For customers at a Pompano Beach gas station, a Sunday afternoon errand turned into a life-threatening situation when a man tried to force his way into a woman’s car and was fatally shot during a confrontation, 911 calls reveal.
Brian Semil, 37, of Pompano Beach was shot just before 5 p.m. at the Racetrac gas station in the 500 block of Atlantic Boulevard, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office. He was pronounced dead at Broward Health North.
The Sheriff’s Office said Semil tried to force himself into a car with a woman and her children inside, and three men intervened. During that altercation, one of the men shot Semil.
One of the callers appeared to be the woman, who told officers in Spanish that she was in the car with her mother and children when a man tried to get inside and wouldn’t let her drive away.
“I was pumping gas, and I was here with my mom and kids, and there was a person — I don’t know if he was on drugs or not — who tried to get into the car and he wouldn’t let me go,” the woman told the call-taker. But then a man nearby stepped forward and “saved me because (the assailant) had come toward me, and he wouldn’t even let me close the door.”
As she was speaking, commotion could be heard in the background.
By the time the woman phoned 911, she and her family had gotten away from the suspected attacker, but she was worried about the man who had helped her get away, who still was at the gas station, she said.
“Oh, look, he’s hurting him!” she told the 911 operator.
“They’re fighting?” the operator asked.
The operator asked her for more information, but the woman said she didn’t know more, explaining she had already gotten farther away from the gas station.
“Is there someone hurt on the ground?” the 911 call-taker asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman replied. “I saw him on the ground. I heard a gunshot, and I left from there.”
Several other frantic 911 calls came in from customers at the gas station whose Sunday afternoon had suddenly become life-or-death.
“Guy with a gun at the gas station, Racetrac, running around here and stuff like that,” one caller said. He appeared to think the man had driven off, then realized he was still there.
“Come NOW! Come now!” he yelled. “Come now! I’m at the Racetrac. Send an ambulance! Get the cops over here now, God damn it! Hey don’t come next to me, stay over there man, stay away from me.”
Deputies have not said if Semil was armed, but another caller said she saw “a man with a gun trying to rob a lady.”
“I guess he got shot,” she said.
Another woman said her partner had pointed his own gun at the suspect.
“He’s trying to come up to my man,” she told the operator. “He has his firearm pointed at him. I need someone here right now. There’s another man here too with a firearm pointed at him as well. But I need someone here right now.”
She then appeared to yell at the other man. “Get the f*** away from him!” she yelled, then told the dispatcher, “my man’s gonna shoot him!”
The three men who intervened remained at the scene and cooperated with deputies, the Sheriff’s Office said. After investigating, the Sheriff’s Office will forward its case to the State Attorney’s Office.
Semil had a history of felony arrests, court records show. In 2015, he was charged with stealing a woman’s key fob in Fort Lauderdale and driving off with her car, leading police officers on a chase downtown and at one point ramming the car into one of the police cars, according to a probable cause affidavit. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to three years in prison.