JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Detectives are currently investigating several shootings in Northeast Florida that show an alarming pattern on local roads: bullets flying on highways and byways in broad daylight.
Many of these shootings have happened on busy roads with other cars around.
However, there is no reason to believe any are connected, according to information News4JAX reviewed.
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Last week, dashcam video from a semi-truck in St. Johns County showed a late-morning shooting on I-95 near World Golf Village where masked men opened fire on a passing car. Two people were injured.
Monday morning, Jacksonville police found a man shot to death inside a flipped-over car along Southside Boulevard near JTB. It’s unclear where the shooting happened.
There are many more examples with few arrests.
“It’s really scary because you know, you have these people who are minding their own business, just doing everyday normal life things on the roadways, like everyone does,” said Tom Hackney, a retired director and lead investigator for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
He too is alarmed about an apparent uptick in roadway violence. Some cases appear to be road rage, others targeted attacks.
“That bullet doesn’t know what its target is,” Hackney said. “And it’s only glass in cars. And people think, ‘oh, you know that that’ll stop it?’ Well, it doesn’t, it keeps on going, you know, those bullets, those projectiles are going thousands of feet per second, and don’t stop with glass, and they’ll continue on through in, and again, we’ve seen that collateral damage when that happens, and it’s just it’s unpredictable.”
It also presents more challenges for detectives.
“It stretches your crime scene out considerably, because you just don’t know, cars are traveling fast,” he said. “So, where the initial point of a crime occurred, it’s very hard to locate, that doesn’t assist in trying to find showcasing that or other evidence to recover. There’s, you know, there’s no contact between the suspect and your victim in cases. So, it kind of removes a factor of a forensic, the DNA.”
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Road rage is a problem across the area.
Flagler deputies arrested a man after they said he pulled a gun on someone who cut him off. No one was hurt.
Also, Nassau deputies arrested a man for a shooting with two girls including his own daughter caught in the crossfire and injured.
“It is it is terrible that we’ve gotten to that place,” Hackney added. “But the safe play in all this is to make an assumption that you just don’t know who that person next to you is.”
The verdict: don’t pick a fight even if you’re in the right.