An unarmed Florida man was reportedly shot by police officers while inside his own car, outside of his own home, after going to grab some cigarettes.
Roy Middleton was returning home from work early Saturday morning when he stopped by the car he and his mother share to grab some smokes.
A neighbor who didn’t recognize Middleton phoned the local sheriff’s office to report a possible burglary, and deputies were dispatched to the scene.
That’s noteworthy enough, but what happened next was even more astonishing:
Deputies found Roy inside the car and ordered him to step out and back away with his hands in the air. He complied, and turned to face them as he did.
He was subsequently shot at.
“It was like a firing squad,” he later recalled from his hospital bed of the shots fired at him (seven in all). “Bullets were flying everywhere.”
At least one of the bullets hit Middleton’s leg; five reportedly hit his car and house, where his elderly mother had been sleeping at the time.
“I don’t understand how they could fire so many shots,” said his mother, Ceola Walker. “He wasn’t resisting or anything and he was at his own house.”
Though the wounds Roy Middleton suffered are not life-threatening, he will require several weeks of treatment before he’s back to full strength.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the incident.