A Florida high school, a self-described mentally ill teen and a school shooting. If it sounds familiar, it should. Except this was Sky Bouche rather than Nikolas Cruz. He smuggled a sawed off shotgun into school Friday and fired a single shot that wounded one student.

Another difference: rather than following the Scot Peterson protocols and waiting outside the building as the shooter works his way through the building, Forest High School’s resource officer, Marion County Deputy James Long, made a bee-line for the shooter.

The Forest resource officer, Marion County Sheriff’s Deputy James Long, “did not hesitate. He went right in,” Woods said at a news conference. Woods said Long heard a “large, loud banging sound” and immediately responded.

That’s right, a good guy with a gun who was on school grounds ran toward the sound of gunfire.

Unlike the Parkland shooting, Bouche apparently intended the gunfire as a cry for help.

‘I prepared to go and scare people,’ Sky Bouche recalled of the attack on Friday morning at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida, in a televised interview from behind bars with KTVU.

‘Put my shotgun in my guitar case, took two pills of Phenibut, put my tactical vest in my backpack and went to Forest,’ Bouche said. Phenibut is an anti-anxiety medication which is banned in the US but obtainable online. . . .

Bouche said that when he entered the school a girl walked by him, but he hesitated in pulling out the gun. ‘I just didn’t want to shoot or kill people, because at that point the adrenaline and the excitement just kind of faded immediately.’

Instead, he said fired through a door and dropped the gun, thinking he hadn’t hit anyone. But a 17-year-old boy on the other side of the door was struck in the ankle.

‘I could have pumped the shotgun. I didn’t, I just dropped it,’ Bouche said. Addressing the injured student he added, ‘There’s nothing I can say, I can say sorry all I want, but he can think what he wants.’

‘This is what I wanted, was to be away from everyone else, so I’m not hurting anyone else,’ he said, sitting stony faced in jailhouse stripes. ‘That was my primary goal. Cause I knew if I didn’t, you know, snap now, it would have been later and it would’ve been a hundred times worse.’

 

Bouche then turned himself in to a former teacher and waited until the SRO arrived.

The two spoke until school resource officer Deputy Jim Long and principal Brent Carson arrived and took the troubled teenager into custody.

Speaking to detectives, Bouche said the motive was to ‘inflict fear in students, but he did not intend to kill anyone.’

He told police that he purchased the shotgun in a private sale a week after the Parkland shooting and that there was no paperwork or background check for the transaction as it was a private sale.

There appears to be a significant difference in the quality of training and personnel between Broward County and Marion County. There hasn’t been any grandstanding or moral preening on the part of Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods. What a difference a few hundred miles make.

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47 COMMENTS

  1. Great…

    Now a cop doing his job merits celebration.

    The pedestal these guys have managed to put themselves on.

    • spoken like a true mouth breathing keyboard warrior who has probably never even seen someone with a gunshot wound before

      • What’s got that got to do with a person doing his expected job, without needing the headlines and celebrations?

        BTW, my nasal airway is quite patent, thanks.

        • It means that people, even well train and well intended, often don’t respond productively under stress.

          You can blame them if you want, but unless you’ve had a similar(ish) high stress experience, you won’t/can’t understand.

          I saw a US Marine Infantryman (trained and temporarily re-assigned as Military Police) and former security professional freeze and be nearly catatonic after having a firearm pointed at him by someone he believed willing to kill him. This was while he was on duty as an MP.

    • Any job well done merits celebration. In corporate America, it often comes along with promotions and bonuses. Why would police officers be any different?

      • Never but never does doing a good job come with bonuses and rewards in corporate America. That is an increasingly rare experience in large companies, where streamlined management systems leave fewer and fewer opportunities for ‘drones’ to stand out above their peers. Really, the labor management side is the only area where the free reign to accomplish the unexpected is still possible in well-run companies.

        Because with police & firefighters it comes with city keys and public accolades and a never-ending demand for more health and retirement benefits. It does deserve to be reiterated that there was no protracted gun battle, no exceptional risk to self, this really was just a good man doing the job he had been assigned (intercept and attempt to stop security threats to his station) probably while collecting easy overtime as do so many resource officers.

