This cop pretended to be Denzel Washington and pulled out his gun. Now he’s fired.
A Florida deputy sheriff has been fired for playfully waving his firearm and taser while quoting lines from Denzel Washington in “Training Day,” an action movie about a corrupt cop, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday.
Deputy Dean Zipes, who was hired in December 2015, was fired April 21 for the incident and other allegations that Zipes twice pulled out his firearm in an office setting and once made a motion to draw his service weapon at a pizza delivery boy, joking that he was alleged Orlando, Florida, cop-killer Markeith Loyd.
Zipes was quoting a profanity-laced scene in the 2001 movie about 4 a.m. Feb. 16 in which Washington’s character points two pistols at a rape suspect and rubs his weapons together in front of a police trainee, according to an internal-affairs report.
During the incident outside the sheriff’s Minneola, Florida substation at, Zipes rubbed his taser and pistol together — also near a trainee — in the direction of nearby Kangaroo Express convenience store, the report said. Several other deputies were present, according to the report.
Zipes said he doesn’t know what “sparked” his actions that morning but was trying to be funny and was also on edge due to an armed robbery his sector responded to that night, the report said.
“I am not a rogue, reckless, dangerous, insane guy that slipped through the cracks at the hiring process and somehow got a gun and a badge,” he told investigators, adding that he’s “just a guy going through some stuff.”
In a separate incident, investigators also responded to complaints filed by Zipes about offensive comments he said were made to him by other deputies. But investigators heard that Zipes also twice pulled out his firearm in an office setting, voiced racial slurs and “made a scene in a local Starbucks after not receiving free coffee.”
The is the second such incident involving the Sheriff’s Office in recent months. In March, two Lake deputies with a history of playing around with their tasers lost their jobs after trying to cover up an accidental tasing incident. A Leesburg High School employee had to go to the hospital when he was accidentally shot by one of the deputy’s tasers, according to a report.
This story was originally published May 5, 2017 at 7:16 PM with the headline "This cop pretended to be Denzel Washington and pulled out his gun. Now he’s fired.."