A Florida police officer who was critically injured in a shootout more than a week ago succumbed to his injuries on Saturday.
Officer Adam Jobbers-Miller, 29, suffered a grievous gunshot wound to the head after he responded to a reported fight and theft at a gas station in Fort Meyers on July 21, and passed away a week later after being hospitalized in critical condition. ICE has filed a detainer on the suspect.
Investigators say that the officer was shot with his own gun after the suspect knocked him down, grabbed the gun from his belt, and shot him, according to court documents.
The suspect alleged to be responsible for the death of the officer, 29-year-old Wisner Desmaret, also suffered a non-life threatening gunshot wound during the incident and was taken into custody.
Desmaret was initially charged with eight felony counts following the incident, including attempted first-degree murder. The charges have been upgraded to first-degree murder since the officer died — and he now has had a detainer placed on him by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The suspect is believed to be an illegal immigrant from Haiti who has been in the country for several years, according to ICE. He has a history of run-ins with law enforcement.
A spokesperson for ICE stated, “ICE filed a detainer on Wisner Desmaret, 29, a citizen and national of Haiti on July 22, after his arrest by the Fort Myers Police Department on charges including attempted murder of a law enforcement officer.”
Desmaret had been arrested in 2011 following a standoff with police and had multiple other arrests on his record over the years for crimes such as trespassing, with his most recent arrest prior to the shooting occurring in March 2017. NBC 2 reported that ICE had previously placed holds on Desmaret after he was arrested in 2008 and again in 2010.
According to CBS News, the death of Jobbers-Miller — who had served with the Fort Meyers Police Department since September 2015 — hit the department and community hard.
“It’s a very low time right now for our city and for the Miller family,” Mayor Randall Henderson told local CBS affiliate WTSP. “We need to stay intensely focused on the family and their support.”
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As the community mourns this heartbreaking tragedy, a GoFundMe account has been established to aid the family of Officer Jobbers-Miller in dealing with the tragedy.
This criminal likely should never have been in this country in the first place, and probably should have been deported after his early arrests, but he was not. Now an officer is dead and people across the country are grieving over this senseless and unnecessary murder.