Nassau County deputies shot and killed a man who Sheriff Bill Leeper said had killed his father and fired at deputies first, early on Thursday, November 12, in Yulee, Florida. No names have been released. Leeper said the man was in his late 20s and that his mother was inside the home when it happened — she was found unharmed.
Source: Florida Times-Union
It began with a report the Sheriff's Office received at about 2 a.m. about a home invasion at Pirates Wood Estates on Doubloon Way in Yulee. Deputies responded to the house and were assessing the situation when they heard gunshots coming from inside, the sheriff said.
"When deputies responded, they were assessing the situation," Leeper said. "… They heard gunshots coming from inside the house. They went back to their patrol cars, got their rifles, came back. They observed an individual down a wooded line come into the roadway. That individual looked back at the deputies. He fired a handgun at the deputies. Deputies returned fire and struck that individual." The man did not survive.
Source: Florida Times-Union
Inside the house, deputies found the father dead and the mother, who was OK. No deputies were harmed in the exchange. Crime scene units worked on Doubloon Way through Thursday as investigators documented the scene.
"A domestic situation," the sheriff says
Leeper described what happened as a domestic situation, but said he did not have specifics about what led up to it or about the family's history. He said more information will be released later. The Sheriff's Office has not said what happened inside the house before deputies arrived, or what the initial home-invasion report described.
The names of both men had not been released by Thursday evening. The sheriff has not detailed what happened inside the home before deputies arrived, and the Times-Union has requested the incident report and records of previous calls for service to the home.
By Thursday evening, neighbors in the Pirates Wood neighborhood told News4JAX they were shaken after the family shooting left a father and his adult son dead, including the son's fatal exchange of gunfire with deputies — a quiet residential street suddenly at the center of two separate investigations.
Source: News4JAX (WJXT)
Two investigations are now running
The Nassau County Sheriff's Office is investigating the homicide — the father's death inside the house. Separately, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is conducting an independent investigation into the deputy-involved shooting, the standard arrangement in Florida when deputies or officers use deadly force. The two inquiries will run on different tracks: one into what happened inside the house, and one into whether the deputies' use of force followed law and policy.
Thursday's shooting was the first deputy-involved shooting in Nassau County since April 25, 2024, according to Times-Union records — a gap of more than two and a half years in a fast-growing county on Florida's northeast coast.
Yulee is an unincorporated community in Nassau County, just south of the Georgia line along the Interstate 95 corridor northwest of Jacksonville. Pirates Wood Estates, the neighborhood around Doubloon Way, is a residential subdivision of single-family homes — the kind of street where a 2 a.m. call and gunfire is far outside the normal run of a night.
What happens next: the Sheriff's Office is expected to release the men's names and more detail as the family is notified and the investigations progress, and the FDLE review of the deputies' shooting will continue independently. Anyone in the area with information about what happened on Doubloon Way early Thursday is likely to be asked to speak with investigators as both inquiries continue.