Drug Raid Gone Wrong

By David Hunt
November 05, 2006

They say the woman slain by Nassau cops complained about drug dealing outside her home in Amelia Island.

At the end of a dead-end dirt road in this quiet oceanside community, wind flutters through the leaves of trees standing so close they could have seen everything that happened.

Cheryl Ann Stillwell spent her final days here in solitude, but not in peace.

By the time narcotics investigators broke down her front door and shot her to death, the 41-year-old computer engineer was out of work, nursing a painful disability and growing paranoid of the neighborhood.

She told family that she watched drug deals through her window and wanted them to stop. She set up surveillance and security equipment, even propping a couch behind the front door to keep it closed if someone broke the lock. For protection, she offered to rent her family's brick house next door at a discount to police officers, but found no takers.

In the end, it was a drug raid that killed her.

Dressed in tactical garb and armed with submachine guns, Nassau County detectives, assisted by federal agents, carried out a search warrant at her home early Dec. 22, believing it to contain a stash of prescription narcotics that someone there was selling illegally.

"Why did they do it the way they did it?" asked Anna D. Renshaw, Stillwell's mother. "If she had a cocaine factory or a crack factory, you could understand it, but she didn't have anything like that."

Authorities have their side of the story, backed by a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation determining no abuse of deadly force. Officers say they knocked and announced themselves as police, but Stillwell took aim with a loaded handgun and Nassau County detective Dallas Palecek had to shoot to protect himself and the others.

Stillwell took her story to the grave, leaving her family to wonder in disbelief.

Two pills?
A search warrant application dated Dec. 14 states a drug informant bought Oxycontin from an "unknown white female" at the white cottage on Midway Road where Stillwell lived. It doesn't list a price or volume of drugs.

Stillwell's father had given her the house. She meant to fix it up, but an accident at work left her unable to do much of anything. She was prescribed Oxycontin for pain. Family members refuse to believe that her prescription made her a drug dealer and have developed theories as to how the house became a target of an investigation.

"It was two pills she gave to somebody," said J. Doyle Wright, Stillwell's brother. "Somebody told her that they couldn't get their prescription filled for a couple of days and, when they did, they'd give the pills back to her."

The drug informant used in the investigation has not come forward to say whose version of the transaction is true.

Wright said he believes Palecek, who fired the burst of four bullets that killed Stillwell, was just doing his job. He blames his sister's death on a poor chain-of-command decision.

"They knew she was protective and they knew she had a gun, but someone in the Sheriff's Office said, 'OK, send in the SWAT team and shoot to kill.' ... You give me a gun and tell me to kick somebody's door in and I'm going to be ready to shoot," he said. "Whoever it was that said, 'This is the way you do this' - that's who I want to talk to."

The search
Sheriff Tommy Seagraves said Stillwell's death was a tragic consequence in a dangerous line of work: drug policing. Her house was among several in an unrelated number of searches that morning.

"I didn't want to see this happen, but I didn't want to see my officers get shot, either. That lady pointed a loaded gun at them," Seagraves said. "I'm a human being. I don't want anybody to lose their life, but at the same time, we had a job to do."

A search warrant inventory states officers found pill bottles and blister packs but did not specify whether actual drugs were found. Seagraves said drugs were found but the family believes anything seized was not illegal.

"It's legal for her to have Oxycontin, but it's illegal for her to sell it," Seagraves said.

The shooting
Four bullets from Palecek's UMP-40 struck Stillwell in the right leg, chest and face. She was pronounced dead at 8:45 a.m. at Shands Jacksonville hospital.

Initially, Seagraves said Stillwell fired first. The state probe into the incident determined that her gun went off after she was shot. Based on testimony given to state investigators, Palecek fired when Stillwell's finger twitched on her 9mm's trigger.

State Attorney Harry Shorstein sent a letter to Seagraves April 26 saying Palecek would not face criminal charges.

"A law enforcement officer may use deadly force when he reasonably believes the force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or others," the letter read.

A memo from Assistant State Attorney Granville C. Burgess dated March 14 said there was no basis for prosecution but questions the tactics of the raid.

"As far as this team knew they were executing a search warrant on a single white female with no violent history, who had sold one time a minor amount of drugs," Burgess' memo said. "If they had had background information I am sure they would have approached it differently."

Seagraves points back to the search warrant application, which said an "unknown white female" sold the drugs. He said there is no law determining how a search warrant is carried out and that his department has not crafted any policies in response to the shooting.

"We were searching the house, not serving an arrest warrant," Seagraves said. "We didn't know what we were dealing with."

Burgess' memo continues: "I do question, given the lighting and distance, how detective Palecek saw this finger movement."

After several weeks of administrative leave, Palecek returned to work. An attempt to contact him was unsuccessful.

Final days
According to investigative documents, Stillwell had brandished her gun before. She pulled it when a woman tried to serve foreclosure papers days before the raid. In 2003, she was arrested for threatening a TV technician at gunpoint.

"I knew the woman, not real well. I talked to her a couple of times. She was real protective of her property," said neighbor Phil Wentz. "She seemed like a really nice woman. She just didn't want anyone coming in and out of there."

In the last conversation Stillwell had with her father, she told him about the drug activity outside. Wentz, who's lived there for nearly four years, acknowledged a problem that has since gone away. Seagraves said he does not recall Stillwell calling the police for help, as she had told her father she did.

"The last time I spoke to her, she told me what was going on and I said: 'Cheryl, stay out of it. You're going to get hurt,'" Harold Stillwell said. He and Wright suspect her death was not a coincidence, but offer no supportive evidence.

"She didn't deserve what happened to her," Wright said. "She must have had something on someone."

"I think that's ludicrous," Seagraves said. "We're out here enforcing the law."

Aftermath
The family has vowed to sue. Fernandina Beach attorney Dan McCranie gave county officials notice in February of the impending civil action, but so far nothing has been filed.

Months ago, the family circulated a petition calling the incident the "home invasion of a handicapped woman." Roughly 800 people signed it.

"We were trying to do anything we could to get it from being swept under the rug," Renshaw said. "All we care about is stopping this from happening to somebody else."

Outside Renshaw's Jacksonville home, Stillwell's yellow Nissan truck sits in the driveway. Her orphaned Doberman, Nova, barks next door.

"I don't even look out my window anymore," Renshaw, 69, said. "I don't want to know what's going on. It's a shame at my age to be afraid of a policeman."