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The former sheriff’s deputy was found not guilty of manslaughter after a U.S. Air Force airman was shot and killed.
Senior Airman Roger Fortson was answering his front door when he was shot, WSB-TV reported. The account identifies him as 23 and names the former Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputy who fired as Eddie Duran.
A jury has now acquitted the former Florida deputy of manslaughter in the airman’s fatal shooting. The verdict means the criminal case presented to jurors did not result in a conviction. It does not, on the information currently available, explain how the jurors understood the encounter, which evidence shaped their decision or why they rejected the charge.
The published summaries establish a narrow sequence. An Air Force airman was fatally shot by a sheriff’s deputy. The deputy was subsequently fired and charged with manslaughter. The case reached a jury, which found him not guilty. Beyond that sequence, much of the information needed to understand the shooting and the trial remains absent.
The available accounts describe different parts of the encounter. WSB-TV reported that the shooting occurred in 2024 as Fortson answered his front door. Atlanta News First described the airman as Black and from DeKalb County, Georgia, and said he was shot at his apartment during a domestic disturbance call. That report did not identify the deputy or provide Fortson’s age in its summary.
Those descriptions do not directly conflict. One places the shooting at the apartment door, while the other provides the stated reason for the deputy’s presence. Yet each set of details appears in a single supplied account, and the summaries do not contain enough information to combine them into a complete reconstruction. It remains unclear what deputies had been told before arriving, what happened immediately before the door opened or what the deputy perceived when he fired.
The location of the trial is also unreported in the available material. The summaries do not identify the court, the judge, the lawyers, the number of jurors or the date on which the verdict was returned. They provide no account of opening statements, witness testimony, closing arguments or instructions given to the jury. The length of deliberations is unknown.
Most significant is the absence of the evidence itself. The reports do not say whether jurors viewed body camera footage, heard emergency call recordings, examined physical evidence or received testimony from law enforcement officers and other witnesses. They do not describe the prosecution’s theory of manslaughter or the defense presented by the former deputy. Without those details, the basis for the acquittal cannot be determined from the published summaries.
The verdict answers the charge that was before the jury. It does not supply a public account of why the shooting occurred. An acquittal records that the defendant was found not guilty of manslaughter; the summaries do not report whether jurors were asked to consider any other offense or whether the case involved additional counts. No vote total or other detail about the jury’s decision has been provided.
The distinction matters because two decisions involving the former deputy now sit beside each other. The sheriff’s office ended his employment after the shooting, while the jury later acquitted him of the criminal charge. The reports do not provide the sheriff’s stated grounds for firing him, any internal findings that preceded the dismissal or the standard used in that employment decision. They also do not say whether any administrative review remains open.
Fortson’s military service is established, but the available summaries give little further information about it. They identify him as a U.S. Air Force airman, with one account specifying the rank of senior airman. They do not identify his unit, duty station or length of service. One account links him to DeKalb County, but the nature of that connection is not explained beyond describing him as being from the county.
The phrase “domestic disturbance call” supplies a reason for law enforcement to have been dispatched, but the summary using it gives no description of the reported disturbance. It does not state who made the call, what was alleged, whether Fortson was named in it or how the responding deputy came to his apartment. No information is provided about anyone else who may have been present.
Nor do the reports describe what followed the shooting at the apartment. They do not state whether medical aid was provided at the scene, where Fortson died or how soon the deputy was removed from duty. The interval between the shooting, the firing, the manslaughter charge and the trial is not specified beyond the single report placing the death in 2024.
What can be said is limited but consequential. A law enforcement encounter ended with an Air Force airman dead. Prosecutors brought a manslaughter case against the deputy who shot him, and jurors returned a not guilty verdict. By the time they did, the former deputy had already been fired.