A Florida sheriff’s officer was murdered and two others injured in what officials described as an ambush shooting inside a residence.
On Friday night, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office dispatched three deputies to a home in Eustis, Florida, a rural area of the county, in response to reports of physical disturbance.
According to John Herrell, a sheriff’s department spokeswoman, the deputies separated the persons involved before being sent to a property a few houses down.
Two deputies searched a few houses down the street from the caller and discovered a door that seemed to have been kicked in.
“When the deputies entered the home, there was a lot of gunfire,” Sheriff Peyton Grinnell said during a news conference at the scene.
One deputy was shot and confined inside, while the other fled. More cops came and formed a team to enter the residence and extract the deputy, but they were confronted with “a hail of gunfire” and another deputy was shot, according to Grinnell.
The male deputy who was shot first and trapped inside did not survive, he said.
The second deputy received a shoulder wound and was in stable condition. According to Grinnell, a third deputy was hit in the armpit, groin, and stomach area several times and was having surgery. The police involved were not immediately identified.
“Just horrific when you have one of your own inside a home and you can’t get to him,” Grinnell said, revealing that SWAT team members helped reenter the residence in Eustis, some 37 miles northwest 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 told the reporter. “It was a chaotic scene from the start until the end.”
Two suspects were found dead when SWAT entered the house, and a third was taken to the hospital, according to Grinnell.
There was no history of violent crime at the house, and nothing indicated that the situation was dangerous, he said.
“They were ambushed,” Grinnell explained.
The stranded deputy was carried to a local hospital and died from his injuries, according to the sheriff. He was identified as Master Deputy Sheriff Bradley Michael Link.
Link, 28, first joined the Lake County Sheriff’s Office as a young adventurer. He worked in the Army Reserves before being recruited as a deputy sheriff by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office in 2017. In October 2019, he joined the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, where he “quickly became part of our family and faithfully served our citizens with courage and zeal,” according to CBS.
“Brad, as our Sheriff’s Office family knew him, touched the lives of all who were blessed enough to work with him; his contributions and the impact of this loss will not soon be forgotten,” according to a statement.