Okaloosa Deputy Eddie Duran told fellow officers investigating his May 3 fatal shooting of Special Forces Airman Roger Fortner that the first thing he saw was an angry look on Fortson's face.
"When I saw his eyes, I saw aggression," Duran said, according to an Okaloosa Sheriff's Office internal investigation report released Friday. "It was a stare that was fixated 100% on me, not eyebrows raised, not, 'Hey what's going on? Why are you here?' It was a stare ... that showed me there was aggression."
Duran explained that the aggression, Fortson's taking a slight step forward when ordered to step back and the tilt of his arm, which was holding a gun, pushed him to use deadly force.
"I thought 'I am stuck in this area and I'm about to get shot,'" he said. "He's got me, it's either him or me at this point."
The deputy's defense of his decision to fire on Fortson did not save his job. The Sheriff's Office announced Friday that Duran was being terminated for violating policies on officer response to resistance based on a finding that Fortson had offered none.
Duran's explanation, the release of the report and identifying the deputy who shot Fortson, all a month after the shooting itself, didn't do anything to tamp down tensions between the Sheriff's Office and the Fortson family. At a Monday press conference held in Atlanta, Meka Fortson, Roger Fortson's mother, said the firing "is not justice to me."
"That's not justice, that's you thinking you're throwing me a bone and I'm OK with it," she said. "There are so many lies in that report, there is so much left out of that report. He (Roger) doesn't know how to put aggression in his eyes .... Y'all are still staining his record."
The family and their attorney, Ben Crump, called upon the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to prosecute Duran for the fatal shooting.
When the family initially turned to Crump to represent them in May, the attorney, who has represented a series of high profile civil rights cases, including those of George Floyd and Trayvon Martin, called upon the Sheriff's Office to clear his name.
He said the agency had treated Fortson as an aggressor who provoked the deadly standoff with Duran and criticized its quick dismissal of the fatal shooting as an action taken in self defense "after a deputy made contact with an armed individual at an apartment off Racetrack Road."
A video released following the initial Crump press conference seemed to show Duran firing on him almost immediately as Fortson appeared at his door holding a gun pointed downward, with his other hand held up in an apparent statement of supplication.
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"Hearing sounds of a disturbance, he (the deputy) reacted in self defense after he encountered a 23-year-old man armed with a gun after the deputy identified himself as law enforcement," the Sheriff's Office said in a news release following the early May event.
"This statement made people try to forget about Roger," said Brian Barr, an attorney for Levin Papantonio Rafferty in Pensacola who is acting as co-counsel with Crump's firm. "They made it sound so convincing, none of you covered it," he reminded the media at the time. "It didn't get any attention."
The internal investigation report was released at 3:07 p.m., Friday by Michele Nicholson, the spokesperson for the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office, with a statement from Sheriff Eric Aden.
"Since the tragedy occurred, our office has been fully accountable and transparent in its compliance with statutory requirements, providing numerous public statements, making accessible the available body-worn camera footage and other related records, meeting with Mr. Fortson’s family and legal counsel, and communicating openly with the U.S. Air Force and our community at-large," Aden's statement said.
The Friday release was followed, just under an hour later, by the agency's Records Division releasing Duran's personnel file, which the Pensacola News Journal had first requested to review on May 17.
The portion of the personnel file released chronicles Duran's time with the Sheriff's Office from 2023 until May 3 of this year, when he was put on paid administrative leave following the shooting.
There is no record of Duran's first stint with the agency from July 19, 2019, to his resignation in November of 2021.
Documents released Friday state that Duran, who appears to have been working as a School Resource Officer when he originally departed, left the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office in 2021 "to follow his spouse to a career opportunity outside Florida."
The Fortson family on Monday seemed to question the original resignation.
"He resigned and came back," said Meka Fortson. "Let the world know why he resigned and came back."
Neither Barr nor anyone from Crump's team made themselves available Monday to discuss the statements made at the press conference.
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The portion of the Duran personnel file that was released indicates that he was a decorated U.S. Army veteran who held expert marksmanship badges in both the pistol and rifle. He spent time as a military policeman and started his law enforcement career in Oklahoma before moving to Okaloosa County.
It also indicates that he was spending his last days as a full time deputy sheriff. On April 30 he emailed the Human Resources Division at the Sheriff's Office to notify it that "due to family hardships" he wanted to resign his full time position effective May 30 to move to part time.
In addition to the interview with Duran, the nearly 30-page investigative report released last week provides some interesting, and in some cases conflicting, testimony from witnesses.
Due to redactions to the body of the report, the names of the witnesses are not available, and it is not perfectly clear how many were interviewed.
One witness, who obviously lived in close proximity to Fortson, said that she could hear "everything" said in his apartment through an air conditioning vent in her bedroom.
She said she heard arguing coming from the apartment on May 3 unlike the "banter" she had heard previously.
"I was like 'it's never been like this and I've been here for six months,'" she said. "That's why it was kind of concerning for me."
The witness also said she never heard a female's voice during the course of the loud argument. It has since been revealed that Fortson was speaking to his girlfriend via Facetime and was alone in his apartment when Duran arrived.
"I couldn't hear anyone back, but I just assumed, because he was so loud," the witness said. "Sometimes when you're getting yelled at you just kind of like, uh, I'm in trouble. I was just like, okay, maybe she's not yelling back."
By contrast Fortson's girlfriend, also interviewed, denied that she and Fortson had been arguing. She said he was playing video games when the first knock came at the door.
"He said 'Who is it?' and also said, 'I don't know who that could be because nobody comes to my house,'" the girlfriend testified.
The girlfriend had no recollection of Fortson saying anything about police, which Duran said he'd heard through the door. She also said she had no recollection of anyone identifying themselves as being from the Sheriff's Office, which Duran clearly did based on video from his body camera.
She testified that as the knocking continued Fortson said "I'm gonna go grab my gun, 'cause I don't know who that is.'"
