JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – After spending the day in a quiet rural area near the Florida-Georgia line shooting guns and doing drugs, Patrick McDowell realized the stolen van he was driving was running low on fuel.
It was early in the night on Sept. 23, 2021, so the Marine veteran and his female passenger searched for the nearest gas station.
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But the first two stations they tried in nearby St. George, Georgia, were closed, McDowell said in court Thursday as he testified during his sentencing trial where he faces the death penalty. McDowell said the two headed over the state line to Callahan in Nassau County.
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It was there, at a busy gas station, where McDowell would fatefully cross paths with 29-year-old Nassau County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Joshua Moyers.
McDowell said when he pulled into the gas station, several jacked-up trucks were doing donuts in the parking lot.
Before he and the woman went inside, McDowell said, they smoked methamphetamine in the parking lot.
A short time later, after they went inside to the bathroom, Moyers pulled up in his Sheriff’s Office SUV and parked near the front doors.
“When I came out of the gas station, I looked at him and actually nodded to him,” McDowell said.
He said he assumed Moyers was there because of the trucks that were being loud in the parking lot, but when those people left, Moyers stayed in the parking lot inside his SUV.
“I knew that he had his eye on me,” McDowell said. “I walked out, nodded to him, (and) he stayed there. I kind of figured I was in some trouble.”
McDowell — who was high, had an active warrant for his arrest and had stolen guns and drugs inside his stolen van — got back into the van and drove off, despite knowing Moyers was watching him.
“It’s hard to explain how methamphetamine works. It makes things that are completely illogical seem logical. And for some reason, I thought it was perfectly logical to get into a stolen vehicle with stolen stuff in it when I knew that there was a police officer essentially waiting for me to leave,” McDowell said.
And just as he predicted, when McDowell pulled away, Moyers followed.
“As I started to pull away, I stopped, told [the female passenger] that we’re probably gonna end up being stopped,” he said.
It was right then McDowell said he knew he had to run. He didn’t want to go back to jail.
The woman he was with tried to talk him out of it.
“She asked me not to and I saw the sense in, you know, not trying to outrun a police vehicle in a minivan,” he said.
Moyers did eventually pull McDowell over, and McDowell said he knew if Moyers identified him, he was going back to jail.
At first, McDowell tried to talk his way out of it, lying to Moyers and saying he left his driver’s license in his pants pocket back in Jacksonville.
He told Moyers he’d borrowed the stolen van from a friend and when he was asked whether or not there was active insurance on the van, McDowell said he assumed there was because it was a Lyft car, and if he’s driving Lyft, then he must have insurance.
McDowell testified Thursday that he tried as hard as he could to talk his way out of going back to jail, but as he spoke to Moyers, he held a backup plan hidden in his right hand — a Heckler & Koch 40-caliber handgun.
Just as McDowell could feel the walls closing in and the possibility of losing his freedom again, he heard a train approaching on the tracks in front of the van.
What McDowell said next on the stand gave a detailed and chilling insight into his thought process in the moments before and after he pulled out his gun and fatally shot Moyers.
“First thing I want to do is apologize to my defense team for what I am going to say because they’re not gonna like this,” McDowell began. “I swore to Lieutenant Blackwell in the hospital that I would tell the truth about what happened when I had the opportunity to and I just promised the family and all the officers involved that I would tell the truth.
“When you get back to where I became open to the possibility that I was going to have to shoot Deputy Moyers because I was not going to go to jail. And my first option was to run. It didn’t make sense to run. [The female passenger] brought that to my attention. So I didn’t do that. My next option was to try to talk my way out of this situation. I knew that there wasn’t much of a likelihood of that. And then as I was trying to talk my way out of it, I started to hear a train coming in. As I said, the illogical seems logical when you’re on meth. That’s not an excuse, I want you to understand. Anything I’m saying about the drugs is not an excuse. I was the one that made the decision to use them. And knowing what they do; it alters your reality. Everything that seems unreal, you know, to a normal person seems perfectly logical when you’re on meth, and at the time, it seemed logical that if the train would come, I could take off across the tracks and him not pursue me. So I started to hear it coming before the arms came down.
“When I took the pistol out of the holster and put it down beside me, I checked the chamber to make sure I had a round loaded because I knew that if [talking] failed, then I was willing to do whatever I needed to do to get away and that included shooting the deputy. And I did that without a single, single thought of taking a man’s life. I was 100% focused solely on myself.”
“Cold, calculated, premeditated,” the prosecutor interjected.
“Yes, sir,” McDowell responded. “I put the gun down, and I try to talk my way out of it and still had my seat belt on at the time. My plan was still to try to run away. If you watch the video closely, you’ll notice that the brake lights never come off. I never put the vehicle in park. I had no intention of remaining there. I was just waiting for the opportunity that I could leave and not be followed.”
“And you made sure you weren’t followed when you put a 40-caliber in his face,” the prosecutor said.
“I’m getting there,” McDowell responded. “Whenever he reached for the door handle — I’ve stated several times that I felt pressured. I think I said that to some of the experts, and I did because it seemed like my options were closing to me. All my options of getting away without violence were closing to me. When he grabbed the door handle and the crossing arms came down, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get away from him unless I, unless I stopped him. So, when he asked me to step out, I turned my body, reached for the seat belt, and I took the gun out, and I shot him. And then as he fell, I fired two more rounds to make sure that he wouldn’t come after me. And then I took off and I just left him there in the street assuming he was dead.”
But Moyers wasn’t dead. Not yet.
His fellow deputies who arrived at the scene scrambled to try to save him and managed to get him into the ambulance still clinging to life.
And then they began what proved to be a five-day manhunt for the shooter.
Moyers’ wounds were too great, and he died at the hospital on Sept. 26, 2021, while his colleagues were still hunting down his killer.
After speeding away from the shooting scene, McDowell said, he parted ways with the woman and told her to call 911.
Then he hid out in the woods for five days, at one point firing shots toward law enforcement closing in on him. He wounded a Sheriff’s Office K-9.
McDowell was eventually found on Sept. 28, 2021, hiding in a bathroom building at the Kirsten Higginbotham Sports Complex. He was bitten by a K-9 during the takedown.
Deputy Moyers’ handcuffs were used to arrest him.
McDowell began his testimony on Thursday by apologizing to Moyers’ family.
“I took the life of a man that was better than me. I’ll never forgive myself for that,” McDowell said. “It makes me physically sick to think about it. There is nothing worse you can do than take a man’s life for doing his job.”