Before the drone footage, they tried to frame this as “old white man drives through a pro-Palestinian protest”
Turns out, a mob blocked off the highway, surrounded his car, chased him, and then tried attacking him.
Here is the full drone footage: pic.twitter.com/75dHls1ZvE
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 23, 2023
By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
On Sept. 15 at around 10:15 p.m., Olaf Brurberg Andersen IV, was drinking Coors Light inside Pete’s Bar in Neptune Beach, Florida, when a police officer approached him.
The Neptune Beach Police officer told Andersen someone had seen a handgun in his waistband. A Florida statute still on the books prohibits carrying a concealed firearm inside a tavern. The officer escorted the 24-year-old outside the bar, read him the Miranda Warning and began a field interrogation.
According to his arrest report, Andersen told the officer he was “unaware he was not allowed to carry a firearm inside establishments licensed to dispense alcohol.” He was arrested without incident. His Springfield XD and Blackhawk holster were seized and placed into property. “It should be noted the firearm was loaded with a round in the chamber,” the arrest report states.
Andersen was taken to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and charged with violating Florida state statute 790.06(12): Carry concealed weapon or firearm in portion of establishment licensed to dispense alcohol for consumption on premises.
One week earlier, at around 10:47 p.m., Shane Wilson Adcox was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon in Pete’s Bar. According to his arrest report, he struck up a conversation with another patron about a recent shoulder surgery he underwent and raised his shirt to show the surgery scar.
“Upon raising his shirt, Witness #1 noticed a firearm inside the suspect’s waistband. When the suspect noticed Witness #1 observing the firearm, he pointed to it and stated he was ‘in Blackwater,’ and referred to the firearm as his ‘side piece,’” his arrest report states.
Another Neptune Beach Police officer was summoned. Adcox, a 55-year-old retired Navy veteran, was escorted outside and detained. His arrest report states, “Post Miranda, the suspect stated that he was unaware he was not allowed to carry inside establishments licensed to dispense alcohol.”
Adcox’s 9mm Glock 45 was seized and he was also taken to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office jail. He was charged with violating three Florida state statutes: 790.06(12) Carry concealed weapon or firearm in portion of establishment licensed to dispense alcohol for consumption on premises, 790.10 Improper exhibition of a firearm or dangerous weapon and 790.151(3) Possessing a firearm while under the influence of alcohol.
According to police reports Adcox never exhibited his handgun or even removed it from the holster, and at no time did police conduct sobriety testing to determine whether he was under the influence of alcohol.
Charges pending
Andersen pleaded no-contest to the charge and was sentenced to two days in jail but was given credit for the two days he served following his arrest. Andersen did not respond to calls or emails seeking his comments for this story.
Adcox has a court date next month, but an assistant state attorney recently dismissed two of the three charges he faced: 790.10 Improper exhibition of a firearm or dangerous weapon and 790.151(3) Possessing a firearm while under the influence of alcohol.
Adcox is still recovering from the weekend he spent in the county jail.
“They threw me into the petri dish, man. I got out late Sunday night with a burning throat, sneezing and fever,” he said. “I tested positive for COVID and Strep. I’m still feverish.”
Prosecutors offered him a deal, in which he would have to take several online courses and pay fines and court costs. His Glock, however, would be forfeit.
“They just suspended my CCW permit,” he said. “There’s no way I’m taking that deal.”
Unconstitutional
Eric Friday is general counsel and chief lobbyist for Florida Carry, Inc., and the state’s preeminent expert in firearms law and Second Amendment rights.
Friday said Florida’s statute that prohibits carrying a concealed firearm inside an establishment licensed to dispense alcohol is unconstitutional based on the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which states that “history and tradition” should determine whether a law regulating firearms is constitutional under the Second Amendment.
“If you understand Bruen, you have to look at the text, history and tradition and then find an analogous statute,” Friday said. “This statute is unconstitutional as to certain places, because you cannot find a founding-era statute that prohibits possession of firearms inside a bar, or one that prohibits possessing intoxicating liquor while possessing a firearm.”
Therefore, Friday said, both Andersen and Adcox should never have been charged.
“Prosecutors should have removed the charge. The public defender should have asked for the charge to be removed. The judge should have been told this by both attorneys, but he too should have known this was not a crime,” he said. “We’ve got checks and balances within the legal system. The problem is when police officers, public defenders, prosecutors and the judge fail to catch these errors, the system has indicted itself at that point.”
