JAD ABUMRAD: Before we get going, just a quick warning. This podcast contains some descriptions of graphic violence and also some strong language. Be warned.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

BEN MONTGOMERY: Look, so it's hard to kill another human being anymore, right? Our fangs have retreated. Our hands are weak. But as we've lost this ability to kill each other, we've gained an ability to read each other's tone of voice and facial expression. And often what's missing in these interactions is one side of that equation, whether it's the police not seeing somebody because they're running through an alley with their gun drawn and it's dark, or shining a flashlight in someone's face where that person can't see the officer's expression, there's some mask, there's some breakdown in that equation that handicaps us from a normal human interaction.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today we are once again taking a deep dive into Tampa Bay Times reporter Ben Montgomery's mountain of data about police shootings in Florida.

BEN MONTGOMERY: So to refresh your memory, from—so we've tried to account for every single police shooting from January 1 of 2009 to December 31 of 2014.

JAD: Just to remind you, Ben and his team at the Tampa Bay Times collected data from 828 police shootings. And there's all kinds of stories that you can tell about this data. Last week, we looked at police training and race and racism. And obviously, there's so much more that can and should be said about all that.

ROBERT: But this week, we're going to go in a very different direction. Maybe, Matt, you just want to set this up for us.

MATT KIELTY: Yeah. So we want to tell this story because it actually plays out this idea that Ben just mentioned, that there's a sort of communication breakdown that happens. And it does it in a very particular way, because when one of these cases comes before a court, the court, more often than not, will only look at the moment that the cop involved in the shooting pulled their trigger. You don't consider any other moment. It's only the objective facts on the ground of the moment the officer applies force. So the thing that we found compelling about this story is that in this case, you can actually see, in kind of a rare instance, you can step in and see all the little moments that lead up to that moment, and you realize how complicated these interactions get. So this particular story, it's a story about a white couple, Andrea and Rick Sheldon. And we're actually gonna start the story with Rick.

MATT: So on one of my trips to Florida, Ben and I drove to the northeast corner of the state, up near Jacksonville, to Rick's place. It's sort of like the wilds of Florida.

MATT: Hey, sir.

RICK SHELDON: Hey, how you doing?

MATT: Matt Kielty.

RICK SHELDON: Nice to meet you.

MATT: Nice to meet you.

MATT: Like, sort of off the grid wild.

MATT: Oh, that's a big bird back there. What all do you have on the property?

RICK SHELDON: Pretty much a little bit of everything.

MATT: He collects rainwater in barrels. He's got ...

RICK SHELDON: Potatoes, tomatoes, squash.

MATT: These organic gardens.

RICK SHELDON: Ducks, goats.

MATT: A lot of animals.

RICK SHELDON: Turkeys.

MATT: Big turkeys. Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh!

MATT: A couple dogs in the house.

MATT: Oh, you're so excited! All right, I'm gonna hit stop on this and replace the battery.

MATT: Eventually, we all sit down in Rick's living room. Rick sat cross-legged on the couch.

MATT: Rick, I was just wondering if we could ...

MATT: I pulled up a chair across from him.

MATT: If we could talk about your case. But even backing up before everything happened, can you just tell me about your wife?

RICK SHELDON: I met Andy. She was down here visiting her mom, and we hit it off straight from the get go.

MATT: Where'd you guys meet?

RICK SHELDON: Tradewinds Lounge, downtown St. Augustine.

MATT: Is that a bar downtown?

RICK SHELDON: Yep. Yep.

MATT: What'd she look like?

RICK SHELDON: Oh, knockout. Ten. Dark, dark hair.

MATT: How tall?

RICK SHELDON: Oh, short little thing. Five foot two.

MATT: You make the first move?

RICK SHELDON: No, we kind of made the same move at the same time. And I can remember telling her, you know, we have a live burn tomorrow.

MATT: Rick was in training to be a firefighter.

