MAN KILLED IN DRUG INVESTIGATION

Officers Confront Victim Outside Motel In West PB

WEST PALM BEACH -- A law enforcement officer working a drug
investigation with Palm Beach County sheriff's deputies shot and
killed a man early Friday during a confrontation outside a motel near
Interstate 95 and 45th Street.

The man is the seventh person to be shot and killed by a law officer
in Palm Beach County in a little more than nine months.

"[An officer] felt threatened by the suspect and shot his weapon,"
PBSO spokeswoman Teri Barbera said.

The shooting took place during a joint narcotics operation involving
the Drug Enforcement Administration, PBSO deputies and U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, DEA official Jeannette Moran
said. The man was transported to St. Mary's Medical Center and died
at 2:19 a.m., Barbera said.

Neither the victim nor the officer who shot him was identified.

A second police-involved shooting early Friday took place in Broward
County. A Sunrise man was shot and killed at his home by a SWAT team
in search of drugs.

The seven fatal police shootings in Palm Beach County since October
involve several police agencies, and took place in various settings
and circumstances.

One of those who died was a 16-year-old Delray Beach boy who was
driving erratically on a school campus after a dance. Another
fatality was a 37-year-old utility company energy trader whose death
was ruled "suicide by cop" after he aimed a handgun at police and
four officers responded with a fusillade.

In a metropolitan area the size of Palm Beach County, seven fatal
police shootings in nine months doesn't add up to an epidemic of
deadly use of force, according to some law enforcement experts. "But
it is a legitimate issue for police executives to be looking at,"
said Josh Ederheimer, director of the Center on Force and
Accountability for the Police Executive Research Forum.

His group, a nonprofit based in Washington D.C., was commissioned to
study the Delray Beach Police Department's use of force policy after
the fatal February shooting of Jerrod Miller, 16. The report is due
by the end of the year.

David Klinger, a former police officer who is now a professor at the
University of Missouri-St. Louis, said seven fatal police shootings
is an area of some 1 million residents "does not shock me. That's
within the norm of what we know from various studies over the past 20
or 30 years."

At the same time, Klinger and Ederheimer agreed that fatalities at
the hands of law officers had been trending down in recent years, due
in part to stiffer departmental rules on use of deadly force.

"There is more of an ethos now that says restraint is the way to go,"
Klinger said.

For officers confronted with a situation they perceive as threatening
to their lives or the lives of others, however, restraint is often
hard to summon.

Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer alluded to that in a
July 8 memorandum in which he found that police officers "were
legally justified" when on March 10 they fired at least 26 rounds at
John Garczynski, who was threatening suicide in a car outside his
sister-in-law's Boca Raton apartment.

However, wrote Krischer, since police knew of Garcyznski's mental
state and "given the dynamics of 'suicide-by-cop,' responding in
force turned control of the situation over to the deceased.

In Friday's police shooting at the Days Inn in West Palm Beach, a
police investigation will be followed by a review by the state
attorney, according to office spokesman Michael Edmondson. Details of
the incident, which is being probed by the Sheriff's Office, were
sparse on Friday.

"Any use of force involving death gets reviewed by the office,"
Edmondson said. "It'll be handled the same way it's handled in any
use of force situation. If it's clearly a justifiable use of force,
the case is closed. If it's clearly unjustifiable force, then charges
would be filed. If it falls into a gray area, it goes before a grand jury."

Staff Researcher Barbara Hijek and Staff Writer John W. Cote
contributed to this report.