Adcox said neither the prosecutor nor his public defender have told him that the charge he still faces may be unconstitutional.
“My public defender said he was ‘looking into some things,’” he said.
By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Violent crime is continuing to surge in the city of Seattle and surrounding King County, where the number of homicides in the city this year has already surpassed last year’s body count, and with three months remaining in 2024, a new record could be reached.
According to the Seattle Times, there have been 114 killings in King County as of Sept. 29, which brings the total to 114, just shy of the 119 investigated in both 2021 and 2022. Half of those murders have been inside the Seattle city limits, which carries no small amount of irony since the city is headquarters to the billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobby responsible for two restrictive statewide gun control initiatives in 2014 and 2018, both of which were sold to the public as mechanisms to reduce violent crime.
Perhaps one result of this has been a rebound over the past two months of concealed pistol license numbers in the county. The Department of Licensing says there are now 696,540 active CPLs in Washington, of which 111,332 are held by King County residents. Roughly 25 percent of those licenses are held by women. Last month at this time, there were 693,551 active CPLs statewide, including 110,627 in King County.
The numbers represent a rebound from a six-month decline in the number of active licenses, which hit 698,147 back on March 31.
KOMO News, the local ABC affiliate, is reporting September was a “deadly” month with 10 homicides, more than double the number of murders during the same month in 2022 (4) and 2021 (3).
Why are the number of active CPLs moving back up? It could be related to the loss of some 600 commissioned police officers in Seattle over the past three years, since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.
And reports about rising violent crime, coupled with police manpower losses, could be factors as well. Washington has been nudging the 700,000 mark for carry licenses for the past year. It might meet that threshold by year’s end if the rebound continues.
KOMO is reporting comments from people who say they “don’t feel safe around the city,” and the station quoted one individual specifically citing reports of “shootings and stabbings.”
But with this news, Seattle-based gun prohibitionists are mute. Their gun control restrictions have been, according to Second Amendment activists, total failures. Only law-abiding citizens have been inconvenienced, while criminals have continued hurting and killing people.
Here’s a look back at the history of gun control in Washington since 2014:
2014 – Voters approve anti-gun Initiative 594 after proponents spent more than $10 million in a lopsided campaign to pass the measure. It requires so-called “universal background checks” on all firearm transfers, with certain exemptions for family members.
2015 – The Seattle City Council adopts a Chicago-style tax on retail firearm and ammunition sales. Proponents project annual revenue between $300,000 and $500,000, which has never come close. The money would ostensibly go to anti-violence programs. Since 2016, the first full year of tax collection, the number of homicides in the city has more than doubled.
2018 – Washington voters again approve a gun control initiative (I-1639), this one inventing a definition for a “semi-automatic assault weapon” and prohibiting young adults ages 18-20 from buying them. It also requires proof of training within the previous five years in order to complete the purchase.
2022 – The Washington Legislature passes the magazine ban and is immediately sued by the Second Amendment Foundation and several others.
2023 – The Legislature passes a ban on so-called “assault weapons” and is immediately sued in federal court, again by the Second Amendment Foundation and others. Another bill signed by Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee requires proof of safety training for any firearm purchase and expands the waiting period on gun purchases to ten days.
Looking back to 2018 when I-1639 was on the ballot, gun right activists predicted anti-gunners would eventually move to ban the firearms they had taken so much trouble to define. Their concerns were largely dismissed or ignored by the media, and that remains the case today.
The active shooter was wearing black shorts, a floppy hat and tactical gear, and he had already killed an Arvada police officer. He was shooting out windows in police cars in a busy shopping and restaurant district in Olde Town Arvada during lunch hour one year ago.
Three fellow officers in a nearby substation — in shorts and polo shirts — were worried they weren’t wearing the right gear to safely face him. They instead watched the man with an AR-15 from the window as he walked toward the main square of Olde Town, according to investigative documents.
Johnny Hurley, 40, was shopping at an Army surplus store a block over and peered out the window, spotting the shooter. He ran out of the store and removed his concealed gun at his waist, beneath his shirt.
Hurley had trained for active shooter situations — not because it was part of his work, but because he wanted to help people and save lives.
Crouching down, he ran across a vacant, shady plaza with umbrellas and tables, gripping his gun as it pointed toward the ground. Hurley knelt down behind a brick wall and carefully watched the shooter. Hurley took aim and fired six rounds from his handgun, five struck the gunman, according to his lawyers.
