The only difference between an acorn and a loaded gun? Nothing if you’re a trigger-happy Florida cop.


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Back in November, Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office deputy Jesse Hernandez mistook an acorn falling on the roof of his squad car for a gunshot, an error that prompted him to open fire on 22-year-old Marquis Jackson, an unarmed Black man who was handcuffed in the back of his squad car.




Though Hernandez and his partner Sergeant Beth Roberts, had been called to a neighborhood in Fort Walton Beach, Florida over a honking car, later placing Jackson under arrest under suspicion of stealing his girlfriend’s car, things took a turn for the dangerous after the deputy caught wind of a tree nut bouncing off the hood of his cruiser.


“Shots fired!” he yelled as he rained a hail of bullets on his squad car, prompting Sergeant Roberts to spring to action.


“Jesse, Jesse are you okay?” she screamed.


 “I’m hit! I’m hit!” he screamed, a sentiment that would ultimately be proven false.


While Jackson made it out of the terrifying ordeal alive — “All I could do was lean over and play dead to prevent getting shot in the head,” he recalled in an emotional Facebook shared shortly after the incident – he said the shooting has left him “damaged for life.”


“I was scared to death and I knew all I could depend on was God! I ignored everything and prayed!” he remembered. “Windows were shattering on me the whole time as bullets continued flying across me. I was blessed not to get hit by any bullets or get hurt physically but mentally, I’m not ok.”


So take it from this tale of very Floridian woe: From an acorn grows a mighty oak … and one hell of a lawsuit.