MAN SHOOTS AT DEPUTIES IN BACKYARD THEN QUICKLY EXITS RESIDENCE THROUGH FRONT DOOR, UNARMED, IS SHOT AND SUES: WHO WINS?
On July 10, 2025, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals decided Heid v. Rutkoski[i], in which the court of appeals had to decide if deputies involved in a shooting were entitled to qualified immunity. A summary of the facts is as follows:
Heid and his wife got into a physical altercation in their residence. Heid’s stepson tried to intervene in defense of his mother, and Heid physically assaulted and threatened him. Deputies were called. Initially, Deputies Kramer, Sanchez, Lewis, and Best arrived. Deputy Rutkoski arrived last and was the acting supervisor on duty.
Deputy Kramer told Deputy Rutkoski, among other things, that Heid had a gun safe and access to five guns. One of the guns, according to Heid’s wife, was an AK-47.
At the direction of Deputy Rutkoski, a perimeter was established with Deputy Sanchez outside at the back of the residence and Deputy Best at the front of the residence using a patrol vehicle for cover. Deputy Rutkoski, also at the front of the house, then began call-outs using his patrol vehicle’s public address system, ordering Heid to exit the house with his hands up.
As it turned out, Heid was not in the house; he was in the backyard, against a citrus tree, smoking. He later claimed he did not hear the call-outs on the PA system. He saw Deputy Sanchez and asked if he was going to shoot him. Deputy Sanchez ordered him to put his hands up and stop moving. Heid claims he did not hear Sanchez. Heid then walked to his back porch and entered the residence. Deputy Sanchez radioed to the other deputies that Heid just entered the back of the house.
Heid armed himself with a rifle. Deputies Kramer and Lewis ran to the backyard to assist Deputy Sanchez. Moments later, Deputies Best and Rutkoski, who were at the front of the house, heard a “loud gunshot from the backyard” that sounded like a “shotgun or a rifle.”[ii] Heid had shot in the direction of Sanchez. Over the next several seconds, dozens of gunshots were heard by Best and Rutkoski, some of which sounded like the first gunshot and some of which sounded like the deputies returning fire with their department-issued handguns.
After the gunfire stopped, Deputy Rutkoski, over the radio, asked if the deputies in the gunfight were okay. Deputy Sanchez replied 10-4, that he was not injured. Deputies Kramer and Lewis did not respond, and Rutkoski feared they were shot.
As Deputies Best and Rutkoski watched the front of the residence. Best had a vantage point where he could see the front door. He alerted Rutkoski that Heid was exiting the front door. A moment later, both Best and Rutkoski thought that Heid threw something from the front door toward the patrol vehicle. Heid, later in court, said he did not throw anything, and a neighbor’s surveillance camera does not show an object being thrown. Heid later claimed that before he opened his door to exit, he yelled, “I’m unarmed. I’m coming out. I’m surrendering. I give up.” Deputies Best and Rutkoski said they did not hear Heid make these statements.
Heid later testified that he exited his house with his hands in front of him. The deputies said he exited quickly with his arms swinging. The neighbor’s surveillance camera showed that Heid exited the house at “a rapid pace.”[iii] The video was not clear enough to show whether his hands were in front of him or swinging, but it was clear that his arms were not up, in a standard surrender-position. At this point,
Deputy Best observed Heid’s approach and feared that Heid would continue the gunfight in the front yard. Deputy Rutkoski only saw Heid once he cleared the corner of the garage, claiming Heid “closed on [his] position” in a “charge” movement. He, too, feared that Heid intended to continue the gunfight. Consequently, Deputy Rutkoski discharged his firearm fourteen times in rapid succession after Heid closed to within three or four feet of him. Deputy Best simultaneously discharged his firearm five or six times. The audio on a neighbor’s cell phone video and Deputy Best’s body camera confirm that the deputies were shooting for three to four seconds. The shooting continued as Heid fell to the ground, and he was struck six times. While on the ground, Heid briefly continued moving before ceasing and vocalizing his surrender.[iv]
Heid was convicted by a jury of “(1) Attempted Second Degree Murder of a Law Enforcement Officer, with a special finding that Heid actually discharged a firearm during the commission of the offense; (2) Aggravated Assault on a Law Enforcement Officer; (3) Resisting an Officer with Violence; and (4) Resisting an Officer without Violence.”[v] The “resisting an officer without violence” charge pertained specifically to the part of the incident when he exited the residence toward Deputies Best and Rutkoski, and was subsequently shot.
