Nestled between the sand dunes of Anastasia Island and St. Augustine s Lighthouse is Salt Run a tidal creek that serves as a dedicated anchorage and free home for sailboaters. Many of the boats lying at anchor are known as live-a-boards ; their hulls are encrusted by barnacles, and their masts are bare. Some of the owners are merely eccentrics, harmless characters who fancy themselves as living out a bit part in a Hemingway novel.
Others, however, have a darker side.
A Routine Beginning
On the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 6, 2002, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) Officer Randy Bowlin s work day started out normally. His patrol area covered the St. Augustine area, which included the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) and the Atlantic Ocean.
Although he is a full-time water patrol officer, Bowlin s duties are not all law enforcement related. On this day, Bowlin s first priority was to release a batch of baby sea turtles an endangered species that had been rehabilitated from earlier injuries. He placed them in his patrol boat, a 25' Mako powered by twin 225 horsepower (HP) Mercury outboards, and left from St. Augustine, heading offshore in search of floating Sargasso grass. The grass would provide needed cover so the young turtles could escape predators and have a better chance of survival. He found a large patch of grass 15 miles out and released the turtles there.
Bowlin then turned his attention to other matters.
He had recently received numerous complaints of commercial shrimp boats trawling less than a mile from the beach. This is an illegal activity normally conducted at night. Because he was already far offshore and sunset was only an hour off, he waited there, drifting in the currents until nightfall.
When it was dark, Bowlin put his boat up on a plane and worked his way back shoreward with his lights out. Once he was just off of the beach, he turned south. Scanning ahead with his radar, he spotted six shrimp boats inside the mile limit about 10 miles away. As Bowlin closed with the shrimp boats, they picked him up on their radar and moved back into legal waters just as Bowlin reached them. Bowlin came alongside two of the trawlers and warned their captains not to fish inside the prohibited area.
Bowlin then continued south and cut through Mantanzas Inlet. The Inlet would take him to the ICW and back to St. Augustine. As he was passing the dock at Fort Mantanzas Park, he spotted a park ranger standing under a dock light and stopped to talk with him.
As they chatted, the subject of officer-involved shootings came up, and the park ranger told Bowlin about two of their guys who had just been shot at by drug smugglers in Arizona. As they parted, the ranger told Bowlin, You be careful out there.
Initial Contact
Bowlin headed north on the ICW. At about 2300 hrs, he passed under the Bridge of Lions in St. Augustine and followed the channel as it cut east across Mantanzas Bay.
Salt Run was just ahead on the right.
It was very dark, recalls Bowlin, And I was looking for an unlit channel marker that s very hard to see. My boat was just on a plane when out of my peripheral vision I saw a small boat go by whoosh off the port (left) side of my boat, blacked out. I turned around and looked, and for a moment thought I had run him over.
Bowlin brought his patrol boat around to check on the operator of the vessel to make sure he was all right. As he pulled alongside, he could see it was a 7' blue dinghy powered by a 2 HP outboard. A man was sitting in the boat with one hand on the motor s tiller, putting along at a leisurely pace toward the entrance of Salt Run. Bowlin ordered him to Stop! several times. The operator stared straight ahead, ignoring Bowlin s instructions. Finally, Bowlin eased his boat in front of the dinghy to stop it.
I could smell an odor of alcohol coming from him, says Bowlin. His voice was slurred, and he was talking loudly. He was one of the friendliest drunks I had ever encountered, and I thought, Great. I would have to run into this knucklehead when I m about to go off shift.
We did some talking, and I detected a German accent in his speech. He gave me this story that he was a cabinetmaker from Germany and had recently come over to the States on his sailboat. He told me his name was J. Michael Giairod and that his passport was on his sailboat, anchored just ahead of us in Salt Run. He said he didn t have a driver s license, which was believable. In my experience, a lot of sailboaters don t have a driver s license. The dinghy was not registered, and he had no other paperwork on him.
I had him do the horizontal gaze nystagmus test, which he did not perform properly. I asked him to do the finger count next, and he just stared at his fingers. Finally, he said, Man I really am drunk.
Bowlin tied the dinghy off to his vessel so that it was rafted alongside. He gave Giairod a life vest to wear and put his engine in gear, moving toward the sailboat at 2 or 3 knots. Bowlin continued talking with Giairod and ran his name through dispatch, trying to verify his identity. Dispatch responded with, No record found.
When Bowlin reached the sailboat (a powder blue, single-mast, 30' Tartan), he ran its registration numbers through dispatch, and it came back, No record found.
I admit, says Bowlin, that by then I was becoming a little frustrated, because the sailboat s registration numbers should have come back to someone. My intention was to get his identification, then take him over to the Lighthouse Boat Ramp, which was a quarter-mile away and finish giving him the field sobriety tasks.
