Florida gunman kills 4, including mom still holding baby: Sherriff Grady Judd full press conference

thank you ladies and gentlemen for being with me this afternoon i first want to introduce to you if you don't know brian haas our state attorney i think simply the very best state attorney any place in the nation and then we have assistant chief of police in lakeland sammy taylor who's with us today as well both of them will speak and i do want to point out for those that may say well where's the chief he's homo covid and he's quarantining and he offered to come to work and the two assistant chiefs said do us a favor chief stay home and get well we also have major chris colson and my chief of staff today steve lester with us now i'm going to take a few minutes to outline what we know at this point in the investigation i'm going to recap some of what we talked about this morning but i need to underscore it now for everyone that this event started about 4 23 this morning we gave our first briefing early this morning and this is the second one certainly in like 10 hours anything i say is subject to modification or correction at a later time but as is the policy here in the 10th judicial circuit we always provide all the information that we can as soon as we can so the community will know what we know it's likely that some of the details that i give you today will change as the investigation and the crime scene work goes forward and it's also important to note that there's some information that we cannot validate yet and or details that we will determine later but we do have a lot of information to release concerning the suspect before i start the chronological series of events i want to tell you clearly and unequivocally that at this point in the investigation we find zero connection between our shooter our murderer and our victims he lives in brandon and i will explain that later but i wanted to clear say that clearly because the first thing you will ask of after hearing this information well certainly there had to be some connection we find zero connection at this point in the investigation so here's what occurred about 7 23 saturday evening we received a call of a suspicious person and vehicle on socral loop road in the unincorporated area of north lakeland it's kind of a mix of rural and suburban area nice community wonderful people we arrived within six minutes and when we arrived the suspect was gone the witness told us that he pulled up and said words to the effect that god sent me here to speak with one of your daughters amber and so they said nope no one here by the name of amber i'll give you the chronology later on by another person person's version but at that point in time the suspect wouldn't leave and he stopped on the side of the road where he saw a guy mowing so the guy mowing went and got another person and when i have to talk about another person understand that we have marsy's law in the state of florida so unless victims give you the op the permission or victims relatives gives you permission you cannot identify who they are so the our victim who i will discuss in a few minutes ago that told us that we can talk to him goes and gets this other person and they go what do you want here well i'm here to talk to amber you see god sent me here because she's going to commit suicide so this other person reconfirmed there's no amber here you leave or we're going to call law enforcement and they did and he left and we arrived we spent 22 minutes at the scene and in the area looking for this vehicle and it was nowhere to be found nine hours later lieutenant tompkins who is patrol lieutenant in the northwest district is in the area of highway 98 north and duff road and he's hears two bursts of what he believes to be automatic gunfire he notifies communications he immediately grabs all of his available deputies and they start to the area he doesn't even know where the gunfire is coming from other than it's to his north and to his east from where he is almost immediately the sheriff's office began getting 911 calls of an active shooter now we have a protocol in place at the sheriff's office and we partner with all all of our police departments and our state police when we send out an active shooter call everyone comes and that's what occurred on this particular occasion at about 4 22 this morning whenever we notified everyone that there was an active shooter our deputies were coming from not only the northwest district but other districts of the county the lakeland police department who's our partner and our colleague and a professional police agency and our dear friends of course they sent us everybody they had so we started rushing a lot of people to the scene quickly so lieutenant tompkins arrives at the scene and when he arrives at the scene there's a truck on fire in the front yard and there's popping sounds from the truck and you immediately notice there's these glow sticks kind of in a path from the road up past the residence as if it's creating a path and at that particular time he notices and and his colleagues notice that there's a guy in camo outside they did not see a firearm and he ran back into the house well ladies and gentlemen in that particular area 4 30 5 o'clock in the morning before you may be getting up going into the woods that's not totally unexpected dress if it weren't for the gunfire but they see no guns he runs into the suspect runs into the house and then there's another volley of gunshots and they could hear a woman screaming and a baby whimpering at that point lieutenant tompkins and his team attend attempt to make entry through the front door and it's