From his new residence in a Florida prison, Heid sued Deputies Best and Rutkoski for shooting him “while he was unarmed and surrendering,” in violation of the Fourth Amendment.[vi]
The deputies filed motions for qualified immunity, which the district court denied, holding that there was a genuine dispute of fact whether an “unarmed and surrendering” Heid posed a risk to the deputies when he exited the front door. At this stage of the litigation, the court is required to credit the facts offered by the plaintiff unless clearly contradicted by video.
The deputies appealed the denial of qualified immunity to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
The court of appeals first noted that, to defeat the deputies’ motion for qualified immunity, the plaintiff must show (1) the deputies violated his constitutional rights, and (2) the law was clearly established at the time of the violation such that a reasonable officer in the same situation would have known that his conduct was unlawful.
The court then set out to determine if Deputies Best and Rutkoski violated the Fourth Amendment when they shot Heid.
The court noted the relevant legal principles and stated
Reasonableness is a fact-specific inquiry . . . .” Id. at 1279 . We consider the reasonableness of the force used to effect a seizure “from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Graham, 490 U.S. at 396, 109 S. Ct. at 1872 (citing Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 20-22, 88 S. Ct. 1868, 1879-81, 20 L. Ed. 2d 889 (1968)). And the inquiry turns on such factors as [1] “the severity of the crime at issue, [2] whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and [3] whether [the suspect] is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.” Id. (citing Garner, 471 U.S. at 8-9, 105 S. Ct. at 1699-1700). As the Supreme Court recently confirmed, this analysis precludes “put[ting] on chronological blinders.” Barnes v. Felix, 145 S. Ct. 1353, 1359, 221 L. Ed. 2d 751 (2025). “The history of the interaction, as well as other past circumstances known to the officer, thus may inform the reasonableness of the use of force.” Id. at 1358.[vii]
The court then set out to examine the facts of the incident. At the outset the court noted that Heid, because of his criminal convictions related to the incident, is “collaterally estopped,” or not allowed to make assertions that are not consistent with his convictions. Therefore, he was not allowed to assert that he did not know the deputies in the backyard were deputies because he was convicted of “Attempted Second Degree Murder of a Law Enforcement Officer,” while discharging a firearm during the commission of that offense. Heid was also not allowed to argue that he did not “knowingly resist” five officers because he was convicted of both Resisting an Officer with Violence (pertaining to the shootout with Sanchez, Kramer and Lewis) and Resisting an Officer without Violence (pertaining to Best and Rutkoski).
The court then noted that it was undisputed that Deputies Best and Rutkoski knew the following: (1) They knew that Heid was involved in a domestic dispute with his wife early that night where he bit her, choked her, and threatened to harm his step-son; (2) They knew he had multiple guns in his residence; (3) They knew Heid engaged in a gunfight with Deputies Sanchez, Kramer and Lewis, as they heard both the sound of the deputies’ handguns being fired and the sounds of a rifle or shotgun being fired; (4) They knew that after the gunfight, Heid reentered his house, where he had additional guns; and (5) They knew that about twenty seconds after the gunfight ended, he exited the front door at a “fairly rapid rate of speed.”[viii] Based upon these undisputed facts, the court of appeals stated
A reasonable officer in Deputies Rutkoski’s and Best’s positions could have believed, in the split-seconds when Heid came out the door and only twenty-seven seconds after the backyard gunfight, that Heid was still armed or had gathered another weapon while inside the home. See Franklin, 111 F.4th at 1194 (holding that an officer may reasonably believe, based on the totality of the circumstances, that a suspect is armed and dangerous even if the suspect is ultimately determined to be unarmed). Deputies Rutkoski and Best simply “had no way of knowing if [Heid] had another weapon before having searched him (which [they] had not yet done).” Id. at 1196. They were not required to risk their own lives to apprehend a suspect they reasonably believed to pose great danger and who “up to that point, had shown anything but an intention of surrendering.” Crenshaw v. Lister, 556 F.3d 1283, 1293 (11th Cir. 2009) (footnote omitted).[ix]
Heid’s arguments
He was shot as he was surrendering, arms out and vocalizing his surrender
