PANAMA CITY BEACH — Bay County Sheriff’s deputy Barrett Jackson responded to shots fired at about 6 p.m. on Saturday.
He later arrested Marcus Fletcher, 20, of Huntsville, Ala. for the offense. Although he was bold enough to be contemptuous toward Jackson, he was drunk enough that he needed assistance to gain balance. Bay County Sheriff’s deputies found an empty magazine for the gun near Laketown Wharf Condominiums and .38 caliber handgun in a nearby mailbox.
The case was one of seven armed and dangerous reports BCSO encountered in the first 11 days of Spring Break and one of three firearms seized.
“Does that sound like normal Spring Break behavior?” Sheriff Frank McKeithen asked.
The Sheriff’s Office held a press conference on Monday to talk about escalating Spring Break violence, saying the number of incidents shows changes designed to tone down Spring Break — such as instituting a closing time for alcohol sales at 2 a.m. — have not worked.
“You can’t police this away,” he said. “They pass everything we ask them to it, it would not fix Spring Break.”
The Sheriff’s Office has re-instituted an undercover narcotics operation that netted 21 arrests of BCSO’s 304 arrests over the first three weeks of Spring Break. McKeithen said all of the suspects arrested were well past normal college age and he emphasized his point with a 39-year-old Nashville based Molly dealer, slinging the synthetic drug to college kids.
“It’s not the traditional Spring Break,” McKeithen said. “This is not the same thing we saw five years ago.”
It is McKeithen’s observation that the “100 milers” are committing the most serious crimes over Spring Break.
“Take an estimate of 300,000 college kids; take 1 percent — that’s 3,000 people and I think it’s a lot more than that,” McKeithen said.
What has not changed is that the statistics during Spring Break continue to climb. There have been 936 people booked into Bay County Jail this Spring Break, 304 from BCSO, up from 135 in 2014. Last year, BCSO had one armed and dangerous case. Traffic stops were up to 479 from 353.
Worse, McKeithen and Major Tommy Ford talked about boiling point moments around the Front Beach Road Wal-Mart each day this past weekend. McKeithen said officers from Jackson and Gulf counties have been called in to control the crowds as people leave the beach at dusk. PCB Capt. Robert Jackson said they have used Washington County and Panama City officers. BCSO has employed 30 officers. Jackson said they closed Front Beach Road to traffic in order to move people out of the parking lot.
“Everybody is working patrol right now,” said McKeithen, who was transporting inmates earlier on Monday. “One fight and it turns into a larger fight. A fight turns into a brawl, a brawl to a riot. That can happen in an instant.”