In 2018, Kyran Andre Caples was a college junior studying business administration at California State University–Fresno.
On Saturday, shortly after midnight, he was shot eight times by members of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office after he gravely wounded two deputies who had ordered him to step out of his car at a closed northwest Lakeland park.
Caples, 26, a former 6-foot-1 varsity safety for the Central High School Grizzlies football team in Fresno, died instantly.
The deputies he shot – Lt. Chad Anderson, 46, and Deputy Craig Smith, 55 — are recovering from their injuries at Lakeland Regional Health Medical Center. “It’s by the grace of God that they’re alive,” Sheriff Grady Judd said at a news conference Monday.
Judd said Caples was radicalized at some point during his third year of college, becoming a member of the anti-government Moors Divine Movement, declaring himself a “sovereign citizen” and changing his name to Kmac El Bey.
It was El Bey who Deputy Shannon Conover encountered at 12:22 am. while patrolling Hunt Fountain Park on Duff Road. Judd said the Sheriff’s Office has been doing extra patrols in the area because of recent vehicle burglaries.
The shooting
Conover approached the white Mercedes-Benz and asked El Bey for his identification, which he refused to provide. “She noticed that he was dressed all in white, as if he were in some kind of religious or cult garb. He certainly wasn’t in normal street clothes,” Judd said.
After trying to talk with him and getting nowhere, Conover, who joined PCSO in 2019 and had a trainee with her, returned to her car and called for backup. Before long, Anderson and Smith arrived at the scene along with Deputy Natalie Oestreich, 30, with her K-9 partner Ace, and Deputy Christopher Bellido, 22, who joined the department last year, with another trainee.
When Anderson and Smith approached the car, El Bey again refused to cooperate.
“They tried to talk to him. ‘You’ve got to identify yourself. You’ve got to come out and talk to us.’ And he wouldn’t,” Judd said. “His car started rolling. They grabbed the window and all of a sudden he started shooting.”
Update on the deputies
Judd said El Bey fired five shots with a Springfield XD 9mm handgun. One hit Anderson in the left arm.
“It went through the arm and into the chest cavity. The projectile lodged between his heart and his spinal column. He was fractions of an inch from either being paralyzed from the chest down or killed,” Judd said.
Anderson, who has been with PCSO for nearly 26 years. has had two surgeries. He is still in the intensive care unit, listed in “critical but stable condition.”
Judd said initial reports that Smith, who has been with PCSO for 12 years, was shot four times were inaccurate. “After clearly evaluating him … he was shot twice. So what we were looking at was ‘in’ and ‘out’ holes,” Judd said. “He was shot twice in his right arm and he went down.”
Smith’s condition has been upgraded and he has been moved to a different floor.
Anderson “got two shots off before he went down,” Judd said. Between Anderson, Conover, Bellido and Oestreich, PCSO deputies fired a total of 38 shots. Eight hit El Bey, killing him instantly.
Judd said in addition to the handgun he used to shoot the deputies, El Bey had two other weapons in his car — a loaded .40 caliber handgun and a Ruger 10/22 shotgun converted to an AR-15 style assault rifle.
‘The most senseless part of this’
The “most senseless part of this,” Judd said, is that El Bey had a suspended driver’s license, but no criminal record. If he had cooperated, he might not even have gotten a citation for trespassing in the park.
“When we found he had a suspended license, he couldn’t have driven off … More than likely, we would have said, ‘Hey, let’s get somebody to give you a ride.’ And that would have been the end of it,” Judd said.
“He was not who we were looking for,” the sheriff explained. “We were looking for teenagers that were running through neighborhoods at night flipping door handles. He was not a target. He was not a problem until he made himself a problem.”
Judd blamed the Moorish sovereign citizen ideology, which is rife with conspiracy theories, for the tragedy. Adherents believe people can take steps to divorce themselves from a government they consider illegitimate, after which they are no longer subject to federal, state or local laws.
Judd said El Bey was homeless and had been “moving around” after being evicted from a house in Lithia. He had an encounter with officers in Pinellas County last month when they asked him to leave a business area. That encounter ended peacefully, but on Saturday he chose violence.
“He had time to think about it while backup was coming. We didn’t rush him. We didn’t push him. We talked to him. We tried to communicate with him,” Judd said. “There was a legion of deputies around him trying to get him to cooperate. He chose for us to shoot. He made that decision and we obliged him.”
A radical change
When PCSO representatives reached his mother in Fresno, she told them she didn’t know Kmac El Bey — the person her son had become. Although they had spoken and she occasionally sent him money, she hadn’t seen him since he left California three years ago.
“She said I don’t know this person. She said I know Kyran Caples,” Judd recounted. “I raised him as a Christian boy. He was a good man.”
He was named to the football All-League 1st Team during his senior year and had a 3.5 GPA before graduating from high school in 2015. His now-defunct Twitter handle was “KmacAC” — incorporating his initials, Kyran Andre Caples.
Moorish sovereign citizens claim to be descendants of Moors from the Kingdom of Morocco, which signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with the US in 1786. They often cite that treaty to claim they have special self-governing status and are exempt from normal laws and regulations.
El Bey carried a card identifying his race as Yahudim Moor — a term affiliated with Black Hebrew Israelites — and his nation as Amurca, which many adherents think refers to Muurs (Moors). The last names “El” and “Bey” are taken by many Moorish sovereign citizens as acknowledgement of their African and Moorish backgrounds.
He used a “number 13 lionhearted” on his Florida driver’s license and wrote “ARR” after his signature, meaning “all rights reserved.” Like many men in the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, El Bey wore a fez in his identification photos, which are traditional in Morocco.
Judd said there have been many violent confrontations between Moorish sovereign citizens and law enforcement, including two incidents in 2017 in which a lieutenant with the Orlando Police Department and a sergeant and officer with the Kissimmee Police Department were killed.
“We make frequent arrests of these citizens, these Moorish citizens, but we don’t publish them because we don’t want to market for them,” Judd said.
Judd said his department has spoken with El Bey’s mother twice. “She is a wonderful lady. She is totally in shock. … She’s going to fly in at some point in time and she wants to meet with the deputies and apologize for her son shooting them. That’s a good person.”
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