Inside The Cabin
Giairod was still joking with me, continues Bowlin, not showing any signs of nervousness. I consider myself a pretty good reader of people and didn t pick up anything funny coming from him.
Giairod said, If you let me get on my boat, I ll get my paperwork for you. What really happened was that he was suckering me into that boat.
I asked him, Do you have any firearms on board? He said, No guns. I hate guns, but I do have some knives and a bow and arrow. I instructed him, We are going to go on board the vessel together. I will follow just a few feet behind, and you will point to where the paperwork is. I told him I would retrieve the paperwork and then we would go back up on deck.
We entered the cabin through a companionway [entrance] in the stern, which led down four steps into a galley. There were only about two inches on either side of my shoulders, and I had to duck my head as I stepped into the galley. We continued forward toward the berthing area, which is at the bow of the boat. I asked Giairod, Where is the paperwork? He said, Underneath my mattress. And now he was at the mattress, which came out flush to a narrow doorway with bulkheads made of cheap wood paneling on each side. He turned and sat down on the mattress facing me and lit a cigarette with his left hand.
Suddenly, his demeanor did a 180, and now I was picking up cues that indicated something was very, very wrong. He was looking at his feet and would not make eye contact with me. And he would not answer any of my questions. He was also leaning back on his right hand, which was now just behind the bulkhead, out of my sight.
I kept the best reactionary gap that I could, which was eight to nine feet, about the best you can do in a sailboat. I unsnapped my gun and rocked it out of the retention, keeping it level with the holster along my side. My first thought was, He s going to charge me with a knife.
I said, What s in your right hand? No response.
I said again, What s in your right hand? No response.
I said, Let me see your right hand, real slow.
He quickly leaned to his left, pulled his right hand in tight to his chest to get around the bulkhead and punched his arm straight out holding a pistol. So now I was looking right down the muzzle of his gun. I pulled my gun up from the hip and punched out three bang, bang, bang. One from the hip, one at mid-stroke and one pointed. Simultaneously, Giairod shot at Bowlin one time, but Bowlin didn t realize it.
I knew I d hit him, continues Bowlin, because he had fallen back on the mattress with his upper torso lying behind the bulkhead. All I could see was from his legs down. And I could see blood. I continued putting rounds down range as I backed up, until I bumped into the stairs. On my last shot, I remember seeing the slide come back and the shell casing eject. He was screaming, You ve killed me you mother #$*@! You ve killed me! I turned and ran up the stairs, feeling certain he was going to shoot me through the thin paneling of the bulkhead.
I was prepared to take a shot. I told myself, Unless he shoots you in the head or neck, you re getting up these stairs. I was mentally prepared to take one in the ass or legs. Fortunately, I was wearing my ballistic vest.
Bowlin safely retreated to his patrol boat and drove over to the Lighthouse Boat Ramp, where he waited for backup to arrive. St. Augustine police department officers and St. Johns County Sheriff s deputies, along with Bowlin s supervisor, Lieutenant Bill Head, arrived in a few minutes.
Mopping Up
Head met with all of the officers there to discuss the situation. There was a concern that Giairod was in the sailboat bleeding to death and, of course, he needed to be apprehended.
Head drove Bowlin s boat. Two St. Johns County Sheriff s deputies and two St. Augustine Police Department officers were also on board. Everyone stayed low as they approached the sailboat at an idle speed, lights out. As they neared the sailboat s stern, the officers could see Giairod lying on his back in the lower cabin, holding a pistol in his left hand across his chest. They shouted orders for him to, Drop the gun! Drop the gun! Drop the gun! Giairod dropped the pistol on the cabin floor. Officers scrambled across the stern and into the cabin, securing Giairod with handcuffs in less than a minute.
The sailboat s registration numbers were again run. This time it came back to James M. Forney, 43 years old, wanted for questioning in a homicide by the Miami Police Department. The name Giairod was one of several aliases that Forney was known to use.
Forney was lifeflighted to Shands Hospital in Jacksonville with gunshot wounds to his left knee and right hand and metal fragments imbedded in his right eye. He would later lose the eye.
Florida Department of Law Enforcement Agents arrived in the early morning hours to work the crime scene. They retrieved Forney s pistol, which turned out to be a 9mm FIE-TZ75. Bowlin turned over his 9mm Glock 17. An examination of his firearm and magazines revealed he fired seven rounds.
Upon Forney s release from the hospital, he was charged with: Attempted Murder of a Law Enforcement Officer; Giving a False Name; Boating Under the Influence; and Operating a Vessel without Navigation Lights.
Final Analysis
There are about a dozen different ways of skinning this cat, says Bowlin. And as you can imagine, I received plenty of unsolicited advice on how I could have avoided this situation. Of course, those that offer that commentary know what the outcome was. In the final analysis, Monday morning quarterbacking is always flawless. But I did the best I could under the circumstances, and I am happy to relay my experiences. Hopefully, it will help other officers avoid similar situations.