The entire scene was captured on surveillance camera footage.
“I have to admit it’s kind of exciting to see the way he handled himself,” said his mother, Kathleen Boleyn. “The way he took all the training and practice that he’s had and did the right thing.”
Hurley continued to try to do the right thing — he moved to disarm the gunman, who was still alive and lying on the ground with his AR-15 nearby, according to Boleyn’s attorneys.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsThey stayed inside because they worried even the door itself wouldn’t stop a round from an AR-15, according to investigative documents.
Even though Hurley didn’t look anything like the suspect description, they told investigators in an interview later that they couldn’t tell if he was a possibly a second shooter. They had no idea one of their own, Officer Gordon Beesley, had been killed just two minutes earlier.
“That’s the information that Arvada did not want the public to know,” said Siddhartha Rathod, the attorney representing Hurley’s family. “The officers hid while Johnny did what they were trained to do, that the officers refused to go outside. These are three officers with bulletproof vests on, and they refused to open the door and go and engage the shooter.”
For 11 seconds, the officers watched Hurley from behind as he was trying to remove ammunition from the automatic rifle, according to court filings. Without announcing “police” or asking him to drop the weapon, Arvada Officer Kraig Brownlow opened the substation door and took aim at Hurley from behind, hitting him in his back pelvis and killing him.
“If they would’ve simply said, ‘Police,’ Johnny would be here today,” Rathod said.
In an interview in Rathod’s office earlier this month, Hurley’s mother looked at the floor.
“Absolutely,” she said. “That was very much a part of his training. Any announcement, any suggestion to put down your weapon, if they would have said, ‘Police, put down your weapon,’ … he would have dropped it.”
This week is the one-year anniversary of the incident, and Hurley’s family filed a civil rights lawsuit against Brownlow and the Arvada Police Chief Link Strate alleging their actions and the police department’s own policies deprived Hurley of his constitutionally protected rights.
Arvada Mayor Marc Williams said June 21, 2021, was the hardest day of his life as mayor.
“We still mourn the loss of Officer Gordon Beesley and are so thankful for the service of the Arvada Police Department,” he said. “And at the same time we still think about Johnny Hurley. It’s tragic because of the actions of a crazed gunman, we lost two very good men that day.”
Williams said he feels badly for the Hurley family.
“I wish I knew the man,” he said. “He was someone who was willing to step into a very dangerous situation … The tragedy of him picking up the gunman’s rifle will always haunt everyone.”
But Rathod, the family lawyer, said the juxtaposition of Hurley’s actions compared to the officers is stark.
“When Johnny heard the shots, he opened the door and faced the danger,” Rathod said.
After a series of personal problems, he grew increasingly isolated and agitated. And he grew extremely angry at the police, constantly binging on anti-police videos, according to court documents.
Just a couple of weeks before this shooting, he confronted Officer Kraig Brownlow, Sterling Boom and Michael Hall, the three officers who watched him from the substation just days later storm the shopping district with an assault rifle. Troyke called them “terrible people” and “sovereign citizens,” court documents said.
The day of the shooting, Troyke told his sister the police weren’t taking him seriously. His sister called APD and asked for a welfare check. She noted he had a lot of weapons at his disposal. The officer who tried to do that check was Beesley, the officer whom Troyke killed shortly later. Beesley knocked on his door, but Troyke had already taken off for Olde Town.
Mark Wise was the one witness who saw the entire episode as he and a colleague were leaving a restaurant in the town square. When the gunman shot and killed Beesley right in front of Wise, he dove for cover behind parked cars and called 911. He then watched Hurley run toward the gunman, stop, and kill him.
“In that moment when Johnny was running towards me, I didn’t know if he was friend or foe,” Wise said, in a tribute video made by Hurley’s lawyers. “I stayed because something about his presence told me this was going to be OK.”
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsShe has weathered a year as a mother living through all of the firsts without her son — the hole at Christmas, a birthday he wasn’t there to celebrate, Mother’s Day.
“When you were having fun with Johnny, there wasn’t anybody else you wanted to be with,” she said. “He just made fun things more fun.”
On what would have been his 41st birthday last August, she went to a horse farm to honor him. Hurley’s sister, Erin, took a group of his friends up camping, an activity the two loved to do together. They brought Hurley’s camping chair and set it up with a photo of him, his floppy camouflage hat and a beer in the cupholder.