blocked they go around to the back door lieutenant tompkins goes into or or forces his way into the house and is immediately confronted with this same person who now is wearing bulletproof vest camo knee protection head protection and there's a shootout the suspect shoots at our deputy our lieutenant and our lieutenant shoots back as we know now apparently striking him he retreats back into the house lieutenant retreats back we set up a perimeter that time the suspect starts shooting toward our deputies from inside the house we begin to lay down directive fire so that we can get three deputies to a safe location who have been pinned down by the gunshots all this time our colleagues from the police department arriving in fact one of our colleagues from the lakeland police department actually got there in time to help send directed fire back toward the house from which we were being shot so now our deputies are shooting like a police has a officer that's shooting and everything goes silent we have air support there and air support notices a guy coming out of the house notifies the perimeter units and he's got his hands up he surrenders and it's our suspect when he surrenders now we're helling into the house and we find out there's a an 11 year old female victim who is calling back to us she's significantly injured and sergeant graham once again another hero that was there that night rushed into the house and rescued the 11 year old who had multiple gunshot wounds i'll give you this preliminary number it's subject to change we don't know how many of them are entrants and exits but she has at least seven bullet holes that we've counted immediately she was transported to tampa general hospital tempe general hospital is simply the greatest trauma unit you can find any place in the nation it's about 35 miles away and because she was a juvenile trauma patient that's where the protocols say that she went and she couldn't be in better hands in the meantime we've got the suspect in custody he's injured he goes into a lakeland police car the lakeland police car drives him to the perimeter where fire and rescue fire rescue pulp fire rescue is staging they put him on an ambulance and rush him to the lakeland trauma center for help on the way according to the lakeland police officers while on the way to the hospital and while at the hospital he made statements like he'd been taking methamphetamine of course there are people across the state and nation that think that's a low-level non-violent drug well they couldn't be more wrong i've got empirical evidence to the contrary i wish they would quit saying that publicly and i wish the politicians would quit paying attention to it because taking him at his word and face value this drug is anything but low-level and non-violent he also said that he was a survivalist and he said statements like you know why i did this so we worked to secure the scene we were significantly concerned about booby traps because it was evident to us that with him laying out this pathway for us he wanted to draw us into an ambush so it took a period of time for us to deal with that issue the 11 year old little girl when questioning her made the statement that there's three more people in the house who are dead and they were so let me stop there for a minute and go over what we know about the people in the house the suspect first and foremost is brian riley he's 33 years of age brian went into the house and he shot and killed number one victim who gave us permission to release his name justice gleason justice is 40 years of age then he's shot and then this is in no specific order our victim number two is a white female who does whose family doesn't want her name released she's 33 years of age victim number three is a white male that's three months old i went into the crime scene and saw victim 2 the 33 year old white female holding this infant in her arms and then both deceased then there is another small apartment or house beyond behind this house to the west of this house the suspect had gone in there and shot and killed victim number four who was a mother and the grandmother to the infant she is 62 years of age and of course i told you about the white female victim 5 that was 11 she is a student as i'm told at lake gibson middle school she has undergone surgery i don't know if she's still in surgery at this hour she's certainly expected to recover and we thank god for that but in addition to that if he's not evil enough he shot and killed the family dog and if the ironies aren't horrible enough this is one more bit of horrible irony the dog's name was deoji and the dog was named after one of our canines that was shot and killed in the line of duty along with the canine handler in 2005. so let me tell you about brian riley the information we know at this time he was a marine he did four years of service he was honorably discharged and did another three years in the reserve he was deployed to iraq in 2008 afghanistan during 2009-2010 and he during that period of time was designated as a sharpshooter he's currently employed by ess global corporation in executive protection as a bodyguard and to provide security we located his girlfriend who was absolutely totally cooperative and she said she had been dating him approximately four years she said he had ptsd i've seen him depressed i've never seen him violent she said but a week ago today meaning last sunday he did security at a church in orlando and he came home and he said you know god spoke to him and now he can talk directly to god and she said i've never seen that kind of behavior she said but once again he wasn't violent and then