Civil rights lawsuit filed in Florida deputy's killing of US Airman Roger Fortson
The complaint filed in a Pensacola courthouse alleges that Deputy Eddie Duran used excessive and unconstitutional deadly force when he shot Senior Airman Roger Fortson just seconds after the Black 23-year-old opened his apartment door on May 3, 2024. Duran identifies as Hispanic, according to his voter registration.
Fortson's family is represented by Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney who has been involved in a number of cases involving law enforcement killings of Black people, including those of Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Tyre Nichols and George Floyd.
Duran has pleaded not guilty to a charge of manslaughter with a firearm.
The complaint also details alleged failures by the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office in training and supervision and claims that staff at the apartment complex where Fortson lived provided misleading information that led to the fatal law enforcement response.
Duran came to Fortson's door in Fort Walton Beach in response to a report of a physical fight inside an apartment. A worker there identified Fortson's apartment as the location of a loud argument, according to sheriff's investigators.
Fortson, who was assigned to the 4th Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt Field, was alone at the time, talking with his girlfriend on a FaceTime video call.
Duran's body camera video showed what happened next.
The deputy pounded at the door repeatedly and yelled, 'Sheriff's office — open the door!' Fortson opened the door with his legally purchased gun in his right hand, pointed to the ground.
The deputy said, 'Step back,' then immediately began firing. Fortson fell backward onto the floor. Only then did the deputy yell, 'Drop the gun!'
Deputies had never been called to Fortson's apartment before, 911 records show, but they had been called to a nearby unit 10 times in the previous eight months, including once for a domestic disturbance.
The fatal shooting renewed debate on police killings and race, and occurred against a wider backdrop of increased attention by the military to racial issues in its ranks.
It is highly unusual for Florida law enforcement officers to be charged for an on-duty killing. Convictions in such cases are even rarer.
___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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Boston Globe
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How New England built the Plains
Advertisement But something shifted quickly and irrevocably that night he wrote about in 1854. It began with a man named Anthony Burns. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Burns had stowed away for weeks in the belly of a ship to escape enslavement in Virginia. By the time he stepped ashore in Boston, he had become both free and criminal — property that had, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, escaped its rightful owner. When federal marshals arrested him on false pretenses, hoping to sneak him back into bondage before the public noticed, Boston erupted. The courtroom became a spectacle. The public was barred. Burns's own lawyer was rendered powerless — forbidden to object, speak, or protect his client in any meaningful way. And in a final insult, a government agent tricked Burns into dictating a letter affirming his status as an enslaved person. The judge empathized with Burns but nonetheless ruled against him. Advertisement Slavery, it turned out, didn't need Southern soil. It could be enforced right in the cradle of abolition, in close proximity to the Boston Common. Amos A. Lawrence in 1880. Wikimedia Commons The city's Black residents, who had always known the fragility of their freedom, mobilized first. The pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury demanded Burns's release. Protests filled the streets. Fearing an uprising, the federal government fortified the courthouse even before the trial had concluded. President Franklin Pierce ordered troops to secure the building. Soldiers lined the entrances, and chains were fastened across the courthouse doors. What changed wasn't just policy. It was perception. The moral quarantine in which elite white New Englanders had sequestered themselves failed. Slavery had entered their bubble. Henry David Thoreau, speaking just weeks after Burns's trial, demanded that his fellow citizens choose moral clarity over legal comfort. 'Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?' he asked. 'Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made?' Amos Lawrence and others like him — well-heeled, genteel, cloistered — took notice. Eventually they also took action, albeit moderated and carried out on their own terms. Calls for a more direct confrontation with slavery were not only imaginable at the time — they were already echoing through New England's streets, pulpits, and newspapers. In the wake of Burns's arrest, some abolitionists demanded open defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. Many had supported similar efforts just three years earlier, when Shadrach Minkins, who had fled enslavement in Norfolk, Va., was forcibly rescued from a Boston courthouse by Black activists and white allies. With the help of the Boston Vigilance Committee, Minkins escaped via the Underground Railroad and reached safety in Canada. 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Families armed with shovels, hymnals, rifles, and righteous intent. The Emigrant Aid Company raised funds through an exhaustive network of some 3,000 churches, many of them Quaker or Congregationalist. 'For Religion,' their circulars promised. 'For Education. For Temperance.' They were advocating a version of abolition that didn't disturb Boston's own social order. It was freedom as export. Righteousness at a distance. The ask was modest — $20 per settler, roughly $700 today. Enough to transport and equip a family to settle Kansas on behalf of abolition. Donations flooded in. The Rev. Horace James from Worcester sent $23.37, boasting of his congregation, 'Never did fingers and thumbs move more nimbly in the performance of any good work.' To him that meant that 'verily there is hope for Kansas.' Others weren't so flush with cash. The Rev. W.C. 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Advertisement And Kansas, as it turned out, bled. Missourians — armed and incensed — flooded across the border. Ballot boxes were stuffed. Pro-slavery militias burned pressrooms. In 1856, just as the violence crested, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a searing speech comparing Kansas to a raped virgin and accusing Southern politicians of barbarism. In a more familiar scene, days later, a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, stormed into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner unconscious with a metal-tipped cane. This was the war New England had hoped to fund rather than fight. But the borders were dissolving. Eventually, the South seceded. And when Kansas did enter the Union as a free state in 1861, its fate had been sealed not by New England idealism but by the absence of Southern senators in Congress. 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Even here, in the bluest of blue states, there's talk of 'indoctrination,' 'wokeness,' and 'elites out of touch.' And here too, migrants are detained often without the norms and sorts of protections we assumed would be durable. Advertisement In the 1850s, Lawrence and his cohort were shaken into action by a single courtroom scene on Court Street. But their response came with a caveat: They would confront injustice without addressing it at home. Today, Court Street is quieter, humming more predictably with foot and car traffic — but the moral decisions we must make haven't gotten easier. Who we detain, whose histories we erase, which freedoms we underfund — all still happen in that old Boston bubble. The difference now is that there's no Kansas to send our convictions to.
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