JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — This story was originally reported by the Florida Times-Union.
Drug indictments against members of a federal task force have scuttled a couple’s prosecution on attempted murder charges involving shooting a Jacksonville police detective during a SWAT raid.
Charges were disposed Wednesday against Anthony Christopher Gantt and Diamonds Jonquil Ford, who had been accused in the 2020 shooting of detective R.M. Nauss at a suspected drug house on Rutledge Pearson Drive.
“The criminal indictments of two DEA task force members — who are essential to the state’s evidence — are fatal to the prosecution of Diamonds Ford and Anthony Gantt,” State Attorney’s Office spokesman David Chapman said.
The dismissed charges are the most visible consequences so far from a federal prosecution of task force members Joshua Grady Earrey, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, and Nassau County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. James Darrell Hickox.
The two lawmen were arrested in March and charged again in September in an 11-count indictment claiming drug possession, fraud and gun and tax crimes.
Both men played roles in an investigation that led to a search warrant being issued in September 2020 for police to enter a home on Rutledge Pearson Drive. Hickox had asked the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office to provide a SWAT team and briefed them before the raid.
Nauss was a SWAT member breaking open a bedroom window and removing curtains when he was hit by gunfire that struck his protective vest and a radio, releasing shrapnel. He was knocked to the ground by the gunfire and rushed to a hospital but had only superficial injuries and nerve damage from his fall, a State Attorney’s Office memo said.
Because of the federal indictment, “Earrey and Hickox are no longer available as state witnesses” in the attempted murder case involving the gunfire, said the memo, called a "disposition statement." The statement, which outlined the decision to drop charges, added that claims in the indictment “raise significant questions” about events that happened before the SWAT team entered the house.
The federal charges argued that Hickox stole drugs for resale after they were bagged as evidence in police cases, then forged paperwork to cover his tracks.
But in the state's memo, Assistant State Attorney Roth Huband wrote that "the state has no means other than Hickox" to establish that an informant working for Hickox really had bought drugs in deals that were the basis for the search warrant being issued.
"But for these arrests, the prosecution would have continued," Chapman said, adding that the injured officer, other SWAT members and Jacksonville Sheriff's Office leadership had been told the reason the case was dropped.
Prosecutors had also brought drug trafficking charges against Gantt's brother, Reginald Gantt, and had planned to pressure him into testifying for state. But Huband wrote that "the nature and the quantity of the substances that were purchased can no longer be established," leaving Gantt's bother no reason to help prosecutors.
Charges against Reginal Gantt were dropped in June, court records show.