Lake County Sheriff’s Office deputies shot and killed a man they assumed was an attempted murder suspect on Sunday, but they now know they shot the wrong man.
In the early morning
hours, deputies knocked on 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott’s door without
identifying themselves as law enforcement officers. Scott answered the door
with a gun in his hand.
“When we knocked on
the door, the door opened and the occupant of that apartment was pointing a gun
at deputies and that’s when we opened fire and killed him,” Lt. John Herrell
said.
Deputies thought they
were confronting Jonathan Brown, a man accused of attempted murder. Brown was
spotted at the Blueberry Hills Apartment complex and his motorcycle was parked
across from Andrew Scott’s front door.
“It’s just a bizarre
set of circumstances. The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff
or police office, you’re going to get shot,” Herrell said.
Residents said the
unannounced knock at the door at 1:30 a.m. may be the reason why the tragedy
happened.
“He was the wrong guy
and he got shot and killed anyway. There’s fault on both sides. I think more so
on the county,” Ryan Perry said. “I can understand why he [the deputy] did it,
but it should have never gone down like that,” Perry said.
Brown was arrested
near the same building where Scott was shot. Brown and another suspect in the
same case, Anthony Rodriguez, were booked into the Lake County Jail over the
weekend.