DeSantis booed at vigil for victims of racist shooting in Florida
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate, was met with boos while speaking late Sunday at a vigil held for the three victims of a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville.
Democratic City Councilwoman Ju’Coby Pittman, who represents the neighborhood where the shooting occurred, addressed the governor in her remarks to a crowd of about 200 people who had gathered a block from the Dollar General store where the gunman opened fire.
“Governor, I know you’re here,” Pittman said. “And you know what? I’m glad you’re here, because you can see the people and the impact it’s had on the community.”
Someone in the crowd then shouted: “He don’t care!”
When DeSantis began speaking and the crowd began to boo, Pittman stepped in to ask the gathering to listen to the governor.
“It ain’t about parties today,” she said. “A bullet don’t know a party.”
DeSantis called the shooter a “major league scumbag” in his comments, adding that there was no tolerance for racist violence in the state.
“What he did is totally unacceptable in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said. “We are not going to let people be targeted based on their race.”
Rev. Jeffrey Rumlin, pastor of The Dayspring Church in Jacksonville, later responded to the governor’s remarks, saying: “Respectfully, governor, he was not a scumbag. He was a racist.”
“This shooting, based on the manifesto they discovered from the scumbag that did this, was racially motivated,” DeSantis said in a video message after the shooting Saturday. “He was targeting people based on their race. That is totally unacceptable.”
Authorities said the gunman, identified as 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter, opened fire in a Dollar General store Saturday afternoon, killing three people before shooting and killing himself. All three victims of the shooting were Black, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said at a press conference Saturday evening.
Waters said the gunman — who was white — had authored numerous manifestos ahead of the shooting that signaled this attack was racially motivated.
The victims were identified as Angela Michelle Carr, 52; Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 19; and Jerrald Gallion, 29. Gallion attended the St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Bishop John Guns said at the vigil Sunday evening.
“In two weeks I have to preach a funeral of a man who should still be alive,” Guns said. “He was not a gangster, he was not a thug — he was a father who gave his life to Jesus and was trying to get it together.
“I wept in church today like a baby because my heart is tired. We are exhausted," he added.
Some officials said attacks like Saturday's have been spurred by political rhetoric that targets "wokeness" as well as policies like DeSantis's new Black history standards in Florida.
“We must be clear, it was not just racially motivated, it was racist violence that has been perpetuated by rhetoric and policies designed to attack Black people, period,” state Rep. Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville Democrat, said in a statement.
The Justice Department announced Sunday that it will be investigating the shooting as a hate crime and an act of “racially-motivated violent extremism.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.