RICK SHELDON: At the academy, one of our last events. And then I'd call her whenever I got done, and we'd go have dinner. She's like, "No, you're not gonna call me. You're just gonna come over." I'm like, "I'm gonna be stinky." She's like, "No, because I know that if you go back to your place, you're gonna pass out tired, and I'll never see you again. So you're just gonna come over here and take a shower." I showed up. I ate dinner, and passed out.

MATT: So that was date number one?

RICK SHELDON: Yep, pretty much.

MATT: So Rick says they just, you know, sort of connected. And so they dated for about a year.

RICK SHELDON: She moved down here, and then ...

MATT: The two of them got married.

RICK SHELDON: She went to nursing school.

MATT: Later became a hospice nurse. Rick eventually became a firefighter.

RICK SHELDON: For Jackson fire rescue.

MATT: If we were to jump ahead to the night in question, could you just, like, back up to, like, the beginning of the day and just kind of walk me through?

RICK SHELDON: Yeah, we woke up extra early.

MATT: What day is this?

RICK SHELDON: April the 15.

MATT: 2012?

RICK SHELDON: Yeah.

MATT: Okay. So you woke up.

RICK SHELDON: Yeah. We were in—at our cabin in Georgia, getting it ready, getting it all set up and whatnot. And it was gonna be our retirement place. Anyway, packed up, came home. Long drive. Long, hot drive. And we got home, you know, started unpacking the car a little bit, started doing a little bit of this, that, and other, doing a little bit of chatting, talking about dinner, having a couple of drinks, whatnot.

MATT: What happened after that?

RICK SHELDON: I don't know. We just kind of started getting grumpy at each other and getting grumpy.

MATT: Now we talked about this for a while.

MATT: I'm just wondering if you can remember just kind of any detail of what you guys were talking about.

RICK SHELDON: Um ...

MATT: And Rick didn't want to get into it.

RICK SHELDON: I'd rather not make a statement about that right now.

MATT: Just about the conversations you guys were having?

RICK SHELDON: I'd rather not make a statement about that right now.

MATT: Okay.

RICK SHELDON: All we can say, according to the police report, is that Rick and Andy got into this screaming match, and Rick says that he felt himself ...

RICK SHELDON: Shortness of breath, chest pain.

MATT: ... starting to kind of unravel.

RICK SHELDON: Loss of concentration, inability to think.

MATT: Rick says he's had problems with PTSD.

RICK SHELDON: For quite a while.

MATT: It goes back to his former job as a paramedic.

RICK SHELDON: I'm like, I can't take this. I need to walk away. Grabbed a bottle out of the refrigerator, and I got in my truck, and I went. I was like, "Okay, I'm just gonna go fishing."

MATT: Drove down this dirt road for about five miles.

RICK SHELDON: I went to the big pond down there.

MATT: But right over by the pond ...

RICK SHELDON: I was stuck.

MATT: ... his truck gets stuck in the mud.

RICK SHELDON: I was axle deep.

MATT: So he opens up this bottle of tequila and he starts drinking. He keeps drinking. Eventually, he pops some pills.

RICK SHELDON: Sleeping pills. Next thing I remember was, you know, I remember having problems. I remember being upset. I remember having my, you know, PTSD. It sucks. I remember calling my boss, going, "Hey, I need some help." And asked for help. Asked for employee assistance program help, you know, the suicide hotline.

MATT: Oh, you thought you were suicidal in that moment?

RICK SHELDON: No, I just thought I was losing it.

MATT: In what way? Is it just like—I'm just trying to ...

RICK SHELDON: Stop digging.

MATT: Yeah?

RICK SHELDON: Stop digging. You don't want to look in this head. [laughs]

MATT: It gets that bad?

RICK SHELDON: Yeah.

MATT: Um, did he say anything to you?

RICK SHELDON: I don't remember the conversation.

MATT: Okay. What happened after that?

RICK SHELDON: Next thing I know, I've got the cops calling me going, "Where are you?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Hello?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Richard?]

