Victim’s son: Citizens academy shooting was ‘accident waiting to happen’

COCOA BEACH, Fla. June 21 used to be a day of celebration for Steve Knowlton.

Now, it’s just another day he has to contend with the “living hell” of dealing with his mother’s death.

Mary Knowlton, who would have turned 74 on Wednesday, was killed Aug. 9, 2016 in a “shoot-don’t shoot” training exercise that was a part of a citizens police academy. She was struck by live ammunition from the gun of former Punta Gorda officer Lee Coel, who was supposed to be shooting blanks.

“I still have, you know, there’s bitterness and anger in me,” Steve Knowlton, Mary’s son, said Wednesday. “Resentment. Wondering why God didn’t step in.”

Knowlton wonders, too, why Punta Gorda police chief Tom Lewis is aggressively fighting the second-degree misdemeanor culpable negligence charge against him. Days after the shooting, Lewis said he accepted “full responsibility for the actions of my department, my officers, and the bottom line is I am 100 percent accountable.”

“Now it’s the total opposite,” Knowlton said. “He has not taken full responsibility for this. He’s copping out.”

Lewis, whose trial is set to begin Friday, is fighting to get the charge against him thrown out. Lewis’ attorneys want the term “culpable negligence” defined for the jury before the trial begins.

An attorney for Lewis has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Knowlton worries his mother’s memory is being obscured by the legal back-and-forth. The publicity of the case, and particularly a more than $2 million settlement the family reached with the city, has led to some nasty comments, he said.

“We’ve had a few people come up and say, ‘Do you think you got enough money?’ in a sarcastic way,” Knowlton said. “No amount of money is going to take the place of my mom. I would rather be penniless, homeless, digging out of a garbage can if she was still alive.”

Knowlton, who lives in Cocoa Beach, said he loves Punta Gorda but finds it difficult to reckon with the notion that some restaurants he used to visit there raised money for Lewis’ legal defense.

“It just doesn’t sit well,” he said. 

Knowlton said he was “amazed” at the outpouring of the support he received in the initial aftermath of the shooting but said that changed after a few weeks.

“The smoke clears and you find out who really supports you,” he said.

It bothered Knowlton that City Manager Howard Kunik, on the day he announced Lewis was placed on paid administrative leave, called Lewis “an honorable man.”

“I mean, I can be a great guy and I can drink a whole bottle of vodka, get in my car and kill somebody,” Knowlton said. “But being a great guy, would that get me off of charges against me?”

Knowlton criticized Lewis for employing Coel, an officer with a checkered past, and for using him as the “bad guy” in the training exercise.

“I know that nobody woke up that morning and wanted to kill somebody. I know that wasn’t their motives, but the carelessness involved in the whole procedure and the department — it was an accident waiting to happen.”

For Knowlton, the memory of his mother’s death with never go away. Normally, he and his mother would spend her birthday on the beach.

“She would be there and then I would come in and we would talk for hours just about life, and I miss that,” he said. “She was a huge part of my soul, and after this happened it ripped that part out of me and the rest of my family.”