Good Guy with a Gun #211: Lehigh Acres, FL
Ja'Darian Graham had no prior criminal history. Four carjackings makes for a pretty ambitious first offense, with death a pretty extreme penalty. | Original incident: May 29, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.
The timeline on this is confusing, with multiple conflicting reports, so I’m not going to give exact times. One thing to note is that the video is generally dark, so this appears to have occurred mostly in the nighttime.
An Uber driver was sitting in her car at a strip mall on Lee Boulevard when she felt three knocks on her window. She turned around.
“The only thing I saw was a handgun and an assault-style1 rifle. He told me to get out of the car, and I got out,” she said. “I thought he was going to kill me.” She ran to the nearest storefront — a Papa John’s — and called the police.
That was, I think, the second of four carjackings that night.
Earlier, Ja’Darian Graham had tried and failed to take a vehicle on Joel Boulevard. He fired at the car as it drove away.
Then came the Uber driver.
Third was a car that he was able to steal, but unable to drive — it had a stick shift. (Note to self on car preferences.) He abandoned it and continued on foot.
Then he carjacked a fourth vehicle at a Lehigh Discount Liquors.
Finally, he drove the stolen car to his cousin’s house, got out, and started firing from the front yard.
The cousin’s girlfriend bolted from the back of the home as Graham forced his way in, still shooting. One of his rounds hit his cousin in the elbow2 — at which point the cousin shot him.
Graham didn’t make it.
Sheriff Carmine Marceno described the end of that scene this way: “The homeowner returns fire, thankfully, and kills our suspect. This person [Graham] is on a tear. And that’s unacceptable. So thank God for our homeowner, he’s a hero.”
He also confirmed that Graham had no prior criminal history.
The Uber driver, still shaken, told reporters that even with Graham dead, she remained afraid.
Sources
Primary
Sheriff Marceno described the situation for WINK. This is a Facebook video post.
Local news
Gulf Coast News Now presented the story with a full two-minute and fourteen-second video, including surveillance video of the last carjacking and commentary from the store clerk who witnessed it. They also pinpointed the carjacking locations on a map. This is the video to watch if you’re only going to watch one, in my opinion.
They had an additional video on the topic that you can see below, also very good.
WINK provided initial coverage and the interview with the Uber driver. I always appreciate it when news sources humanize the violence of the situation, which can otherwise feel like “this subject was shot by that subject” — anonymous, clinical, unemotional. This woman was terrified for her life.
The News-Press put their story behind a paywall that I chose not to break.
2A / specialist news
Sean Holt covered the story at USACarry, and AmmoLand also had a blog post about the incident.
I’ll mostly ignore the fact that the rifle was almost certainly ordinary and not “assault-style,” whatever that means.
I’ve seen references to a shoulder wound instead of an elbow wound.