Letters from the accused shooter of a Fort Myers police officer show a deeply troubled, paranoid man who believed the police, his family and others were conspiring to kill him.

Wisner Desmaret, 29, wrote the letters from the North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center in Gainesville where Judge Stephen Walker had committed him after he was found unfit to stand trial in Sarasota.

Desmaret was treated there beginning in April 2017 until he was sent to the Sarasota County Jail around the end of June. He was let out of jail under the pretrial release program July 19. 

Three days later he was involved in an altercation that left Officer Adam Jobbers-Miller with a gunshot wound to the head.

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The court received five letters from Desmaret while he was incarcerated in Gainesville. According to court records, none were ever read or reviewed by the judge. And a copy of the final threatening letter, according to the records, wasn't forwarded to the prosecutor or defense as the others had been.

Desmaret's first letter was oddly prophetic. Written in neatly printed letters, and received by the court on April 27, Desmaret's spelling and grammar are poor, but the letter is coherent. He explains that he has "paranio (sic) problems" and "mental health" problems. "But just because I have a few issues that does'nt (sic) mean that I am not a human being."

More: FMPD officer shot: Father says mentally ill son will be arrested for Adam Jobbers-Miller shooting


Although he had been locked up for 14 months, he asked the judge not to send him back to the county jail until his case was resolved.

"I'm asking you this because every time I leave from the state hospital and go back to the county jail, they change my medicine and give me different meds from the meds I was taking at the state hospital which was helping me and making me feel better," he wrote. The county drugs made him "feel sick" he said, and "I stop taking my meds." 

In all five of the letters Desmaret wrote to the judge, he describes people trying to kill him. In a letter received May 22, the second in the series, he wrote: "I'm tired of people trying to kill me. Somebody gaved (sic) some money to my Family and now Family members are trying to kill me. I don't know who to trust, is like everybody is out to get me for what I dont (sic) know."

In that letter, Desmaret also wrote that some of the people trying to kill him are "supposed to be serving and protecting." 



Three letters arrived at the court in June. The June 1 letter is the shortest. Desmaret again asks how the judge is doing and thanks him in the end. In this letter, he asks the judge to look over his case "because I dont (sic) think my public defender knows what's going on or knows what she's getting herself into." He again mentions people want to kill him, adding, "I want to talk to the FBI or the CIA maybe."

Neither Alexandra Baishanski, Desmaret's current public defender, nor his previous public defender Kristina Cucinotta could be reached for comment.

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In a letter received June 19, Desmaret again turns to the details of his case. "I did not have cocaine on me," he wrote and requested a copy of the lab analysis for the cocaine he was charged with possessing. He does admit to having knives, but that was "because some people was following me and a trying to kill me," he wrote.

Desmaret then brings up the police again but in a more direct way than in his May 22 letter: "And I dinnt (sic) go to the police to ask for help because I found out they got something to do with it too. They knew the whole time that there were people out there trying to kill me and they was going to help them kill me."

The last letter the court received from Desmaret was the most chilling. Desmaret's handwriting starts small, similar to his earlier letters, but grows to about a half-inch tall by the end.

"This is my last warning before I call my angels from above that yall cant (sic) see to come down and deal with yall they are only a call away," he wrote. "So tell your Litte Friends to Leave me alone before I call these angels to come Down and Clean up."

Desmaret's final letter was received June 27. Less than a month later he would be out of jail after experts for the court reported that he was competent to stand trial. 

He was ordered by the pretrial services program rules to take his medication, call pretrial services every other Wednesday and schedule bi-weekly office visits. His next hearing was scheduled for Aug. 16.

On July 21, Desmaret was in Fort Myers and became involved in an altercation with Jobbers-Miller causing the officer to be seriously wounded. And Desmaret was shot.

Five days later Jobbers-Miller was still listed as critical and breathing through a ventilator. Desmaret also remains hospitalized, although his condition is unknown.

Desmaret had a history of running from the police. In Sarasota County, when approached by an officer for riding a bike in the dark without a rear light, he shouted, "Why are you stopping me!" a January 2017 police affidavit reads, and then "took off running." When he was apprehended and asked why he ran, Desmaret said it was "because he was scared."

On Monday, the 12th Circuit Court for Sarasota County revoked Desmaret's supervised pretrial release and ordered him arrested and taken into custody. By being involved in the shooting, he violated the terms of his pretrial release.

The order came too late to prevent a tragedy that Eddy Regnier, a psychologist in Sarasota, said could have been avoided if Florida would fix its broken mental health system.

Regnier was one of the psychologists the court had proffered to evaluate Desmaret's mental competency, but he was not involved in the case and did not provide the services. 

He said the judge is not to blame for letting Desmaret out. Once a psychologist declared him competent, he had no choice.

"The court is at the mercy of a dysfunctional mental health system," Regnier said. "Tragically we have, my profession has, failed the court, and this tragedy happened."

A person who is psychotic can fool a person into believing he's sane, Regnier said. "People who are the most paranoid, by the very nature of the disorder, tend to have high intelligence," he said. In a short interview they could provide intelligent answers that sound reasonable. "But a few minutes later they fall apart because they are psychotic," he said.

Instead of spending money on mental health services, we are depending on the judicial and penal system to treat the mentally ill, Regnier said. The U.S. spends $1 trillion a year on mental health treatment in the prison system, he said. Yet a fraction of that could be spent on preventive and supportive mental health services resulting in safer communities. "We clearly cannot arrest our way out of this," he said.

Yet arrest after arrest was the way Desmaret's mental health issues were handled for more than a decade.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement Records show 25 arrests in Florida, the first when he was 12 years old. From 2002-17, Desmaret racked up25 felony arrests and 22 misdemeanors. He had one case, a misdemeanor trespassing case in 2011, where he was found guilty. The other cases are still open, were dismissed or abandoned, or he was deemed incompetent to stand trial.

"This sort of in-and-out of court, I've never seen it to this extent. Or someone declared incompetent so many times," said Peter Dennis, a criminal defense attorney in Fort Myers. 

The judge is prohibited from communicating only with the defendant about the issues in the case, he said. So the judge wouldn't have read Desmaret's letters, although the defense attorney could have introduced them as evidence that he was not sane, Dennis explained.

But even then, he asked, what would the judge have been able to do with him? There are no long-term facilities to treat mentally ill people who come through Florida's judicial system, he said. 

"We focus on incarceration, hoping the jails will make people sane," Dennis said.

David Frady, a spokesman for the Department of Children and Families, which provides mental health treatment for people committed by the court system, cited Florida Statute 916.145.

It limits to five years the amount of time a person deemed incompetent to proceed with trial due to mental illness can remain in a forensic facility before the charges must be dismissed.

Although if the court deems that the person will become competent "in the foreseeable future," the time can be extended. If the charges are nonviolent, which Desmaret's were in Sarasota, the charges are dismissed after three years in the state facility.

"It takes a tragedy to bring this up," Dennis said, and get people talking about treating the mentally ill and providing the money and resources to take action. But Dennis didn't sound hopeful and ended on a disconcerting note, "This is going to happen again unless we have a mechanism in place to stop it."



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