later in the week he said that god told him to go to the hurricane relief and to take supply so all through the week he was buying supplies so that he could make a trip to provide hurricane relief from hurricane ida she said he came home on one day he became he was becoming more erratic he wasn't sleeping at night and he bought a thousand dollars worth of cigars to take as a relief present and he said that god said that he should do that so he came home saturday evening and said he saw a man on a lawnmower and god gave him this vision that his daughter amber was going to commit suicide so he told this man that i need to talk to your daughter amber that she's going to commit suicide god told me and the guy said hey there's no one here by the name of amber but he was insistent the guy told him to leave but he was insistent so the guy who we believe is victim one we're not absolutely 100 percent confirmed with this but we believe our victim won justice he goes and gets another witness which is one of our victims she comes to talk to him and he's they said look buddy there's no amber here you need to leave or we're calling law enforcement that's when about 7 23 our deputy arrives we spend like 22 minutes there looking for him and he's gone but what we didn't know at the time is he had left and gone back to brandon and when he gets back to brandon he talks to his girlfriend and he says oh before he goes back to brandon he tells them look you don't need to call the cops because i'm the cops for god they tell him to leave or we're going to call the cops so 7 30ish 7 20 he leaves now we know that we didn't know this morning he went back to brandon and talked to his girlfriend she said look you're not talking to god directly he gets mad and said there's no room for doubters in my life god gave me a gift and i'm talking directly with god she says we've never had an argument like this he didn't threaten anybody she said so he went to his man cave and i went to bed i woke up at 6 30 this morning and he was gone so i turned on my gps and saw that his cell phone and we know his vehicle was on soaker loop road they began to get news reports so she grabbed his father and the father's wife and cain met us and talked to us we also know that brian has a conceal weapons license but this is brian he has virtually no criminal history virtually not back when he's a teenager he had a small charge and then just almost nothing so we're not dealing with a traditional criminal here but what we're dealing with is someone who obviously had mental health issues at least this last week had ptsd and whether or not we followed that back to the military we don't know as he's interviewing with us he's trying to convince us that he's mentally ill that he's very in tune with his statements and his admissions but he says at one point to our detectives they begged for their lives and i killed them anyway he's evil in the flesh he was a rabid animal our hearts and our prayers go out to the family of those that are injured and injured and deceased it's just a blessing from the good lord that they're in the shootout and the subsequent volleys of shootouts that my deputies and our colleagues from or a colleague from the lakeland police department weren't shot and killed as well the crime scene will take hours and hours and hours and days on a cursory look we identified at least two and maybe three firearms we see different calibers of shell casings from ammunition inside there literally they are just beginning the crime scene investigation at this point i want to introduce to you our state attorney who once again as i said before i believe is simply the very best and i'm honored that he would come out and be with us today and personally direct the prosecution piece of this investigation as our shooter brian reilly has been treated at the hospital and released and now is in custody in this building while we process the paperwork mr haas thank you sheriff i guess the the big question that all of us have is why i know that's the thing that's been on my mind the whole day and unfortunately and so frustrating that we will not know the why today maybe ever but we do know that a lot of folks have been terribly impacted our community has been a victim of this terrible tragedy and the family members of those who have been killed it is incredible given what i saw at the scene that no law enforcement officers were injured or killed and it just highlights the dangers that our law enforcement officers are put themselves in harm's way every single day every single night and it's incredible that we don't have more victims based on the weapons and what we saw at the scene so obviously this begins and continues a very long process that i imagine will will go on for some time to come once the arrest is officially made and the court system will then have the case we will provide updates as we can but this we expect will go on for quite some time thank you and i've also asked if assistant chief taylor would speak on behalf of the lakeland police department and their response to assist us for which chief i'm i'm very thankful that you all were there and did a wonderful job with us thank you sheriff on behalf of the men and women lakeland police department i'll be briefing my comments but i do want to reinforce what uh with mr haas and the sheriff have said about the heroic actions of the officers and the deputies out there um and i've used the word horrific before when i've spoken to you on other cases but i can tell you the scene out there is absolutely horrific and it would have been more horrific if we'd have had deputies or police officers injured