New Investigative Details Reveal How a Deputy’s Shooting Practice Nearly Killed An 11-Year-Old Boy

A 15-page charging affidavit the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office provided on Thursday details the lengthy, intricate investigation that followed a Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy inadvertently shooting an 11-year-old neighbor child in the neck in the Mondex, or Daytona North, in late August 2025. 

Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy Bryan Jackson, 57, was charged with culpable negligence, a first-degree misdemeanor. 

The report, written by Sheriff’s detective Necole Marsan, details to what extent detectives tried to conclusively establish that Jackson himself fired the round, as opposed to his daughter, Kailen Jackson, who had been issued the AR-15 that day by the Sheriff’s Office. She was in training. She had spent the day at a firing range before driving to her father’s house with the gun. 

The report also details obstacles: “During the course of this investigation,” the report states, “several limitations were encountered that prevented full reconstruction of certain aspects of the incident. One significant unresolved area concerns the complete surveillance footage from Bryan Jackson’s RING camera system. While Bryan advised that his RING camera had not recorded the firearm discharge and appeared to be uncharged at the time, partial segments of video before and after the shooting were voluntarily provided by him. These clips showed Bryan arriving home, handling the rifle, and later making statements referencing a possible ricochet; however, no video depicting the actual firing event was captured in the materials he shared.” Since there was no probable cause of a felony, detectives could not just then secure a search warrant for the Ring footage. 

By the time deputies and detectives got to Jackson’s property, Kailen Jackson had driven away to Lake Mary–with the rifle. After initially answering questions, Bryan Jackson told a detective he was not answering hers as he was getting a lawyer. Less than two weeks after the incident–on Sept. 8–he refused permission to detectives to return to the property. They had wanted to reconstruct the incident. 

Detectives also uncovered that Jackson had built a berm partially on property that did not belong to him. 

A 13-year veteran of the agency, Jackson told detectives he’d built and used two berms as a firing range on his property, at the corner of South Elder Street and Mahogany Boulevard, for 10 years. One of the berms, however, was built partially on an adjacent property to the north. That property owner had died. The property owner’s son told detectives that “no one should be on the property, has permission to be on the property or alter the property in any way.”

The following is based on Marsan’s investigative report, disclosed here for the first time. It is not the final word on the investigation. There is yet to be a final investigative report, which may include further findings. Marsan’s report was dated and signed March 11, and sent to the State Attorney’s Office only Thursday. 

The evening of August 27, 2025, Mary Buckner was folding laundry in the dining room of her house on Hazelnut Street in Daytona North. Her husband Johnney was working on the chicken coop in the backyard. They are grandparents to three children, whom they adopted as their own. 11-year-old Jayce was in his bedroom, in the southwest corner of the house, playing video games. A pair of jeans was on the dresser, on top of a shoe box.  

Around 6 p.m., Johnney heard shooting from the Jackson property to the southwest. Johnney assumed the Jacksons were shooting into a berm. The last shot he heard made the sound of a branch snapping, but he didn’t think anything of it. 

That shot could have killed Jayce. 

It drilled a hole through his bedroom wall, drilled a hole through the pair of jeans, and grazed him on the neck and arm. Jayce ran out of his room yelling that he’d been shot.  The projectile was not located that day, but on Sept. 5, as Mary was cleaning. It was in the family bathroom. 

Jayce was taken to the emergency room the next day. He told a detective, and later a Child Protection Team forensic interviewer, that “while he was laying on his bed within his bedroom, he was playing a video game and then felt something on his neck, and then right arm,” the report states. He described to sound as like a rock hitting a window or the wood, and noticed he was shot. “Jayce reacted by ‘swatting’ at his neck and then immediately exited his bedroom to advise Mary of his injury. Jayce then placed an ice pack on his neck and right arm. The pain “really hurt and burn.” He had initially thought that his video game switch had blown up. 

Previous reports had referred to Jayce getting grazed in the neck, but not the arm: the report determined that the wrist injury was not related to the shooting. He did not bleed. 

“Johnney armed himself with a pistol from his bedroom and left the residence in his truck to speak to neighbors who he knew to shoot often on their property,”  the report states. Johnney drove down to Jackson’s property and found him speaking to a neighbor. He told Jackson he may have shot his son. The two men then drove up to the Buckner house. 

