Harrison County deputy and Biloxi police officer fatally shoot man at courthouse
BILOXI, Miss. Jan 17 2021
A Harrison County deputy and Biloxi police officer were involved in the shooting death of man Friday night at the county courthouse in Biloxi, authorities confirmed.
Harrison County Coroner Brian Switzer told the Sun Herald on Saturday that the man killed was 48-year-old Reginald Michael Johnson of Biloxi.
Johnson’s body could be seen Friday on the ground covered in a pink blanket in the parking lot on the west side of the courthouse off Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard.
An injured deputy was wheeled away from the courthouse to a waiting ambulance. Sheriff Troy Peterson said the deputy was taken to Merit Health in Biloxi and was expected to make a full recovery. The deputy was not hospitalized overnight.
MBI is conducting an independent investigation into the shooting, but has not released any details.
A crowd of spectators gathered around the crime scene Friday evening, many saying that least six shots had been fired.
Rachelle Ladnier, an employee in the county tax collector’s office, was among those inside the courthouse when she heard shots being fired.
“Please say a prayer for all parties involved,” Ladnier said on her Facebook page. “This was the absolute scariest thing I have ever been through. I heard the gun shots and saw people running and had no idea where the shots were coming from.
“Thankfully we had some great customers that jumped into action and quickly shut the doors (to the tax collector’s office on the first floor) and locked them. I was terrified and shaking. It is such a scary world we live in.”
On Saturday, Ladnier was still shook up from the shooting but continued to praise their customers who immediately went into action.
She said she heard three to five gunshots shortly before 4 p.m. There were six clerks in the office, including herself, and about seven customers.
After the first shots rang out, she said, one customer called out to two children just outside the door of the tax collector’s office to tell them to come inside.
After they locked the doors that open to the courthouse lobby, the clerks led all but one of the customers to a back room in the tax collector’s office to try to further protect them from harm.
One of their customers, she said, wouldn’t go back to the room with them.
“He said he was going to stay out there (by the locked door in the clerk’s office),” Ladnier said. “He said if somebody came through those doors, he was going to the be the first to meet them so they didn’t come after us. I don’t know what his name was, but he was awesome.”
Other county employees managed to get out the building just after the first shots rang out, Ladnier, and she could see them huddled together in a parking lot from a windows inside the clerk’s office.
“It all happened so fast, I’m not really sure how many shots there were,” she said. “They wouldn’t tell us what happened because it’s under investigation. It was definitely scary. You hear about shootings all the time in buildings, but you don’t expect to happen.
“My biggest fear was was it was somebody we worked with daily,” she said.
The fatal police shooting is reported in South Mississippi in 2021.
