Innocent victim caught in crossfire of downtown Fort Myers shooting

Gunfire on Hendry Street in downtown Fort Myers left the community shaken after a stray bullet hit a man on his way home from work last weekend.

Adam Rudlaff heard the shots while walking down the street, and now he’s in the hospital. Rudlaff has a bullet in front of and behind his heart. He will have to live with the fragments inside of his chest for the rest of his life because the surgery is too dangerous.

Rudlaff told WINK News he thought fireworks hit him, not realizing he had been shot. He begged people to call 911. Unsure if anyone did, he called his fiancee for help.

Nicole Womak, Rudlaff’s fiance, was in Cape Coral when he called, explaining he got shot walking home from work in downtown Fort Myers. She says she quickly called 911 and then dashed downtown as quickly as possible.

Knowing Rudlaff is safe now, her mission is to push the police and everyone else to find the person responsible.

“He was laying in the middle of downtown Fort Myers screaming for someone to call 911 as everybody’s just walking past him for like 30 minutes,” Womak said. “He had to wait to call me while I was driving in Cape Coral with my best friend. And she had to call 911 while I was on the phone with him. It’s not OK.”

“I have a punctured lung; the machine here, it’s actually taking the blood out of me now,” Rudlaff said. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here in the hospital, if my recovery will be less than six weeks. [I’ve been] taken away from everything, all my responsibilities, commitments. It’s really… put my whole world upside down in a matter of seconds.”

“It’s just unacceptable. What if that was a kid where he got shot… could have been a kid’s head,” Womak said.

Dennis Adams, a witness to the shooting, told WINK about what he saw.

“I saw probably… I counted ten police cars, four firetrucks, three or four ambulances…” Adams said.

The Fort Myers Police Department says a fight led to the shooting.

“It was literally seconds before we had officers on scene down there,” said Shawn Yates, acting captain of the FMPD operations division.

WINK News asked Yates if anything had been done to increase surveillance or security in the wake of the shooting.

“Specifically when we talk about security, the downtown camera systems, and we’ve got those viewing all of those downtown areas, so we’ve got generally someone on our real-time crime center that’s observing these cameras through the nights,” Yates said.

However, FMPD would not show WINK the video from Saturday night.

“Probably the safest place to really be. I mean, downtown Fort Myers because we have police presence everywhere,” said Rick Castiano, the owner of World Famous Cigars.

World Famous Cigars is across the street from where the shooting happened. Castiano believes that the shootings, as horrendous as they may be, are isolated incidents and not an accurate gauge of downtown safety.

“It could happen anywhere,” Castiano said.

FMPD says four officers were specifically assigned to that block of downtown Fort Myers that night and explained they don’t have the manpower to have officers on every block.