Authorities in the Florida Panhandle arrested two men for a brutal attack on a state wildlife officer last Friday. The men were charged with shooting the officer and then running him over with his own patrol boat, county officials reported.
On Friday, the Bay County Sheriff’s Office said that Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Officer David Brady approached the pair after calls about a disturbance. The confrontation quickly turned to violence when the officer asked for identification and one man allegedly went into the cabin of a sailboat and returned with his gun.
Officer Brady reported that he jumped into the water and began to return fire, hitting 18-year-old Samuel Wyndham Reager in the hand. Reager and cohort Lachlan Fain Akins, 20, then jumped into officer Brady’s boat and tried several times to run him over.
The accused pair boated off and ditched the officer’s craft in nearby Panama City, Florida. There the two allegedly broke into a man’s home where they were discovered by police.
Reager and Akins were quickly arrested and were found with officer Brady’s handgun.
Brady was hit in the side with one bullet, but the slug was stopped by his bulletproof vest. He also suffered a wound to his shoulder. He was treated and released from the hospital that same evening.
While authorities did not report what charges the two are facing, they did release the fact that Reager is wanted on drug charges in Michigan. Also Akin had a recent disorderly conduct charge in Bay County, Florida.
Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen noted that every law enforcement officer in the country face this sort of danger every single day.
“This is just a reminder of the fact these guys every day they go out and confront something like this every day,” McKeithen told the media. “Every one of them up here and this can happen in Panama City. People think it can’t, but it can.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston, or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.