Georgia police shooting echoes across Broward County | Fred Grimm

I’ve been pulled over for speeding.

In my reckless youth, it was not a rare occurrence. But even in the meanest reaches of the 1960s Mississippi Delta, my traffic stops never turned so instantly hostile. Not like Leonard Cure’s fatal encounter this fall after being shot to death on a Georgia roadside. Of course, I’m white — and race matters.

Cure, a 53-year-old Black man, was passing through the rural southeast corner of Georgia on Oct. 16, when he was pulled over on I-95 by a Camden County deputy known for thug tactics. Sgt. Buck Aldridge was not a study in the dispassionate calm associated with modern policing. Judging by the police dashboard and body cam videos, Sgt. Aldridge approached Leonard Allan Cure with unabashed rancor.

After an angry exchange, Aldridge shocked Cure with his Taser and attempted to handcuff him. But Cure wouldn’t cooperate. He turned on the deputy, grabbed him, tried to overpower him. What followed will be classified by police as a “righteous shooting,” a justifiable reaction.

The police video indicates that Cure was responsible for his own demise. But 400 miles south, a glum sense of culpability hangs over Broward County.

It was the Broward judicial system that sent Leonard Cure away for 16 years for a robbery he didn’t commit. Maybe that explains his irrational reaction on Oct. 16. Sixteen unwarranted years in the brutal confines of the Florida penal system must warp a man’s temperament.

“I’m not going to jail,” Cure yelled as his confrontation with Aldridge escalated. The police officer heard only belligerence.

Down this way, Cure’s words can also sound like a man suffering a dreadful sense of déjà vu.

In 2004, Broward County tried Cure twice for the armed robbery of a Dania Beach Walgreens, despite a startling lack of physical evidence. The first trial ended with a hung jury, which said something about the prosecution’s case. His second trial brought a guilty verdict.

Sixteen years later, a conviction review unit established by first-term Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor re-examined the evidence against Cure and found that the original prosecution’s theoretical timeline for the morning of the robbery was utterly improbable.

There was proof Cure was elsewhere, and a photo lineup arranged to link Cure to the robbery was deemed particularly dubious. Rigged might be the better description.

“The issues we find most troublesome are those surrounding how Cure became a suspect in the first place,” the state attorney’s office reported. “The case became questionable at the very onset.”

The new assessment was not shocking. Not in Broward. The county was infamous in the 1990s and early 2000s for “solving” serious crimes by hanging convictions on innocent men.

The Florida Innocence Project, which helped exonerate Cure, counts 13 serious felony convictions in Broward Circuit Court overturned since 1992, including nine bogus murder cases.

Shoddy prosecutions brought two of those Broward defendants death sentences (One died of cancer after 14 years on death row; the other was exonerated before the state could carry out his execution). Six other innocents received life sentences.

It was easy, convicting these hapless defendants. Easier than hunting down the actual criminals. Most of them had prior convictions and their rap sheets mattered more than their alibis.

Thanks to Pryor’s conviction review unit, Leonard Cure was exonerated in 2020. (The legislature awarded him $817,000 compensation for his 16 stolen years.)

On Oct. 16, after visiting his mother in Port St. Lucie, the exonerated convict was driving through Camden County, heading to his new home outside Atlanta. Aldridge stopped him for speeding, which should have entailed a routine traffic offense, but the deputy was confrontational, exiting his patrol car yelling, “Step out! Step out!”

This particular officer was known for using excessive force.

A 2022 police video recorded Aldridge kicking, punching and Tasing a prone, non-resisting suspect. The Sun-Sentinel reported that Aldridge had been fired from the Kingsland, Ga. Police Department (also in Camden County) in 2017 after his third incident of brutal behavior in three years.

A few months later, he was hired by Camden County Sheriff’s Office, where he apparently found himself among like-minded comrades. The Sun-Sentinel reported that six Camden deputies have been fired and indicted within the last year for kicking and beating prisoners.

When Aldridge, with his ignominious history of police violence, encountered Cure with whatever psychological damage an innocent man accrues after 16 years in a Florida lock-up, it was like the fusing of unstable chemicals.

Cure may have provoked his own shooting death along I-95 that day, but there’s plenty more guilt to go around.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred