ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – A road rage shooting that left a man critically injured rattled residents in Butler Beach on Tuesday, as neighbors struggled to understand how violence erupted along one of the community’s busiest roadways.
The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office said one man was shot near Palmetto Road and A1A South in what investigators described as a road rage incident.
The victim suffered serious injuries and was airlifted to a local trauma center. Deputies said one person was detained and there were no outstanding suspects.
For residents like Billy Hennessy, who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, the shooting felt especially unsettling because of how close it happened to home.
“With all of the growth we are having, it’s making everybody edgy,” Hennessy said. “Everybody needs to calm down. It’s a lot of stuff going on, setting people off; I guess it gets to them sometimes. But something like pulling a gun and shooting in this neighborhood, it’s unbelievable.”
Hennessy told News4JAX reporter Briana Brownlee and photojournalist Jesse Hanson that he never imagined a shooting tied to road rage would happen in the beach community he has called home for decades.
“They must have been out-of-towners, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just beyond me that something like that can happen around the corner.”
Deputies spent hours investigating the scene on Tuesday, shutting down part of A1A South near Palmetto Road while detectives gathered evidence and worked to determine what led up to the confrontation.
Investigators had not released details about what sparked the dispute or the identities of those involved as of Wednesday afternoon.
Hennessy said the shooting reflected a growing concern about how quickly confrontations can turn deadly.
“It’s just scary, you just don’t know what to do,” he said. “Anytime you have a confrontation with somebody, you can’t just talk it out; everybody has to pull some type of heat. Man, it’s stupid. It’s basically stupid what it is. You’re taking a human life. That’s unreal, over something probably stupid.”