Horace Brown was asked why he tried to hit Martin County Sheriff's deputies with his car on Tuesday, he said he didn't know authorities were arresting him.
“I didn’t know that was the police. I had no intentions of hitting them,” Brown told reporters as he was escorted into the sheriff’s office Thursday afternoon. “I didn’t try to hit him. I didn’t know that was police. Where I’m from, you get robbed by white men, too. It ain’t no color in robbery.”
Brown, 23, was released Thursday from Lawnwood Regional Medical Center in Fort Pierce and was taken into custody. Doctors decided not to remove the two bullets lodged in his body, a sheriff’s spokeswoman said. Brown was shot once in the shoulder and once in the neck, spokeswoman Christine Weiss said.
“I feel terrible,” Brown said in a video provided by the sheriff’s office.
Brown was booked into the Martin County Jail and is expected make his first appearance before a judge on Friday.
The Riviera Beach man is accused of trying to hit undercover narcotics detectives with his car Tuesday in a hotel parking lot near Kanner Highway and I-95.
Investigators said Brown crashed into three sheriff’s vehicles as he tried to flee from deputies. He was shot twice as he accelerated toward deputies, the sheriff’s office said. He was placed under 24-hour guard while he was treated at the hospital.
The shooting was reported about 4 p.m. Tuesday in the parking lot behind a Cracker Barrel restaurant and the Courtyard by Marriott hotel. Investigators said Brown was attempting to sell cocaine and the painkiller hydromorphone.
Two deputies fired shots, but only one hit Brown, the sheriff’s office said.
The sheriff’s office and the Martin County State Attorney’s Office are investigating the shooting. The FBI is monitoring the investigation.
When he was asked why he had crack cocaine in his car, Brown replied: “Because I smoke it. Don’t I look like it?”
Brown is expected to face multiple charges, including three counts of fleeing and eluding law enforcement, four counts of aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer with a deadly weapon and resisting arrest.
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