MATT: This is recording that phone call.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: This is Deputy Hall from the sheriff's office.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Hi, Dale. How you doing?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Hey, we're—we're trying to come out here and help you.]

MATT: It's about 11:15 at night, and the deputy tells Rick that he and a few other deputies are walking down this dirt road to Rick's place because they got in a call that Rick was possibly suicidal, that he'd gotten into a fight with his wife.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Where are you at?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: I have no idea, Bill.]

MATT: Rick tells the deputy that he got in his truck, drove a ways away.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Until I got stuck. And I opened that little flask and I've been enjoying myself.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Your wife at the house?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Is she okay? Everything all right up there at the house?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Everything's okay at the house. Just ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Domestic dispute.]

MATT: Then the deputy asks, "Well, can I get her phone number? Because we'd like to make contact with her."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Because we want to make sure everybody's safe. Because, you know, we got deputies out here and it's dark, you know, and we don't want her to think that we're somebody prowling and stuff. So when we want her to know that we're safe. So how can—how's the best way we can make contact with her?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: 823 ...]

MATT: Rick gives the deputy his home phone number.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: You writing this down?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: All right. Okay. So we're gonna—we're gonna try to make contact with her, and then I'm gonna stay on the phone with you. We're gonna try to get another deputy to call her so that we can get her to come outside.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Okay.]

MATT: And the two of them talk for about another minute.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Are you—you're not planning on harming yourself or anything, are you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: No, man.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Huh?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: No. No, I just want to leave.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: What was the last thing?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: I just want to leave.]

MATT: So at this point, the deputy is standing at the edge of Rick and Andy's driveway. Rick is still a few miles away over at his truck, when suddenly in the background of the call, you just hear ...

[gunshots]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Shots fired.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Who the hell is firing shots?]

MATT: That's Rick trying to figure out what happened.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Deputy? Crap! Deputy? Deputy?]

JAD: When we come back, we look at what happened during that phone call and the tragic game of telephone that led to it. Stay with us.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Albert in State College, Pennsylvania. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab. To get back to our story, Rick Sheldon and a deputy were on the phone. Shots were fired in the background. And then the line went dead. We pick back up with our reporter, Matt Kielty.

MATT: So what we know is while the deputy was talking to Rick, the other officers that were with the deputy had gone ahead and gone up to the house. Rick's wife Andy, heard something, came out of the house with a shotgun. The deputies say that she pointed the shotgun at one of the deputies, they opened fire, and she was shot and killed there on the front porch.

ROBERT: Did they say ...

JAD: Did they identify themselves? Did the police surprise her?

MATT: Okay. Okay. So—actually, so Ben and I were able to get all of the police dispatch recordings from that night. And if you go through these recordings, what you hear is this crazily drawn-out version of what Ben was talking about at the top of the story. The disconnect that happens between the deputies and the dispatchers and what they're thinking and hearing and seeing and what's actually happening.

MATT: Okay, so if you rewind to about 40 minutes before that shooting, the first thing that happened was Rick called his boss. Now we don't know exactly what was said in that phone call, because it wasn't recorded, but what we do know is that Rick's boss left that conversation, believing that Rick might be possibly suicidal, that there'd been a fight at the house, that Rick had some guns with him in his truck because Rick and Andy had gone camping, and that there was a gun back at the house. But anyways, the first thing that happened after that call is Rick's boss, who's a fire chief, calls fire dispatch, who calls a sheriff's dispatcher, who ropes in another ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: St. John's county sheriff's office. Can I help you?]

MATT: ... sheriff dispatcher. And what happens is all three dispatchers get on the line.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: And who is—who's out in the woods?]

MATT: Try and figure out what's going on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: His wife is.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: No, the guy is in the woods.]

MATT: Eventually, the sheriff dispatcher, this is dispatcher number three. He's just like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Okay, let me just call the chief and see if there's new information.]

