Chad Smith

Andrew Stanton should be dead.

His young life, mired in the St. Augustine drug scene and marred by drug addictions, should have ended on Oct. 3 at the Lil’ Champ gas station just south of the airport, when a U.S. marshal fired three rounds from his Glock 22 at him, hitting Stanton right below his right eye.

And Stanton would be dead had it not been for a freak coincidence from three years earlier, when he was jumped in Lincolnville, a few blocks from his home.

A man approached him, asked for $5, and when Stanton, 17 at the time, said he didn’t have any money, the man attacked.

Several bones in face were broken, and surgeons had to put in a metal plate into the right side of his face — the exact spot the marshal’s bullet hit would hit three years later. If not for that, he would have been killed.

Whether Stanton, who was unarmed and didn’t have a violent record, deserved to be shot — thus, die — that night is less certain.

***

As with a majority of police-involved shootings in the state, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was called upon to investigate.

Two weeks ago the department released its findings, ruling the shooting justified.

According to interviews with the officers included in a summary of the investigation, Deputy Marshal Scotty Cargile was standing 10 feet in front of Stanton’s bumper as it hit the patrol car.

Cargile said he then saw Stanton put the car in drive and accelerated forward in his “immediate direction.”

He could not retreat, he said, because the gas-pump island was “obstructing safe passage.”

“Cargile did not have an option to use less-lethal force to stop the immediate threat that Stanton posed,” the report stated.

He fired three times.

Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina and an expert on police violence and pursuits, said without knowing exactly what happened it is difficult to say whether the shooting truly was justified.

“The question is, was this guy a threat?” Alpert said.

“If he’s an objectionably reasonable threat to the officer’s life, they’re justified in taking his,” he said. But if he’s not, “deadly force would not be justified.”

The fact that Stanton was not armed does not remove him from any culpability if, in fact, his Buick was heading right for a police officer who had no outlet, save for his gun, he said.

But Stanton has said he didn’t put the car in drive and wasn’t accelerating toward any officers.

He told FDLE investigators that he put the vehicle into reverse to flee the parking lot after he saw the marshals.

“Stanton did not look behind him as he was backing up,” the report stated.

No mention of whether Stanton put the car in drive was made in the summary of his interview, which was shorter than any of the summaries of the interviews with the officers involved or with the civilians who were there.

Alpert said in these kinds of investigations, a “blue shield can go up,” meaning the police will protect their own. He by no means suggested that was true in this case.

But a way to avoid the “blue shield” — or the perception of one — is to assemble panels of police and civilians to review police-involved shootings, he said.

“Everyone needs oversight.”

***

In Stanton’s early teens, he got involved in drugs, a harbinger of what was to come years later, at least according to Alpert’s research that showed 90 percent of shooting deaths, police-involved or not, are related to drugs and gangs.

“If you’re not involved in gangs and drugs your chances of being shot are very small,” Alpert said.

Stanton was arrested and locked up for a year in a juvenile detention center in the Panhandle. He got his GED there, and when he got out he no longer needed school. His mother, Sue Ellen Stanton, said that was a mistake, as he was too young to get a decent job.

He was essentially a full-time truant.

Stanton said she knows her son has his made his fair share of mistakes, too.

And it was those mistakes that led to the point when, on Oct. 3, a fugitive taskforce assembled to bring him in. There were warrants for his arrest on charges of sale of cocaine, violating probation and aggravated assault.

But despite his transgressions, she believes her son is a good, if wayward, person who didn’t deserve to be killed that night.

“He is very grateful to God to be alive,” she said, “and he knows that if he had not been mugged when he was 17 years old he would not be.”

***

On Dec. 11 Stanton was in a St. Johns County courtroom for his sentencing hearing.

Like the shooting itself, it could have been much worse.

He was given five years in a plea deal in which he pleaded no contest to sale of cocaine, fleeing police, violating probation and criminal mischief and not guilty to aggravated assault on a police officer.

“I made a lot of poor decisions in my life,” he told the judge, saying he was high on ecstasy that night. “But on the aggravated assault, I didn’t know there was an officer behind me. If I did I wouldn’t have put the car in reverse and backed up.”

Still, he said, he should have turned himself in knowing that there were warrants for his arrest.

“I’d like to apologize for it, and God opened up my eyes,” he said. “I got shot for it and they say they lost me three times on the way to the hospital. And it’s time for me take some changes.”

At the sentencing, his attorney, Mark S. Barnett, of Jacksonville, said, “Andrew, it’s time to grow up. Do you think you’re going to do that?”

“Yes, sir,” Stanton replied, knowing he should be dead, a fact that might ultimately save his life.

A version of this article was printed Dec. 21, 2008, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.