Senior Airman Roger Fortson. | Source: U.S. Air Force
Details are scarce in the fatal police shooting of a young, Black officer in the U.S. Air Force at his Florida home.
Senior Airman Roger Fortson, was killed in his apartment under circumstances that were not immediately clear after a deputy with the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office “reacted in self-defense after he encountered a 23-year-old man armed with a gun,” as the police claimed in its narrative.
Citing the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office, the Associated Press reported that the deputy responded to a vague report of “a disturbance in progress,” but it was not immediately clear what that referred to.
The deputy allegedly fired his gun only after he “identified himself as law enforcement,” the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office was careful to say, claiming the reaction was to “Hearing sounds of a disturbance.”
Of course, it’s not rare for an active duty member of the U.S. Armed Forces to be “armed with a gun,” as the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office described the encounter with Fortson, whose job with the U.S. Air Force was in part to load ammunition on Air Force planes.
