford’s fourth shooting in his 21-year police career.
Then came the Tuesday night incident that left a 53-year-old woman seriously injured after she fired her gun at officers outside a home off Yellow Bluff Road on the Northside.
Officers were called to the home just before midnight after a man found his wife involved in an apparent suicide attempt, police said.
“She came out with the gun, raised it, and actually exchanged gunfire with the officers. So she fired three or four times,” Parker said.
Six officers shot at the woman, who was in critical condition after being hit several times, police say. None of the officers (Brendon Johns, Anthony Mariotti, Zachary Poole, Jordan Gay, Daniel Veres and Maurice Brown) was injured.
Then came Wednesday’s incident at about 9 a.m. during a traffic deployment near Trout River Boulevard and Ribault Scenic Highway in Northwest Jacksonville, the Sheriff’s Office says.
When Officer A.C. Gaulding signaled for a driver to pull over, the man pulled into a driveway and started getting out of his car, Parker said. Gaulding commanded him to stay put, but the unidentified driver leaned out of his parked vehicle and began shooting at the officer, who returned fire and hit the suspect multiple times, killing him. The officer was shot in his left foot.
“This guy had a bulletproof vest, had bad intentions,” Waters said. “This guy had a drum magazine inside that rifle; he had bad intentions. He had another pistol on the seat of his car. So I don’t know what he was going to do; I don’t know what his plans were; but apparently and thankfully, our officer was able to stop him.”
Gaulding is a 15-year department veteran, and this was his first officer-involved shooting, police say.
Any officer shooting is investigated by the State Attorney’s Office to determine if laws were broken by the officer in the shootings.
The Sheriff’s Office’s Response To Resistance Board also interviews officers and those who investigated the shooting to determine whether department rules were violated and if any disciplinary measures are required.