MATT: "I'll call the fire chief back, try and figure this out."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: I'll take this, Joe. Thanks.]

MATT: Now right around the time that dispatcher number three is making that call, somehow another sheriff's dispatcher, a fourth dispatcher ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Welfare check.]

MATT: ... decides to put out a call for a welfare check.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Ten four.]

MATT: Basically asks a couple deputies to go to Rick's house to make sure everything's okay.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Ten four.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Advised that he is in the woods and has a handgun.]

MATT: Which is true. Rick says he had one in the back of the truck, but he says it wasn't loaded.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Ten four.]

MATT: But then things start to get more complicated, because when dispatcher number three gets a hold of Rick's boss, the fire chief ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, boss: That's correct.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Can you just start giving me some details? He called in. What's his issue? What's the deal?]

MATT: The fire chief says when Rick called him ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, boss: He said, "Chief, I'm out here hiding in the woods. My wife's chasing me with a gun. Just couldn't take it anymore." And then he hung up on me.]

MATT: Now Rick denies having said anything like that to his boss. And his boss, as you'll hear, does seem to walk some of it back, but ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, boss: All right. Thank you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Yeah.]

MATT: ... things are kind of already set in motion, because then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Supposedly ...]

MATT: ... dispatcher number four relays the chief's story to the deputies en route.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: ... the wife has a signal zero handgun, and is chasing the male who took medication. I don't know if he's hallucinating or what's going on.]

MATT: But then that same dispatcher, dispatcher four, calls Rick's boss, the fire chief.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Okay. Now his wife is chasing him?]

MATT: And he's like, "Well, chasing?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, boss: The information that he told me his wife had a gun.]

MATT: Which Rick says he said, but just that there was a gun in the house. That's it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Uh-huh.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, boss: And he was hiding from her in the woods.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Okay. And she's threatened to kill him?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, boss: He didn't say anything like that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Clarification. Male hap is hiding from his wife who signals zero with a handgun in fear of her. We're trying to get more 1043. 48.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Ten four. Thank you.]

MATT: And this is what Ben's talking about, that these sort of clouds of miscommunication ...

BEN MONTGOMERY: Because by the time the police show up at this house for what is normally a welfare check ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: South radio weems.]

BEN MONTGOMERY: Now she has a shotgun inside the house.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: She can't tell it's Mike.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Hey, what you got?]

BEN MONTGOMERY: She's chased him off into the woods.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: What's that address?]

MATT: He's also armed, maybe even hallucinating. So the deputies, they ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: So damn dark out here. We're blacked out, walking.]

BEN MONTGOMERY: Pull up in a blackout.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Just be careful.]

MATT: Meaning they turn off their police lights. They get out of their cars. They don't even turn on their flashlights. And they start walking down this road to Rick's place. And one of the deputies even puts on these ...

BEN MONTGOMERY: Night vision goggles, because they think this woman has chased her husband into the woods.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Supposedly he's in the woods by his house. So just listen out, too.]

MATT: And as the deputies start walking down this dirt road towards Rick's place ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Somebody got pepper spray?]

MATT: ... the situation gets more tense.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: What? What just happened?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Get it out. Get it out. Dog's coming.]

MATT: Because, like, the neighbor's dog is starting to freak out. But eventually ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Okay, we're here.]

MATT: ... these six deputies get to the edge of Rick's driveway.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Chantel, I'll call you back.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Okay. Thank you. Bye. Be careful.]

MATT: And it's actually right around here, about 40 minutes after Rick made that first call to his boss, that Rick gets that call from the deputy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: This is Deputy Hall from the sheriff's office.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Hi, Bill. How you doing?]

MATT: So, you know, the two of them talk for a while. The deputy's trying to figure out where Rick is, and eventually asks ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: So your wife—your wife's got a gun?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: No, I took all the guns with me, except for she's got twelve gauge.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Okay. Is she okay? Everything all right up there at the house?]