Soon after that, “Jayce described Johnney returning with a male who began apologizing stating he was the one who shot the firearm.” The male being Bryan Jackson. 

Jackson told detectives that he’d returned home at 6 p.m., around the time when his daughter Kailen Jackson got there and showed him the AR-15 she had been issued by the Sheriff’s Office. Jackson told detectives that “out of excitement he grabbed the rifle, went inside his residence to retrieve a magazine with 5.56 rounds and then returned outside to shoot the rifle.” He showed detectives where he was standing when he allegedly fired at a berm, facing north. 

An internal investigation to be conducted subsequent to the criminal case will determine whether either  Jackson violated any policies by sharing Kailen’s rifle, or using a private range to practice with an agency-issued firearm. 

Jackson had two berms–a pistol berm and a rifle berm. To detectives, he described the rifle berm as “ginormous,” and that he’d recently added logs to it. He confirmed that the rifle was a Bushmaster Firearms International, but he didn’t have it anymore since Kailen had taken it with her and driven to her boyfriend’s house in Lake Mary. 

Detectives questioned whether it was in fact Bryan Jackson who had fired the bullet that struck the boy, or whether it was his daughter, and Jackson was covering for her. 

Detectives had noticed several surveillance cameras on the property. They asked Jackson whether the cameras would have captured the moment of the shooting. “On my RING camera, yeah,” he told them. But no such footage was produced or secured. 

“Bryan then explained that after he was advised of Jayce getting shot he checked his RING camera to see where he was standing but the camera was dead,” the report states, “so he just plugged the camera in to charge. Utilizing the RING camera app on his phone, Bryan began scrolling through the footage that was recorded. Bryan stated it does not show him shooting but it does show him walking around and preparing to shoot.” He thought it was weird that the camera did not capture him shooting. 

He provided footage showing him walk back into the house at 6:06 p.m., and another clip showing him walk out at 6:11 p.m. with a rifle. He opened the trunk of his patrol car. A third clip shows Jackson speaking on the phone at 6:27 p.m. and saying, “I don’t understand, I mean I guess it ricocheted.” 

Throughout his interview with detectives, he said he’d been using the shooting range for 10 years, but that if he was responsible for the injury to the child, “he wouldn’t shoot anymore and never use that range again.”

Kailen Jackson’s account aligned with her father’s. She said her father was just excited to look at the firearm. “While Bryan was shooting the firearm, Kailen stated she put her hands over her ears because she was not prepared for Bryan to shoot the firearm,” the report states. “Kailen also clarified that she did not know Bryan was going to shoot the firearm and only thought he wanted to see it.” She recalled him firing perhaps 10 rounds, hitting the base of a tree next to a berm as well as the berm. Soon after that, she drove off. 

When she was in the area of County Road 305 and County Road 90, she got a call from her father. “At first she could not understand what Bryan was saying and she was confused about what happened,” the detective’s report states. “Due to this, she did not turn around to return to Bryan’s residence with the rifle and continued to her boyfriend’s house.” She turned over the firearm for evidence the following morning. 

By then Bryan Jackson had ceased communicating with detectives. Detectives, working with the FBI (which was at the scene in October), established in early March that the projectile in question was “likely” fired by Kailen’s rifle. “In the materials provided by the FBI Evidence Response Team,” Marsan’s report states, “ a trajectory analysis photograph was included depicting the path of the projectile located within the Buckner residence. The documented trajectory establishes a direct line from the position Bryan reported standing at the rear of his property, facing the berms while discharging his firearm, to the point of impact within the Buckner residence.”

The totality of the evidence, including the Jacksons’ statements, led detectives to conclude that the shot that grazed Jayce Buckner came from Kailen’s Bushmaster rifle, and that Bryan Jackson had discharged the rifle. “The circumstances created a substantial risk of great bodily harm to the occupants of [the Buckner residence] even though the medical outcome was not catastrophic.”

After the incident, Jayce stopped sleeping in his room. He slept on the floor in the living room. In mid-March, Mary Buckner filed suit for damages exceeding $50,000 against Bryan Jackson.