It’s difficult to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved. Deputies arrested 47-year-old Ryan McMinn after the man tried to fight them when they pulled him out of a “snake-and-alligator-infested canal,” according to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office in northeastern Florida. The man tried to run away from the cops by jumping into the river and swimming away, but it was only a matter of time before the deputies caught up to him.
Officers try to pull man from dangerous river
On July 3, a deputy responded to a welfare check for McMinn after he was found on the ground shirtless at the Wadsworth Elementary School, according to a Facebook post from the official page for the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office.
However, the man escaped on foot, though only a few minutes later a resident reported that someone had entered their backyard and tried to scale their house. Deputies found McMinn and asked whether he needed assistance, but the man fled into the canal instead and tried to swim away.
At around 4:23 pm., the officers continued to follow McMinn on the riverbank, asking the man to emerge from the river. Bodycam footage shows McMinn doing a slow backstroke through the canal as the cops tell him that they won’t stop following him. Though he refused to get out of the water, they saw the man eventually showing “signs of exhaustion” and “treading water,” leading two deputies to enter the river and pull him out.
As the officers waded into the canal and approached McMinn, he “began pushing and pulling in attempts to get away,” at one point trying “to grab a deputy’s head to push it under the water” and “to grab the neck of the other deputy.” Further footage shows the man resisting and shouting as the officers wrestled him onto the shore.
Various comments on the video say that McMinn was lucky that an alligator or a water moccasin didn’t bite him while he swimming in the water.
McMinn was transported to AdventHealth Palm Coast where he was treated and medically cleared. He faces two counts of battery on a law enforcement officer and is being held on a $5,000 bond at the Sheriff Perry Hall Inmate Detention Facility.
