Three Dead in Five Weeks: BSO’s Pursuit Crisis Demands Adults in the Room

Ronald Wilson, 74, was driving through an intersection in Tamarac on February 16th with the right-of-way when a BSO K9 deputy — chasing a stolen Jeep — slammed into his truck. He was dead within the hour.

Ten days later, Bonnie Bouffard, also 74, pulled onto the shoulder of the Florida Turnpike during rush hour. A trooper had just executed a PIT maneuver on a stolen truck. That truck careened into a wall and then into Bouffard’s car. She was a breast cancer survivor who loved bingo and kayaking. Her coworkers didn’t know she was dead until she failed to show up for work the next morning.

Then this past Sunday, 18-year-old Michael Malik Harvey fled deputies in a stolen van, triggering a multi-agency pursuit that ended when he crashed through a gate at a Fort Lauderdale RV park and plunged into a canal. Harvey survived. His passenger — a young woman whose name has not been released — did not.

Three dead in five weeks. All in Broward County. All during law enforcement pursuits. Every chase started with a stolen vehicle.

I have been a criminal defense attorney in South Florida for over thirty years. These are not unfortunate accidents. They are the foreseeable consequence of a policing culture that treats high-speed pursuits like a sport rather than the deadly force they represent.

BSO policy prohibits deputies from initiating pursuits solely for auto theft but authorizes them for “forcible felonies.” In each of these cases, the pursuit escalated after the fleeing driver struck or attempted to strike a police vehicle — and that contact became the legal predicate for a chase that killed someone. The stolen car creates the encounter; the flight creates the contact; the contact justifies the chase. A self-fulfilling loop that produces its own justification while people die in its wake. That same policy says pursuits should be terminated when the risks of continuing outweigh the risks of escape. Three times in five weeks, someone decided the catch was worth whatever happened next.

South Florida should know better. In December 2019, officers from multiple agencies fired over 200 rounds during a pursuit that ended in rush-hour traffic on Miramar Parkway, killing UPS driver Frank Ordonez, 27, and bystander Richard Cutshaw, 70. A Florida Department of Law Enforcement report found that all of the bullets that killed both men came from police weapons. Yet all four officers charged with manslaughter have now been granted Stand Your Ground immunity — the last three just this week. One admitted he initially lied about firing his weapon. Stand Your Ground, designed to protect individuals facing imminent threats, is apparently broad enough to immunize officers who fired 200 rounds into traffic and killed two people who posed no threat to anyone. If that is where the law leads, the law is broken.

What systemic change came from Miramar? None. We held press conferences. We moved on. And now three more people are dead.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s “Fast and Fatal” investigation found at least 3,336 people killed in police pursuits nationwide from 2017 through 2022 — the overwhelming majority in chases that began over traffic infractions, nonviolent crimes, or no crime at all. Jurisdictions that have tightened pursuit rules have reported significant reductions in pursuits, crashes, injuries, and deaths. The fear that criminals will run free without chases is a talking point, not a data point.

The culture rewards the catch. Nobody gets a commendation for calling off a pursuit. The incentive structure is upside down, and the decision to continue a chase is left to the person whose adrenaline is pumping hardest.

Ronald Wilson had the right-of-way. Bonnie Bouffard had a kayaking trip planned. A young woman whose name we don’t yet know climbed into a van on a Sunday night and never came home. None of them got a vote in the risk assessment that killed them.

We don’t need cops playing cops and robbers at high speed through neighborhoods full of people who just want to get home. We need adults in the room — decision-makers who understand that a suspect who escapes today can be caught tomorrow, but a person killed today is gone forever.

Three dead. Five weeks. One county. How many more?