3-Hour Standoff Ends Peacefully With Arrest of Man Previously on America’s Most Wanted

See the lead-up to the stand-off: “Spiraling Down For a While: The Violent Story Before the Stand-Off With Fugitive Michael E. Moore.“

Last Updated: 8:48 p.m.

The suspect at the center of a standoff with three dozen Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies in Palm Coast’s B Section this evening surrendered peacefully after three and a half hours.

He turned out to be Michael Eugene Moore, a man who was on “America’s Most Wanted” television show in 1996 after stabbing his wife 33 times and escaping with his 5-year-old daughter. His wife survived.

Moore was pulled over in the B Section after Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies detected through license plate readers that he was driving a stolen car out of Virginia (where the 1996 incident had taken place). He refused to come out of his car as he sat by the side of the road on Beaverdam Lane–and Facebooked live twice with his wife or girlfriend as he could hear deputies yelling out to him to surrender.

“Oh my God, they’re going to kill me,” Moore Facebooked to a woman who appears to be his current or ex wife. “Amanda. I’m sorry honey. I love you, please help me. I’m in Florida. The cops have got me. They pulled me over. I was never going to hurt you baby. There’s like, 20 cops. Honey, I love you. Honey help me. Oh God, they’ve got guns pointed at me. I love you baby. Please don’t let me die in prison or jail. Please. Oh my God. Help me. This is not fair.”

“Too late bro! You were warned,” the woman writes to him in a comment beneath the video. “Stop being ridiculous!!! This has happened before!!!”

Detectives locally were able to see him Facebooking as they pieced together his identity from different leads even as the negotiating team kept speaking with him–and he kept texting and communicating with his wife or girlfriend. (See several clips below.)

In the end, he agreed to surrender peacefully. There were weapons in the car. But he came out holding just his phone, which he may or may not have been using to film the scene as he surrendered.

“He ran hot and cold with our negotiators, but he agreed to come out,” Sheriff Rick Staly said at the scene. “I think he was getting hungry and he had to go to the bathroom, was some of the indicators. There were weapons in the car, and we had told him to not come out holding anything, and fortunately he complied with that.”

Moore has a current assault and battery warrant from Virginia, and will be facing at least a resisting arrest and a felony grand theft charge in Flagler County. He will be interviewed at the Flagler Beach police station by Flagler detectives, because they don’t currently have accessible interview rooms of their own since the Sheriff’s Operations Center has been evacuated.

“This is why we have the equipment that we have and why we have training and why we practice all the time and it paid off,” Staly said. “We were prepared with both less lethal weapons, gas and deadly force if we needed to use it. What I had directed our team was that if he comes out and starts running to a residential home, he was not going to make it, and we had to use everything we had to stop him, and hopefully that would have been the dog or one of our more less lethal munitions.”

The sheriff credited the 36 deputies who were involved in the stand-off, and the license-plate reading technology he had highlighted in a release just this week. “This shows well this technology is working to help us protect the community, because what was he doing in Palm Coast? Was he going to try to rob someone? Was he going to hurt someone? We’ll never know what we prevented,” Staly said.

In another earlier Facebook Live clip, Moore records himself conversing with the deputies outside: “The minute I step out, you’re going to fire,” he tells them through his window. The negotiator tells him he won’t be fired at. Moore doesn’t believe him, tells him he’s watched TV and knows the score.

“This is Mom I want you to give yourself up now please listen to your mom,” someone writing under the same woman’s name comments to him under that video. “Michael until you answer the police do you understand we will not answer you until you talk to the police talk to the police and Amanda will call you I promise you,” someone else writing under the woman’s name writes him.

“They said they gave me their word they’re not going to shoot me,” he says in another video. He calls himself “just a sad husband right now, lost my wife and baby and kids, period.” He alludes to making threats against his wife after she slept with a television reporter. He speaks of not having his medication, but also of not being psychotic.

Watch Michael E. Moore’s Facebook Live clips:

[The earlier story is below.]

Some 20 units of the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, including the SWAT team, a negotiations team and assistance from Flagler County Fire Flight overhead, have been in a standoff with a suspected armed robber on Palm Coast’s Beaverdam Lane since just before 4 p.m. The suspect is refusing to come out of his vehicle, and has been idling on the side of the road for more than two hours.

At least five homes have been evacuated in the neighborhood, with roads closed and deputies guarding various streets, their AR-15s drawn. Weapons are drawn at the scene itself, where the suspect is surrounded, with no avenue of escape.

“We want him to surrender peacefully, but if he comes out of the car and tries to enter a residence, we’re going to stop him,” Sheriff Rick Staly, who is at the scene, said, whether by use of a k-9 or through more lethal means. “We’re praying for the best resolution that he surrenders, but I’m not going to have one of my deputies hurt and I’m not going to have a resident hurt, and we’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Sheriff’s deputies detected that the man was driving a stolen vehicle through their use of license-plate readers, when the man drove past on Palm Coast Parkway near Belle Terre Parkway at around 3:45 p.m. Deputies got notice that the vehicle was stolen in Virginia during an armed robbery. The suspect was pursued and a traffic stop executed. He eventually complied by pulling over, but refused to comply further.

Based on the sheriff’s office preliminary investigation, Staly said the man is believed to have carried out the robbery in Virginia, zip-tying his victim, a woman, at gunpoint, after going into a business. It is not clear whether the suspect is armed.

Staly is at the scene with much of his command staff, with Chief Paul Bovino–who was scheduled to start his vacation today–as the incident commander. The Home and Lifestyle Show at Flagler Palm Coast High School was just ending its first day, enabling the sheriff’s office to pull a large contingent of deputies from that assignment and redirect them to the B Section.

But Staly said for the duration of the emergency on Beaverdam Lane, emergency calls to 911 will be triaged, with responses dispatched only to the most serious calls. He is asking residents to be patient.

He is also asking residents not to drive out to the area of the B Section in question to gawk, while residents of that neighborhood are asked to stay indoors.

Officials were expecting a long standoff: at 6:27 p.m., the sheriff’s mobile command center wheeled into the neighborhood.

There has been contact between negotiators and the suspect, on and off, the sheriff said, but it isn’t clear why the man is refusing to surrender or whether he is making any demands.

Deputies are within 400 feet of the suspect. Fire Flight has been circling overhead almost since the beginning of the stand-off. Volusia County’s Air One helicopter is on standby for a medical emergency (since Fire Flight took off to conduct a law enforcement assist, not with a paramedic aboard). Flagler County Fire Rescue and the Palm Coast Fire Department are also at the scene.