So, I'll relay here the deets as I've been able to procure them - not to make a political statement, but to attempt to elucidate my swamp existence.

The last police involved shooting in my county was in 1934 during a string of bank robberies. (There was a state trooper who was killed during a traffic stop some years ago, but he didn't discharge his weapon during the stop, so it's not an office involved shooting as such).

There have been a string of day time break-ins and robberies in the Eastern part of my swamp and the neighboring county. So many in fact that the police had theorized that it was as many as 5 different people possibly working in tandem. Aware of this fact, a neighbor in the swamp next to mine noticed that somebody unusual was doing something in their neighbors yard as they drove past to get groceries, so being a small swamp-county too they called the police.

Police arrive, and confront the man who is carrying furniture out of the house and loading it onto a trailer. They question him. He responds that he's moving out. They inform him that they know that he doesn't live there. He scrambles past them and enters his truck and drives off - the police give chase.

They chase him into my county and the very lowest reaches of our Eastern swamp parts - wherein he gets off the road and takes his truck and trailer through the empty corn fields. Due to excessive mud the police cruisers can't follow, his trailer also detaches and throws his unfortunate victim's belongings all over the field. The officers busy themselves collecting said belongings, being unable to do much else, and put out an alert to our Sherrif's department that he is entering our county off-road.

A guy I went to school with who patrols that portion of the swamp during the day (one of 3 officers who are ever on duty at a given time) receives a dispatch notification that an elderly woman, who lives alone, had called in to report that a strange vehicle had driven down her driveway and into a wooded area behind her home. He decides to make a stop before checking out her house, and picks up an additional sherrif's deputy who happened to live between his position and the house he was supposed to check out. He dons a shirt that says "sherrif's department" but doesn't have his service weapon with him.

They reach the home. They stop in the driveway and walk to the woods on foot. There they witness a man painting a truck that matches the description received from officers in the neighboring county. As he paints the truck they decide that it would be best if my former classmate would go back to his cruiser and get his belt (which contains his gun). He then realizes that he had forgotten his belt that morning, because his wife had removed it from the car the evening before as she needed to use the car and didn't want to have his service weapon in the car when she did (each deputy has his own vehicle that he pays for and can use whilst off duty). They decide to return to the woods and observe after radioing it in.

They then see the man enter his vehicle and withdraw a shotgun and sit down in the driver's seat apparently waiting for his new paint job to dry. It's at that point they decide to collect the elderly woman and withdraw. Eventually 3 more (armed) deputies arrive, along with a deputy from the neighboring swamp, and when they call out to him (from the woods) he then brandishes the shotgun and fires on them at which point they return fire. They attempt to administer first aid, but he was killed in the gun battle.

The other strange part of the story is that the fellow appears to live well over an hour away from the location that he was robbing, and his truck was filled with paint cans of varying colors and upon investigation, had repainted his truck several times.

And that is how the biggest incident in my swamp in 80 years went down.