- April 19, 2024
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Monday, Feb. 3
I’ll have the .38 special with fries and a Coke, please
2:23 p.m. 200 block of Airport Road. Shots fired, non criminal.
Three Florida Highway Patrol troopers were out for lunch, seated on the deck of a local restaurant, when they heard a loud gunshot.
The troopers bolted from their seats and saw an elderly man standing two or three feet away, looking confused, with a large hole in the cargo pocket of his shorts and the steel muzzle of a handgun protruding from the hole.
The troopers took the man’s gun, removed the spent cartridge and a live round of ammunition, and contacted the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office.
They told a deputy who arrived at the scene that the elderly man had simply been walking along the sidewalk — he wasn’t handling the gun, and didn’t have his hands in his pockets — when the gun went off.
The deputy spoke to the elderly man, who said he didn’t know why the gun had fired. He repeatedly told the deputy he’d left the safety on, and that there was nothing else in his pocket that could’ve snagged the trigger.
But he also said he’d had hammer cocked back on the loaded gun, and acknowledged that he'd been carrying it loosely in the cargo pocket of his shorts without a holster.
The deputy, searching for fragments of the discharged bullet, determined that it had struck the ground, then ricocheted into a picnic table and through the restaurant’s cloth awning.
The man had a concealed carry permit from North Carolina, also valid in Florida. The deputy submitted the man’s Cobra .38 handgun as evidence, and told him how to reclaim it later.
