Florida deputy killed, 2 deputies wounded in shooting, authorities say

A Florida sheriff's deputy was killed and two other deputies wounded in what authorities called an ambush shooting inside a home.

The three deputies with the Lake County Sheriff's Office were responding to calls of a physical disturbance at a home in Eustis, Florida – a rural part of the county – on Friday night.

John Herrell, a spokesperson for the sheriff's department, told CBS News that the deputies separated the involved parties and then were asked to check on a home a few houses down.

Two deputies went a few houses down the street from the caller and found a door that appeared to have been kicked in.

"When the deputies entered the home, there was a lot of gunfire," Sheriff Peyton Grinnell said during a news conference at the scene.

One deputy was shot and trapped inside while the other retreated. More officers arrived and formed a team to enter the house and retrieve the deputy, but were met with "a hail of gunfire" and another deputy was struck, Grinnell said.

The male deputy who was the first shot and trapped inside did not survive, he said.

The second deputy sustained a shoulder wound and was in stable condition. A third deputy was hit in the armpit and the groin and stomach area multiple times and was undergoing surgery, said Grinnell, who did not immediately identify the officers involved.

"Just horrific when you have one of your own inside of a home and you can't get to him," Grinnell said, explaining that SWAT team members were involved in reentering the house in Eustis, about 37 miles northwest of Orlando.

"We have equipment for that and that's the reason we have this equipment, and we tore the home apart to get in there so we could get that deputy out of there," Grinnell said. "It was a chaotic scene from the start until the end."

Two suspects were found dead when SWAT entered the house and a third was transported to a hospital, Grinnell said.

There was no history of violent crime at the home and nothing to indicate the situation would be dangerous, he said.

"They were ambushed," Grinnell said.

The deputy who was trapped was taken to a local hospital where he died of his injuries, said the sheriff. He was identified as Master Deputy Sheriff Bradley Michael Link.

Link, 28, first became part of the Lake County Sheriff's Office as a young explorer. He served in the Army Reserves before he was hired as a deputy sheriff by the Polk County Sheriff's Office in 2017. In October 2019, he joined the Lake County Sheriff's Office where he "quickly became part of our family and faithfully served our citizens with courage and zeal," the sheriff's office said in a statement.

"Brad, as our Sheriff's Office family knew him, touched the lives of all who were blessed enough to work with him; his contributions and the impact of this loss will not soon be forgotten," the statement said.