“Johnny was a very protective big brother. He always looked out for me, always made sure I was safe, always made sure I felt safe,” she said, in the tribute video. “If I could say one thing to him right now it would be that I love you.”
Hurley was a dilettante who had passions ranging from individual gun rights to cooking to skateboarding to rap music to film. He was a trained chef and picked up catering jobs during the pandemic. He gave away clothes and underwear to homeless people and was known for his gigs drumming in local music establishments. He loved camping. He set up a “hug machine” on the 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver once and doled out “free” hugs to strangers.
Hurley’s mother said if he wanted to learn something about a subject, he dove in. He went to cooking school and learned how to develop his own recipes when he wanted to learn how to cook. When he became interested in mass shootings and how to help people, he took active shooting training classes.
“He had great compassion for people, and this came out in stories that I heard,” Boleyn said, noting one other time he saved someone’s life who was having trouble swimming in a creek.
His friend Douglas Evans said Hurley was “someone you could take to the revolution or take to your mom’s house.”
The instructor told Hurley that he had kids, and he wasn’t sure what decision he would make in a critical moment, fearing for his own family.
“And Johnny said, “Well, I’m not married. I don’t have children,’” Boleyn recalled the instructor telling her.
Boleyn was asleep when federal agents knocked on her door late that Monday night a year ago to tell her that Hurley had been killed. They didn’t give her any details, but they assured her he had done nothing wrong, that he had not broken any laws.
Her daughter, Erin Hurley, had already gotten the knock on the door. She said she crumpled to the ground when representatives from the Jefferson County coroner’s office told her about her brother. She immediately got in the car to drive to Colorado Springs, where Boleyn lives, to be with her mother.
That week was a bit of a blur for Boleyn. She remembers victims’ advocates warning her not to talk to the media and not to watch the news. She didn’t know anything about how Hurley had died. She went to Olde Town Arvada where there was a growing memorial to honor both Hurley and Beesley, the officer who was first gunned down by the shooter.
“People were laying flowers and it kept growing and growing, and I wanted people to know I was his mother,” Boleyn said. “I would just tell people that I was his mother and people were so loving and so beautiful.”
Boleyn and Hurley’s sister had a meeting with officers that Friday, four days after he was killed.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News“When we learned that it was an officer who shot Johnny, that was confusing and shocking and unbelievable,” Boleyn said. “I was grateful that (Arvada Police) Chief Strate in his public address referred to Johnny as a hero.”
There were discussions between Hurley’s family, their lawyers and the city of Arvada for a year. Ultimately, Rathod said they had to file this suit to get justice for Hurley.
“When you compare the action of the Arvada police to the heroism of Johnny, it is a stark contrast,” he said. “And then when you magnify it with their conscious decision to not announce themselves and to shoot Johnny in the back, when he was unloading the weapon, when he did not match the description of the shooter that they had seen, when he did not pose a threat to anyone, it is just unbelievable. Their conduct is unbelievable.”
Late last year, after reading and analyzing more than 1,000 pages of investigative reports and interviews, Jefferson County District Attorney Alexis King made a decision not to press charges against Officer Brownlow, the officer who killed Hurley.
She determined the shooting was justified and that the officer was acting in self-defense or defense of others.
“Though the acts of John Hurley were nothing short of heroic, the facts must be viewed as they appeared to Officer Brownlow at the time,” wrote King in her decision letter on the case. “Officer Brownlow did not know, and could not have known from his vantage point, of the murder of Officer Beesley or of Hurley’s role in eliminating the threat posed by the man in black.”
Arvada Police told reporters after King’s decision they were going to undergo evaluations about what happened. They did that evaluation, a spokesman, Detective Dave Snelling said.
“Our review of all the facts in this tragic incident reveals no policy or procedural violations were made by any Arvada Police Department member in this unprecedented set of circumstances,” Snelling said.
Brownlow resigned from the agency after the incident. He did not return messages seeking comment.
She planted fresh flowers and neighbors stopped to pay tribute. She’s going to plant a garden for him in the front this year. She always has a wreath on the door adorned with a black ribbon.
“There is pride that is mixed with the grief,” she said, her voice weakening. “If you have to lose your child … isn’t this the way? I think when I look at his life in how he was and who he was, this really was him. I was the lucky one who got to be his mom.”
She also recently decided to get a vanity plate on her car. It reads: “HROS MOM.”