MATT: And Rick's like, "Yeah."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Everything's okay at the house.]

BEN MONTGOMERY: "We're fine."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rick Sheldon: Domestic dispute.]

BEN MONTGOMERY: No reason to be worried.

MATT: But as that deputy is talking to Rick ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: I'm gonna stay on the phone with you.]

MATT: ... four of the deputies start walking up Rick's driveway. They want to check on Andy. So they get up to the house. Two of them walk up onto the porch, one of them even looks through the bedroom window where Andy is.

BEN MONTGOMERY: And she has no reason to believe the police are anywhere on her property.

MATT: She was asleep.

BEN MONTGOMERY: And presumably she heard a noise.

MATT: Grabbed the shotgun in the house.

BEN MONTGOMERY: And came outside.

MATT: Now in this moment, all we really have to go on is what the cops said they saw, which is Andy came out through the front door wearing nothing but her underwear, holding the shotgun. The cops say they identified themselves. They were screaming at her to drop the gun. They say that Andy took a step forward, leveled the shotgun against her shoulder, and then they opened fire. They fired 24 shots. They hit Andy at least eight times. She fell to the porch. Some of the police officers rushed to her, began performing first aid. Eventually, they radioed for an ambulance, and paramedics showed up and pronounced Andy dead at the scene.

RICK SHELDON: Hmm.

MATT: At this point, do you have any idea what's happening?

RICK SHELDON: No, not a clue. I realized that I needed to snap out, wake up, get my ass in gear, and find out what's going on.

MATT: But Rick's truck was stuck. And so it took a few hours, but eventually the cops figured out where he was, sent a crew over to meet him.

RICK SHELDON: Yeah, the ground crew came over and picked me up, handcuffed me, and put me in the back of a four-wheel-drive pickup truck and took me into headquarters.

MATT: They got him out of the car, brought him into headquarters.

RICK SHELDON: Put me in a room, typical interrogation-type room. And then I started noticing that they were being very, very friendly. Some people saying something about, you know, my camping equipment in the truck. I remember them authorizing me to have a cigarette in the room. And then we pretty much went through the same questioning that we've gone through so far, and at which time they informed me that they had come out to the house to check on Andy, and she had come to the door and there was an altercation, and they shot and killed her.

MATT: That was the phrasing they used?

RICK SHELDON: Pretty much, yeah.

MATT: An altercation.

RICK SHELDON: Yes.

MATT: When you hear something like that, I mean, I can't even fathom how you respond to some news like that.

RICK SHELDON: I still can't fathom responding to it.

MATT: Did you say anything to him?

RICK SHELDON: "Am I under arrest? Get these fucking cuffs off me."

MATT: How long did it take him to uncuff you?

RICK SHELDON: I don't remember.

MATT: Were you saying anything to him while you were still cuffed?

RICK SHELDON: From that moment on, I pretty much just—I mean, what do you say whenever somebody looks at you and says your wife is dead? We shot and killed her. The absolute implosion of your mind, just the searing pain, the explosive feeling. Do I get angry? Do I get sad? Do I break down and cry? Do I fall apart? Do I hold it together long enough to where I can figure out what the hell just happened? You know, what? You did what? You went out to my house in the middle of the night and you shot my wife? There's—I mean, how do you respond to that? I mean, to this day I'm still six, seven, twenty, fifty times a day asking myself what are you talking about? What do you mean? She can't be dead. What are you talking about? No, no.

MATT: Did you see her at all after the shooting?

RICK SHELDON: Yes. It's about two weeks afterwards.

MATT: Where was that?

RICK SHELDON: At the funeral home. Went over to the funeral home, and—sorry, my feet are going to sleep.

MATT: Yeah, no.

RICK SHELDON: I reached down to kiss her, and felt the edge of what I thought was a casket move. And it was that time that I realized that she was in a cardboard box that just had frill on it to make it look pretty.

