No criminal charges will be filed against the Georgia sheriff’s deputy who shot and killed an exonerated former Florida prison inmate during an intense physical struggle on a busy highway in 2023, Georgia officials said Tuesday.
Camden County Deputy Staff Sgt. Buck Aldridge had seen Leonard Allan Cure, 53, speeding northbound on Interstate 95 just north of the Florida-Georgia border early on Oct. 16, 2023. After pulling him over, Aldridge assertively ordered Cure out of his pickup.
But Cure, who had served 16 years of a life sentence in Florida prison for a Broward County robbery he did not commit, appeared reluctant to take orders from a law enforcement officer and said he was determined not to go back to jail, according to a video recording of the confrontation.
With cars speeding by just yards away, the scuffle between Aldridge and Cure became physical. The deputy deployed his stun gun after several warnings, but Cure didn’t go down. The physical struggle continued, with Cure at one point appearing to grab the deputy’s head from underneath his chin and push him backward while saying, “Yeah, b—-.”
It was at that point Aldridge opened fire, a use of force police are now confirming was entirely appropriate given the life-or-death circumstances.
“Use of deadly force at that point was objectively reasonable given that he was being overpowered at that time,” District Attorney Keith Higgins told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday.
Higgins, Georgia’s top prosecutor for the coastal Brunswick Judicial Circuit, said he told Cure’s family of his decision during a meeting Monday and notified the deputy.
Aldridge had no way of knowing Cure’s tragic history at the time of the incident. Cure had been mistakenly identified as the man who robbed a Dania Beach Walgreens of $1,700 in 2003. Convicted in 2004 and sentenced to life in prison, he continued to profess his innocence until his case was taken up by Broward County’s Conviction Review Unit, an effort by the State Attorney’s Office to assist people who have been wrongly convicted. The unit found faulty evidence pointing to Cure’s guilt and credible evidence demonstrating he could not have been the robber.
He was the first inmate to be exonerated by the unit.
Cure was freed in 2020, but that could not erase the memory of the time he spent behind bars, according to his friends and family. Family members have filed a lawsuit against the deputy, accusing him of failing to de-escalate the tension of what could have been a routine traffic stop.
Lawyers for Cure’s family have said the Camden County sheriff should never have hired Aldridge, who was fired by the neighboring Kingsland Police Department in 2017 after being disciplined a third time for using excessive force. Personnel records show the sheriff hired him nine months later.
Attorneys for Cure’s family criticized the decision not to prosecute Aldridge.
“Leonard Cure was a man who had already fought so hard to reclaim his life after a wrongful conviction, only to have it stolen from him again,” lawyers Ben Crump and Harry Daniels said in a statement issued via e-mail. “His family will not stop fighting for accountability, and neither will we.”
This report is supplemented with content from the Associated Press.
Rafael Olmeda can be reached at rolmeda@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4457. Follow him on Threads.net/@rafael.olmeda.
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