Florida Shooter’s Desperate Plea To Judge

DECEMBER 15--The ex-con who opened fire last night at a Florida school board meeting because his wife had been bounced from a teaching position last year told a judge that he was unemployed, destitute, and wanted to relocate to a “less economically depressed area of the U.S.,” according to court records.

In a March 2009 letter, Clay Duke asked a Bay County judge to relieve him of the monthly responsibility of paying costs associated with his supervision by a state probation officer.

Following his January 2000 conviction for firing a gun at an occupied vehicle, Duke was sentenced to five years in prison to be followed by 10 years of probation. The 56-year-old Duke’s probation term began in January 2004 upon his release from prison. Duke is pictured in the mug shot at left.

In his letter last year to Judge Michael Overstreet, Duke claimed to have made only $200 during the prior six months. He noted that his wife had been “bumped down to a teacher’s aid position and with that downgrade came the salary downgrade…and now because of further budget cuts she may get bumped out of the teacher’s-aid position…she may be unemployed too!”

Rebecca Duke lost her teaching job earlier this year.

In February, Overstreet signed an order terminating Duke’s probation after the felon filed a pro se motion stating that he had “no violations and has complied diligently with all probation terms and conditions.”

Probation officials did not offer an opinion on the early termination request, according to a January 2010 court filing that includes a scary synopsis of Duke’s original crime. In October 1999, Duke threatened to kill a Florida woman, and when she attempted to flee, he used a handgun to “shoot out the victim’s rear tire of the vehicle that she was operating.”

Duke, wearing a bulletproof vest, told the woman he had “been watching her for the past six months and was planning to kill her, several other people, then himself,” according to probation officers.

After firing several rounds last night at board members of the Bay District Schools, Duke was felled by shots fired by an ex-cop working as a security guard. Duke then shot himself to death. (3 pages)