MATT: Did you say anything to her?

RICK SHELDON: Yeah. Yeah, told her that we really need to do something about her hair because it was a mess. And the rest of what I said to her is between me and her.

MATT: Sure.

RICK SHELDON: All right. I need a break.

MATT: Yeah. No, of course. We'll take a break.

MATT: I put the microphone down. Rick got up and went over to the kitchen and poured himself a pretty big glass of vodka. We kind of just walked around the property for a while. We kept talking. Eventually, Rick pulled out this computer bag that he keeps buried in his closet.

RICK SHELDON: The diagram of all the shooters involved.

MATT: It's this bag full of ...

MATT: And the shots fired?

RICK SHELDON: Mm-hmm.

MATT: ... all the police reports that were made about that night. Medical examiner's autopsy report.

RICK SHELDON: Yeah. You know how many times I've sat down and just written through all the questions that I have? You know, the autopsy report just said that there was no previous surgeries? Really? She just had her gallbladder taken out.

MATT: These are just questions that ...

RICK SHELDON: That constantly kept going on, you know? "Coward says that he made eye contact with her."

MATT: That's deputy Thomas Coward.

RICK SHELDON: "And she with him." Okay, so a guy is standing at the window. You've seen the elevation of the window compared to whenever a six-foot-tall person is standing at it. You really telling me that you made eye contact?

MATT: Rick also has all the recordings of the police dispatch.

MATT: How many times have you listened to those recordings?

RICK SHELDON: Countless. Nonstop.

MATT: Was it like a daily thing?

RICK SHELDON: Hourly.

MATT: He says he just can't stop asking himself how did this happen? And then eventually ...

RICK SHELDON: Who's got the map?

MATT: Rick walked us outside.

MATT: Diagram's back inside.

MATT: Rick went back inside, came back out with this map that his lawyers had drawn up.

RICK SHELDON: Take this map and position yourself in the positions where the shooters were at.

MATT: He started having me and Ben walk through the shooting of his wife, kind of like going and placing ourselves where each officer was.

RICK SHELDON: This one down here, he's the one that testified that he couldn't see what he was shooting at. He just knew that the other guys were shooting.

MATT: So he's on the other side of the ...

RICK SHELDON: On the other side of that tank.

MATT: He walks us over close to the porch where one of the officers was. And you can see some of the bullet holes in the house.

RICK SHELDON: Yeah. Here. There.

MATT: So that's it. So the bullet went through here, tore up—tore up the ...

RICK SHELDON: Yep.

MATT: ... plastic.

RICK SHELDON: Here.

MATT: Then we were off the front porch over in the front yard where three of the deputies were.

MATT: So they—they see her come out and they start moving across like this?

RICK SHELDON: Yeah. Shooting a almost naked woman on her front porch in the middle of night, in the middle of the swamp. Fuck them.

MATT: Rick then walked inside and left us standing in his yard.

MATT: About four months after Andrea Sheldon was shot and killed, the state attorney's office sent a letter to the Florida Department of law enforcement that it had conducted an investigation in the shooting, saying that there'd be no charges brought against the officers, stating that what they did was a quote, "Justifiable use of deadly force." Rick has filed a civil complaint on behalf of the estate of Andrea Sheldon. The complaint alleges each officer involved in the shooting violated her civil rights, used excessive force, didn't follow training policy and procedure, and intentionally inflicted emotional distress on Rick. When we reached out to the St. John's County Sheriff's Office, they said they could not comment on the case pending litigation.

JAD: Big thanks to our producer Matt Kielty and Tampa Bay Times reporter Ben Montgomery. Definitely keep an eye on our website, Radiolab.org. As soon as the Tampa Bay Times's big feature is up, we will link you there. And it's definitely worth checking out. Radiolab.org is the address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Desta Rusa calling from Long Island City in New York. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack and Molly Webster. With help from Tracie Hunte, Valentina Bohanini, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.]

 

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