A Florida man tweaking on meth survived the jaws of an alligator but failed to outlive a hail of gunfire when he attacked police who were trying to help him.
Sheriff deputies fatally shot Timothy Patrick Schulz, 42, after he emerged from an alligator infested lake in Lakeland, confronted arriving cops and then went for the shotgun in their running patrol car, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
Schulz had been released from the Polk County Jail nearly a week earlier after being booked for possession of meth. He had a long history of drug related arrests, authorities said.
“This is just crazy stuff, Ok?” Judd told reporters this week. “You know that it’s got to be true. You can’t make it up.”
Deputies became involved in the Memorial Day incident when a convenience store clerk at dawn reported a man acting strangely and asking to call his son, authorities said. Police went to the store but couldn’t find the man.
Nearly two hours later, people reported a man later identified as Schulz swimming in a lake that contained multiple alligators. One witness tried to give him a life preserver, the sheriff said, and another tried to speak with him but received only a growl in response.
An alligator then bit Schulz in the arm, but he freed himself, witnesses said. As deputies arrived, he waded out of the lake and grabbed the pair of garden shears left outside at a nearby home.
Schulz charged the deputies with the makeshift weapon, the sheriff said, prompting one of the deputies to fire a stun gun at the man, but it had no effect.
“They were still trying to take him in peacefully,” the sheriff told reporters. “The fact that he was bitten by an alligator and still continued his rampage is shocking.”
Schultz then bolted to their running squad car, jumped inside and tried to commandeer the service shotgun officers carry on patrol.
That’s when deputies opened fire, hitting Schultz with bullets that smashed through the windshield of their own cruiser.
The sheriff blamed Schultz’s behavior on the dangerous amphetamine, saying the drug causes its user to disassociate and become almost superhuman.
“If you’re on enough meth,” he said. “Then the person you see is not the person that’s attacking.”
Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more
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