Controversy arises as Titusville police officers kill man in altercation

In Titusville, Florida, the tension is on the rise following a shooting incident where a 25-year-old man was killed by police officers.

Titusville Police have confirmed that they are looking into alleged threats on social media targeting officers who were part of the incident that resulted in the death of Tri-Marea Charles.

One person has been arrested in relation to these posts, Titusville Police Chief John Lau confirmed.

“Free speech doesn’t give you the right to threaten officers’ lives,” Chief Lau said in a phone call with News 6 on Tuesday afternoon.

The investigation into these online threats came to light after News 6 requested public records from the city of Titusville concerning social media posts related to the shooting of Charles.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) is overseeing the investigation into the officer-involved shooting. Body-camera footage is expected to be released upon the conclusion of the probe.

In response to the public records request, News 6 obtained an e-mail that Chief Lau sent to Titusville’s city manager and other city leaders.

The e-mail, which was delivered in the morning of Friday, Feb. 14, came a day after an NAACP meeting that addressed Charles’ shooting. The meeting, at times, grew heated, as a group of Charles’ friends and protesters stormed out during Chief Lau’s address to the crowd.

During that meeting, Chief Lau described the events of the night of Feb. 7. He alleged that Charles tried to run out a front door, but while doing so, tripped, causing a gun to fall out of his waistband.

While Chief Lau claimed Charles engaged in a physical altercation with police and re-armed himself, protesters seized on Lau’s comments that the gun had fallen onto the ground.

“The key thing was he dropped a gun,” Alicia Marie, who attended the meeting, said shortly after it finished. “He didn’t have a weapon.”

The next morning, in his e-mail to city leaders, Chief Lau said the meeting was “by and large, received well by most of the group.”

The e-mail’s subject line read “Threats of Public Officials.” Chief Lau wrote that after the meeting, “there was a frenzy of social media activities from our community to try and identify our police officers involved in this shooting.”

Lau alleged that the “name, address, and pictures” of an officer’s family were posted on social media. He added that the picture and residence of one of the officers’ mothers was also published on social media.

Lau wrote that the threats consisted of “retaliation, calling him, ‘murderer,’ and posting that they would kill him.”

An arrest affidavit for a woman who was arrested shortly after midnight on Feb. 14 alleges that she posted an encouragement to “kill cops.” She allegedly included the hashtag #LLTRAY, which the affidavit claimed had been used on Facebook to refer to Tri-Marea Charles.

In his e-mail to city leaders, Lau said he was able to make contact with the officers who were threatened, and that “they relocated their families until we could get a handle on this.”

He went on to write members of his staff “met with many of the names attached to the threatening posts.” He said that all but one of the posts had been taken down at the time he composed the e-mail.

When asked what officers told the people responsible for the alleged posts containing officers’ personal information, Lau told News 6 they said, “You’ve got 30 minutes to take this post down.”

Lau insisted those comments did not amount to a threat, but rather were a warning about the legal statute of which they were in violation.

The individual who was arrested was charged with “written threats to kill.”

Lau said the person who was arrested is not the only person of interest in the police investigation, and that the probe into the social media posts is ongoing.