Deputy killed, two others wounded in ambush shooting in Florida, sheriff says

A sheriff’s deputy was killed and two other deputies were wounded in what officials described as an ambush shooting inside a Florida home Friday night.

During a news conference, Lake County Sheriff Peyton C. Grinnell described the shooting in Eustis, a city north of Orlando, as a “very violent scene.”

He said deputies were responding to an unrelated call about a disturbance in the Orlando Hills neighborhood around 8 p.m. when they were alerted to a problem in a home a few houses down from where they were investigating.

Deputies “saw what appeared to be the back door kicked in, and they could hear a disturbance inside of that home,” Grinnell said.

When one deputy entered the house, there was a lot of gunfire, he said, and that deputy was struck. A second deputy managed to retreat, but the first one was trapped in the home.

Additional deputies responded, according to the sheriff, forming a rescue team. They were met with a “hail of gunfire,” he said.

Grinnell said the house had complaints about animals in the past, but there was nothing “right now” to indicate a history of violent crime at that address. The deputies were not expecting the gunfire. “They were ambushed,” he said.

The three deputies were taken to hospitals, and Bradley Michael Link, a master deputy sheriff, was pronounced dead just before 1 a.m., according to Lt. John Herrell, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.

Link served in the Army Reserves before he was hired as a deputy sheriff in Polk County in 2017. He joined the Lake County Sheriff’s Office in October 2019.

Grinnell said one deputy who was wounded was in stable condition and the other was in critical condition.

Inside the house, law enforcement found two people dead. The sheriff described those people as suspects. It was unclear how those two people died, Grinnell said.

A third person found in the house was wounded and taken to a hospital, he said. Additional details about that person were unavailable.

Firearms, including “everything from long guns to handguns,” were found in the house, Grinnell said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.