and by the grace of god i don't know how they weren't i mean the the deputy the lieutenant engaged in a firefight right in the doorway the back door you know he chose to make a heroic entry into that house and then we have other deputies that were willing to run towards the gunfire so i can't i can't compliment the heroic actions of those uh those folks that were at the scene um the fact that the uh that no one was injured more than than what we had no deputies or police officers injured is by the grace of god i don't know how it didn't happen so i want to compliment those guys we do have one officer of the local police department that did return fire obviously he'll be out on a paid administrative leave which is which is normal um and then the other two officers that were there from our agency uh or will be returning to duty tonight if they feel like it so again thank you for coming out and thank you to uh sheriff's office for doing a tremendous job on this as sheriff said there's a lot of work that still has to be done it's uh it's uh uh they're gonna be after the rest of the day and maybe into the next several days working on this scene so but thank you for coming out chief can we get the name of your officer in the provided support fire we'll provide that to you later yeah yeah the suspect's name is brian b-r-y-a-n riley r-i-l-e-y ryan is 33 years of age and our and our victim is justice j-u-s-t-i-c-e gleason g-l-e-a-s-o-n he's 40 years of age are there any other questions for mr hassan well he's playing he's trying to play games with word games with the detectives which is a clear indicator that he knew exactly what he was doing he hasn't he just explained that they begged for their life and that he shot and killed him anyway and the the the interesting thing and we don't know the answer to that not underscore we don't and as mr haas said we may never know how did he end up at that house and he lived in brandon and then he was able to find him way himself a way back to that same house nine hours later his girlfriend said he made zero statements about being violent or dangerous to those people at that residence it simply appears at the early stage and this is of the investigation and this is conjecture and it certainly can change as but he just happened to be the unlucky one mowing the yard and that's where brian stopped that day but if there's more information it because we're sitting here with the same questions that you are and everyone is in the community is why there this is not near his home he has no relationship that we're aware of to any of them and we can't answer that at this time this the 62 year old we can't give all of the relationship well we can tell you that yes they're related we just according to marcy's law can't release information that would lead to the identity of any of the victims justice told us we could use his name or we wouldn't be able to use his name sure do you have an order in which they were each killed we have no idea at this point the investigation and we may never know that but once again we've not been able to have any detailed conversation with our 11 year old victim who sergeant graham heroically rescued from the house she couldn't walk from the house she was too injured and he ran in there and rescued her i hate to ask this question you can ask anything where were the victims shot especially yeah we're not going to release where the victims were shot and quite frankly i don't know where all they were shot at this early stage but we wouldn't anyway but they were they were shot significantly to immediately pass away do you know at what point they were shot because you said one of the deputies heard the woman and the baby we it's all conjecture we don't know we think some of them were shot before we were there when we got there and he saw us and he ran back inside we didn't see any guns and we heard another volley of shots and that's when we heard the woman scream and the baby and one and then we tried to enter and that's when we had the the one of our uh volleys of gun fights with him and apparently shot him on that particular occasion but once again he had bulletproof vests on and was garbed up then we didn't hear any other shots that we heard past that point where as they were coming out toward us we don't know when he shot the lady in the apartment behind the house my conjecture at this point is before we arrived but i you know but we don't know at this point in the investigation we may never know we just know we had a madman with a lot of guns that shot and killed innocent people how are the because when officers kick foxy came back to the staging area they definitely had a sad look on their face and sort of uh not not entirely but a sad look however well once it's important to understand we train law enforcement officers to be their best at the worst of times and that's what our law enforcement officers were last night they were their best at the worst of times but anytime someone dies it's tragic but when you see somebody so heartless so calculated that they will shoot a mother clinging to her three-month-old baby and kill the baby and shoot family dog this guy is heartless and calculated with his murder he had all kinds of opportunity to change and it's all once again conjecture and speculation but he laid down these glow sticks from the road up past the initial house up behind the house i think and the preliminary information he was trying to create a diversion or an illusion or or create an opportunity for these deputies to follow these glow sticks and see what would happen and at the same time keep in mind that the truck's on fire