The court of appeals then examined each of Heid’s arguments. First, Heid asserted that, as he exited the house, his arms were out in front of him, as he was obviously surrendering. He also argued that he vocalized his surrender to the deputies as he exited the house. To these arguments, the court stated the neighbor’s surveillance camera video showed that his hands were not positioned up in the air, as in obvious surrender. Regarding his vocalization of surrender, assuming that he did tell the officers that he was surrendering, “the officers had no way of knowing whether Heid was telling the truth, and Heid’s physical actions” contradicted to his assertion.[x] The court stated
Although Heid was ultimately shown to be unarmed as he came out of the front door, there is no genuine issue of material fact as to whether Deputies Rutkoski and Best—based on the video evidence and the information they had at that point—knew that Heid did not possess any weapons. See Franklin, 111 F.4th at 1194. Further supporting the reasonableness of the officers’ actions was the fact that Heid advanced close to the positions of Deputies Best and Rutkoski, appearing suddenly from behind a blind corner in the seconds immediately preceding the shooting.[xi]
The court also noted that the incident occurred in a short period of time. The court stated
Critically, all of these events happened in a short period of time. See Graham, 490 U.S. at 396-97, 109 S. Ct. at 1872 (“The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”). “[I]n circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” we cannot dismiss the fact that Deputies Rutkoski and Best were “required to make split-second judgments” about the amount of necessary force. See Singletary v. Vargas, 804 F.3d 1174, 1181 (11th Cir. 2015) (internal quotation marks omitted). And Deputies Rutkoski and Best, twenty-seven seconds after Heid’s gunfight with the other officers and his flight into a house containing multiple firearms, were not required “in a tense and dangerous situation to wait until the moment [Heid] use[d] a deadly weapon to act to stop [Heid].” See Long v. Slaton, 508 F.3d 576, 581 (11th Cir. 2007). Their use of force to effect Heid’s seizure was reasonable.[xii]
Deputies continued to shoot after he fell to the ground
Lastly, Heid argued that the officers continued to shoot him after he fell to the ground and that constituted excessive force. The court of appeals noted that Best and Rutkoski’s use of force only lasted a total of 3-4 seconds. The court stated
They were “not required to interrupt a volley of bullets until [they] knew that” Heid was not armed and no longer posed any danger. See Jean-Baptiste v. Gutierrez, 627 F.3d 816, 822 (11th Cir. 2010). This is not a case where the deputies believed Heid was unresponsive and no longer a threat, yet continued shooting him. Cf. Robinson, 46 F.4th at 1342-44 (determining officers used excessive force by shooting a suspect twenty seconds after a flash-bang revealed that the suspect was unconscious).[xiii]
The court also noted the relevance of Heid’s prior violent behavior, specifically engaging in a gunfight with deputies in the backyard. The court stated
Nor can Heid’s prior violent conduct be chronologically severed from his exit of the house to limit the inquiry into the reasonableness of Deputies Rutkoski’s and Best’s actions. See Barnes, 145 S. Ct. at 1360 (“[A] court cannot thus ‘narrow’ the totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry, to focus on only a single moment. It must look too, in this and all excessive-force cases, at any relevant events coming before.”). In these tense circumstances, it was not unreasonable for Deputies Rutkoski and Best to very briefly continue using force after Heid fell.[xiv]
Thus, the court of appeals held that the Deputies Best and Rutkoski’s “use of force against Heid was reasonable and did not violate the Fourth Amendment.”[xv] Therefore, the court of appeals also held that the deputies were entitled to qualified immunity and reversed the decision of the district court.
Note: Court holdings can vary significantly between jurisdictions. As such, it is advisable to seek the advice of a local prosecutor or legal adviser regarding questions on specific cases. This article is not intended to constitute legal advice on a specific case.
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[i] No. 24-10068 (11th Cir. July 10, 2025)
[ii] Id. at 6
[iii] Id. at 9
[iv] Id. at 9-10
[v] Id. at 2
[vi] Id. at 10
[vii] Id. at 12-13 (emphasis added)
[viii] Id. at 14
[ix] Id. at 14-15 (emphasis added)
[x] Id. at 15
[xi] Id. at 15-16 (emphasis added)
[xii] Id. at 16-17 (emphasis added)
[xiii] Id. at 17 (emphasis added)
[xiv] Id. at 17-18 (emphasis added)
[xv] Id. at 18 (emphasis added)