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News
When the Department of Homeland Security launched a search for new service pistols, Heckler & Koch was selected to provide pistols to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
In addition to the standard-issue Heckler & Koch P2000 Compact LEM pistol in .40 S&W, a small contingent of Border Patrol BORTAC agents assigned to the national team based at SOG headquarters in El Paso, Texas, carry the HK P30L (Long) LEM service pistol in .40 S&W.
NEXT-GEN DESIGN
Even though the HK P30 and the HK P2000 Compact share a number of parts, the P30 is a more modern design that has improved ergonomics, including a special grip frame with interchangeable backstrap inserts and lateral plates, allowing the pistol to be individually adapted to any user.
So-called “red flag laws” have become a recent favorite of gun control activists, who portray them as a way to keep firearms out of “dangerous hands.” The laws empower judges to issue case-by-case firearm prohibition and confiscation orders, upon a petitioner’s showing that the respondent of the order poses a danger to themselves or others.
The concept has at times held superficial appeal even to those who might normally support Second Amendment rights. But it’s constitutionality and efficacy wilt under close, critical scrutiny, which is why the NRA opposes the concept.
Last week, an unusually revealing article by Bridge Michigan, an independent news source from the Wolverine State, brought another critical voice to the debate: that of the police who will actually be tasked with executing the orders. Entitled “Michigan police agencies sweating enforcement of ‘red flag’ gun laws,” it vividly underscores the difference between theory and practice when it comes to gun control.
Among the officials quoted in the article is Robert Stevenson, executive director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police. He said he supports the idea that people who are “not mentally balanced” should not have firearms, but he is concerned with the practicalities of how police will enforce Michigan’s new red flag law, which takes effect next spring. Stevenson offered several scenarios in which the supposedly “lifesaving” law could itself pose lethal risks.
As he explained to Bridge Michigan:
What happens if the person with the order tries to hurt the officers? What if the person who was deemed suicidal becomes overwhelmed and still poses harm to themselves when their guns are being seized? What if the individual with an order has to be detained by force or even be killed, due to the threat they pose?
From the citizen’s perspective, Stevenson said, it could be a case of: “We’re trying to save somebody in the family. We went to the police to save them, and they killed them.”
The legislator who spearheaded Michigan’s red flag effort, Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak), claimed to Bridge Michigan she “studied the laws in other states, such as California and Florida” and “found no instances of a gun being fired during a seizure of weapons.”
Sen. McMorrow’s research, however, was seriously flawed.
A simple Internet inquiry should have revealed to her that Gary J. Willis, a 61-year-old African American man, was killed by police in Anne Arundel, Md., as they attempted to retrieve his firearm under a red flag order shortly after 5:00 a.m. on Nov. 5, 2018.
Willis’s wife, Dolly, was also home at the time. Police claim that Willis became increasingly agitated as officers explained the requirements of the order to him and that he reached for the gun after he had voluntarily set it aside at their request.
Willis died on the scene after being shot at least five times by police. A Baltimore Sun article quoted the local police chief as saying the execution of red flag orders involves, by definition, “a tense, dangerous situation,” one he would prefer to be handled by SWAT teams.
Gun control advocates like to claim any intrusion on constitutional rights is justified, if it “could save just one life.” Apparently, however, they don’t hold themselves to that same standard when promoting policies that themselves pose lethal risks.
Also expressing skepticism of the red flag concept to Bridge Michigan was Matt Saxton, the executive director of the Michigan Sheriffs’ Association. Sexton said his “organization was never asked to comment on conversations of how to enforce the new law.”
He described being “left in the dark, not sure what to strategize for and what to envision when [the new law] takes effect.” It appeared to him that localities would be left to figure out the logistics of implementation on their own, perhaps in collaboration with each other. Sexton told Bridge Michigan “he doesn’t believe that extreme risk protection [i.e., red flag] laws are the best laws that could be passed,” but he hopes for the best.
No wonder that the most consistent experience states have when passing red flag laws is to later discover they are little known, little utilized, and don’t live up to their billing as a game-changing way to prevent “gun violence.”
A Duke University sociologist who studies red flag laws and their effects told PBS, “It’s too small a pebble to make a ripple. … It’s as if the law doesn’t exist.”
When a law is almost universally treated as if it doesn’t exist, it may be because it should have never existed in the first place. Disuse, indeed, might be the best that could be hoped for when it comes to red flag laws.