and it's popping and crackling and burning so you got the division diversion there the deputies have already heard volleys of gunshots now they're seeing glow sticks and this thing this thing is deteriorating around them very rapidly and as my colleagues here said it how we ended up not with a lot of deputies and police officers shot and killed is just absolutely amazing but for but for their training sure it's early and you probably have still a lot of questions but any indication on brian's history of drug use did the girlfriend indicate that this was out of the norm for him to be on math the dog the girlfriend was shocked she said i didn't know of any drug use and our statements are based upon his statements and uh who said he had teached you something from ptsd did he see a doctor at all don't know that's just what we were told were there any drugs found in his vehicle have you searched his home we will we are partnering with the hillsborough sheriff's office to execute a search warrant at his residence his girlfriend is totally cooperative with us in that endeavor she is as mortified and shocked as i believe all of us are she said she didn't see this coming or obviously she would have done something about it we know that there's at least two possibly three guns in the house from a cursory look we've not executed our search warrant and done our complete crime scene will we find more than that i don't know two possibly three in the house our victims we have a total of five victims the 11 year old which is alive and four that are deceased plus the canine deoji is shot and deceased as well the family dog too there was another 10 year old little girl that we were looking for because it was the sister of the 11 year old we found her alive and well at family at another family's house were there any other survivors in that house or the house behind or he's right no survival he shot all the people he shot everybody in the house was the 10 year old in the house and ran out the 10 year old was never there at all we just knew that there was a sister that was unaccounted for she was never there she was at a relative the whole time she had she was not involved in it in any way can you tell us in what rooms each i don't think it'd be appropriate to talk about where we found them at this point in time but we can tell you that they were huddling and hiding in fear the guns uh the gun that was used or the guns that were used i know you mentioned rapid fire things like that were these high-powered rapid fire type yes they were and we will obviously be doing further analysis i anticipate once the crime scene work is complete we'll probably have an update and wrap up this information and hopefully be able to show you the firearms at that point in time so we have to my knowledge at least two people in the last 10 months who are mentally ill who have gone in and just slaughtered people what is the solution to this well first and foremost when i was asked if you didn't hear the question that we've had two people in the last 10 months that that where the mentally ill people have gone and slaughtered them it's important to underscore just because you have mental health problems does not mean you're not criminally liable he's criminally liable he played ward games with us during the interviews to try to set a defense that doesn't work but at the end of the day when you look this guy prior to this morning was a war hero he fought for his country in afghanistan and iraq he was a decorated military veteran and this morning he's a co-calculated murderer whose girlfriend of about four years it's not like she's just known him a month or two said that yeah we've noticed that you know that occasionally has a little depression in their words ptsd from the war but the reality of it is this nation doesn't do enough for those that are mentally ill now there are millions that have mental health episodes that don't do this so because people have trouble with your mental illness doesn't mean they're going to be a mass murderer this was a mass shooting this was an active shooter event but my goodness as horrible as it is we see mass shooters at theaters and at churches and at schools and at businesses but who would ever think in a community with a 49 year crime low that you would have a mass shooter at 4 30 on a sunday morning in a quiet safe neighborhood and it's evident when you look at his lack of criminal history so when we're dealing with these active shooters these active assailants these are not traditional criminals criminals are criminals they're thugs they'll steal they'll use drugs and take your stuff but a normal what i call run-of-the-mill garden variety bat patch thug and criminal is not a mass murderer this guy was a mass murderer and tomorrow a lot a lot of youth reporters will try to ask the question is this connected to what happened over the last couple weeks in afghanistan and did he lose his mind because of that what was your response to that my response would be that that would be conjecture at best it would could be folly or fantasy that because there was no communications at this point in the investigation that tied this conduct to our last couple of weeks in afghanistan but what we do know is we have a guy who was becoming delusional and his girlfriend said he progressively got worse as the week went on but still he wasn't being violent according to her or threatening any violence do you know where you never said where he was no and quite frankly i don't know at this moment in time but he was treated and released so and it might have been that the injury struck him via his bulletproof vest that he