Deputy Dawg Leaves Full-Auto .223 on Floorboard of Car While He Goes into Convenience StoreA man fatally shot himself Monday with a rifle he stole from a Kershaw County sheriff's deputy's patrol car that was stopped at a gas station near Camden, sheriff's Capt. David Thomley said.
Not the ending to the story one usually gets from this sort of thing.
Investigators believe shift Cpl. Brian Morris left the car unlocked when he went inside the station's convenience store to pay for gas and buy a soda about 2:16 p.m., Thomley said.
Durr! I'm a dumbass who the government for some reason trusts with fully automatic weapons.
More than four hours later, a 47-year-old Darlington man was found dead in the backyard of an unoccupied home off Gardner Street -- about 1,000 feet from the station, Thomley said. He died of a single gunshot wound to the head, Coroner Johnny Fellers said.
Kershaw County Medical Center EMS had responded about 6:44 p.m., finding the man lying on the ground, said Donnie Weeks, the hospital's president and CEO.
Morris, who was taken off road duty and is undergoing counseling, left the .223-caliber rifle between the front passenger seat and floorboard, Thomley said.
Counseling? Is that what they're calling getting his ass chewed out means?
He reported it missing about 4:45 p.m., Thomley said. Precisely when the man killed himself is unclear, Thomley said.
The sheriff's policy dictates firearms be secure, Thomley said. There is no locked device in the front of the car to keep a rifle, he said.
What else did Thomley say? It's getting monotonous here...
"It would have been more secure in the trunk," Thomley said. "I don't think it's a good idea to have weapons in the front of the vehicle with the door locked or unlocked."
Genius!
Morris, a seven-year veteran with no disciplinary record, had the high-powered rifle because he's a member of the Sheriff's Emergency Response Team (SERT), commonly known as a SWAT team.
Not anymore.
Team members are on call 24 hours a day, and Morris was authorized to carry the weapon at the time, Thomley said. He was working a 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift, Thomley said.
The rifle, which has a switch to make it fully automatic, was fired once by the man, Thomley said.
Which was enough ...
Surveillance images at the Lakeshore Drive gas station show the man standing at the rear of the patrol car and looking into the store, Thomley said. The images then show the man walking beside the car and out of sight, Thomley said.
The front half of the patrol car cannot be seen in the surveillance images, Thomley said. No one witnessed the man take the rifle, Thomley said.
What is with these 7 one-sentence paragraphs in a row, with "Thomley said" at the end of them? Is this an article, or someone's notes?
I routinely fix these and did so here for readibility, but it's a journalistic style that I think the BBC started: every sentence is its own paragraph. I think it makes it easier for editors to cut stories, though apparently it didn't work.
When Thomley talked to Morris on Tuesday night, "his only statement was, 'Captain, I'm not sure if I had my door locked or not,'" Thomley said.
I'm leaning towards "not".
"He's been a great deputy," Thomley said. "He's very thorough, and he's very thoughtful, and this is something certainly that he's hating that happened, and he's living with it and struggling with it."
The man who died was laid off last week from his job in Columbia, and investigators later found a car he took without a relative's permission 20 miles away on I-20 at the Kershaw County/Lee County line, Thomley said.
It's unclear why the man was in the area and how he got to the gas station, Thomley said.
Thomley is not aware of the man having any criminal record or mental health history. No one in the sheriff's office is familiar with him, Thomley said.
Deputies continue to investigate. "We want to find out what went wrong and certainly what we need to do in the future to make sure something like this doesn't happen again," Thomley said.