        Resource officers responding to a threat like they are paid to and meeting/overcoming no resistance in the process does not qualify as heroism. Same reason students aren’t heroes simply for surviving an attack, or engineers for designing planes that don’t crash.

        • There was no gun battle, but he didn’t know that there wouldn’t be at the time. Yes, it was the job he was assigned. That doesn’t make it any less impressive that he ran towards gunfire. Running into harm’s way to help others should be celebrated, whether or not it’s your job.
          Students that survive the attack and aerospace engineers don’t run towards danger, so that is a false equivalency.
          He had the choice to run towards or away from (what he thought to be) someone with a shotgun that wanted him dead. He chose to run towards it. That takes balls. His job title and a badge don’t change that.

        • Engineers have to choose to break bad news to superiors rather than hide it, and can be legally liable for their failures (unlike police officers far too often). An engineer could also face a gun battle on the way to work if we want to play hypotheticals. I’d say both groups’ risks are properly compensated by their wages, for the value they provide.

          This guy’s actions stand out because of low expectations for police competence, most recently from the Parkland response. That’s all it is. We can either expect officers to be men-among-men and treat them as such on a daily basis with high expectations, or as overpaid hall monitors who sometimes rise to the status of heroes by their personal actions above the call of duty. Can’t have it both ways. When policing was truly dangerous and undercompensated decades ago in urban areas the moral superiority was more justifiable than today.

        • Agreed

          At hooty: I am currently tasked with defending a facility. This is my job. Failure to do so would be a failure to do my job. Doing so, would be my job. Nothing more, nothing less. A hero is a mythical thing, whereas a person unwilling to actually do that which they have been hired and trained to do is fairly common. My personal opinion is that there are very few heroes in this world, though there are many who admirably fulfill their duties. Per your statement, running towards gunfire when it is a part of your duty should not be celebrated, it should be considered the bare minimum. It’s not difficult. Subordinate yourself to a cause, earn your keep, and live as necessary

    • It’s called positive reinforcement. If we want cops to run towards gunshots, when human nature generally says to run away, we need to reward them. If it helps motivate another cop to do the right thing next time, and he saves some students’ lives, I see nothing wrong with giving this guy a medal and some celebrity.

      • “men” who need positive reinforcement to defend others from harm, particularly children… Are not Men.

      • It’s called positive reinforcement.
        How about do your job or get fired without pension or benefits?
        With a zero tolerance policy no exceptions and 100% enforcement.
        I’m 100% positive they will be motivated either to nut up or to find more suitable employment.

  2. “There appears to be a significant difference in the quality of training and personnel between Broward County and Marion County.”

    I would hope that LE response to gunshots at a school nationwide never again reflects what happened in Broward County that shameful day…

    • The protocol was supposed to have changed well before Pulse or Parkdale. I don’t have much hope for that needle moving.

    • OK, I doubt it was “improved training or personal”, more like all SROs have probably game played the scenario in their heads. You would be surprised what a difference that makes. What is scary is that you are now seeing copy cats.

      • I think the majority of school shootings are copycat events. There always seems to be 3 or 4 in quick succession.

    • People said that after Columbine. And people said that after that Amish school in Ohio. And people said that after…

  4. Just think if it had been a full semi-automatic AR which stands for Automatic Rifle? He would have mowed down everything in his path with that killing machine. That’s why full-semi auto killing machines should be banned. Especially big high bullet holder clip things. We don’t need those for hunting. Nobody needs a super powerful AR that can shoot through buildings and tanks! I’m appalled!

    • I get the sarcasm, but when you say AR stands for Assault Rifle instead of Armalite, you just play right into the anti’s hands. Now they can point to yet another ‘reason’ why they make such basic errors.
      The rest is fine, its all just opinions. Whether you actually believe what you are espousing or not can be not relevant. BUT, the AR comment is a simple error of fact. We need to not be making those. That way we can still look down our collective noses at the anti fact, anti logic, anti reason, antis. We don’t need to be joining them in their craziest mistakes.