was wearing i just don't have that information at this point in time but he was treated and released he also as as i said earlier while in the hospital went from being calm to jumping up and trying to grab one of the lakeland police officers pistols who was gracious enough to work security on him why we were still at the scene and the lakeland police officer had to fight with him in the emergency room sheriff you've been in law enforcement a long time you've seen a lot of things i guess i'm just curious not where this ranks because every tragedy is awful to the people involved but what you think about this and looking back at your career well you know i've done this job my entire adult life and i've seen a lot of tragedy and a lot of sadness and there's things you can't unsee i will never be able to unsee that mother with that deceased infant in her arms as they both lay their debt it is a horror of the utmost magnitude so [Music] i have seen other horrible events before this ranks in the top ten top five maybe top three it is it's sad when anyone dies at the hands of a murderer this man's evil in the flesh it was total total unprovoked mass murder and there's not enough adjectives or descriptives to point out how angry i am with him or how sad i am for the family and anything i said would certainly anything appropriate to say certainly is not fit for television or social media and i've said some pretty pretty outlandish things before and to keep from going down the path about how i really feel i should say nothing what kind of dog was it a big dog big family dog i don't know i saw it deceased it was a very very large family dog but i don't know what kind it was it was it was an evident to me from looking at it what kind of what what breed it was anything else sure you said that they had reported that they did call law enforcement when they saw him in the neighborhood he just kind of touch on how important it is for community to to point out stuff like that and to follow that question then i would say did you guys how long did you stay in the area did you guys leave a deputy around the area or can you even do that do you have manpower yeah it's first off we were there 22 minutes it's not like we stopped and they said where is he he's gone and we left we were there 22 minutes we it's a saturday night we get not tens not hundreds but thousands of reports of suspicious people suspicious vehicles so to suggest at that moment in time that we got time to stop and do an investigation on every suspicious person and vehicle is uh is not possible and there was no reason to think that when he came the first time other than talking a rational he made zero threats to anyone according to the information were provided zero threats he was just a guy that was saying some really goofy stuff well news flash people say really goofy stuff hundreds of times a day that we're made aware of and thousands of times in this state and tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of times a day across this country we can't do a full-fledged investigation every time somebody says something goofy how in fact the lieutenant was close by sort of benefiting to that 11 year old who isn't alive you know the irony of this is this county is 2 000 square miles we have a population of 720 000 people over 2 000 square miles this county is bigger than the state of rhode island the fact that we happen to have a deputy close enough to hear the gunfire is was remarkable in and of itself our response was quick and our backup from the police department was quick and we engaged quick it just wasn't quick enough and once again when we saw the guy in his camos and he ran back into the house at that point in time we didn't see a gun i don't have any information to leave us so you can't just have a policy of shooting people in the front yard that's wearing camo but my goodness all good old boys you know that hunt and fish and polk county where canada at 4 30 in the morning that's that's not unusual they're getting up going out and fish so in and of itself there was nothing suspicious there initially other than the gunfire but we didn't see a gun and as you well know you can't engage someone who's running away from you when you don't see a gun and see if an imminent threat and none of those presented i can assure you our folks are well trained had we had the legal opportunity with no alternative to talking down we would have shot him a lot but that wasn't the circumstance that presented itself and our deputies professionally did what they should have done and they took him into custody when he came out with his hands up with no gun now as this investigation rolls out we'll we'll bring you more information that we know and we're certain that social media will be wide open and if you don't like the version of facts as we know them you can see some crazy stuff on social media whether you choose to report it up to you because we've already heard that he said that she said that he said that she said in all kinds of stuff that to our investigation didn't occur just people surmising what they think might have happened so you know basically what we know at this point in the investigation other than the logistics of questions like where were they shot that we're not talking about okay thank you very much have a good day

Channel: FOX 13 Tampa Bay

Views: 361,331

Keywords: Bryan Riley, lakeland shooting, polk county florida, survivalist on meth, sheriff grady judd, former marine, lakeland family murdered, man shoots family, who is Bryan Riley

Id: 3aUvj9oSbpk

Length: 48min 22sec (2902 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021