      • Yeah yeah. It timed out before I could finish up. Got sidetracked. I was going to finish up with: Now that I finished up with that ridiculous horse sh**, I had a good time at the March For Our Gun Rights in Spokane on the 21st. I was there toting my AK with its 40 round magazine. Surprisingly, there was not a single counter-protester hen in an orange shirt to make fun of. I really wanted to argue with of those clueless hens!

        Sorry if my (I don’t give a sh– sarcasm) got lost somewhere. I was attempting to make as retarded an argument as I could.

    • Only real comment necessary here is: “Your ignorance really shows through” However, you did forget some things. Just think IF it had been a/an: Pile of dynamite, Flame thrower, Automobile, Truck, Oh what the heck, A-BOMB, H-BOMB? Get the point! What if is your fairy tail in this case.Fact is per shooter ” pump shotgun ” was weapon used. I am appalled at how uneducated you are and trying to make this into something it is not. I do have one question though. Did the tank have it’s windows open?

    • Just think how much more deadly it could have been with a shoulder-thingy that goes up!

      • Or a foregrip hose clamped to the stock. OMG

        It looks like my Monday morning humor didn’t go so well. 😉

        • That us OK, I got the sarcastic humor right away. Some folks are too sensitive because of all of the bovine excrement oozing from the anti-gun mob. When one is a good citizen but gets smeared as someone who is evil, you can get a little touchy. Calling an AR an automatic rifle is definitely something that anti-gun morons do every day. I wonder what they think the AK in AK47 stands for…………….

  5. Uh maybe you should have gone to the local police department with your shotgun , told them you were planning on going to a school and shoot said gun. End result would have been you in shackles , locked away safe & sound permanently. And no one shot in ankle , if you would have hit an artery the poor kid would have bled out. If you had the consciousness of mind to get locked away , so as not to hurt others. You are not only mentally ill. You are diabolical. Have fun hanging off of bubbas belt loop , karma is a bitch. Your about to see for every action, there is an equall and opposite reaction.

    • “hanging off bubba’s belt loop” … Not everyone incarcerated gets raped.Ironicaly there are many decent prisoners. DOC officers not so much.

  6. What I want to know how a kid got his hands on a depressant not commercially available outside of Eastern Europe.

    • Internet ‘pharmacies’.

      No prescription required, for a ‘fee’ their ‘doctor’ will conduct an internet ‘examination’.

      Get whatever you want, opiates included…

      • No need for fancy internet doctors. You can buy it online as a “supplement” for “cognitive enhancement” kinda like Prevagen but not quite as legal.

    • Whats even more funny is they quote him (starting @ 0:42 in the video) but he never actually says “took two pills of phenibut” in the video, they just decided to slip that little extra bit in the article… that’s a bit odd.

  10. SHIT, didn’t even get to do the $0.25 / square thing.

    NOT just Prescription drugs, banned prescription drugs. hunh, wonder who his doctor and what the gateway prescription was?

    DID HIS SCHOOL TELL HIS PARENTS HE NEEDED TO BE ON RITALIN?

  12. I intend to try to be more supportive of police that are doing the right things. We will almost certainly need their support someday in the not to distant future. I

    • I would not want to be a law enforcement officer, it’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t profession. I certainly hope, we the people, get that “needed” support in the not to distant future.

      • Agreed. To read some of the comments here, cops are a quarter step up from Terminators and shouldn’t be lauded for a job well done, but should be bashed mercilessly for the slightest misstep and crushed underfoot for failure.

  13. Very interesting article. We also had a very interesting security officer at our school. He was kind and always able to listen and help. When I had problems with my grades in high school, he advised me to use a service https://edubirdie.com/write-my-dissertation for dissertation writing for students. It really helped that difficult year and I graduated successfully.

  14. Terrible story. Why are there so many aggressive teenagers. What’s wrong? Where does this cruelty come from? It’s just scary to live and send your child to school.

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