By Jim Donnelly
A man arrested after firing his gun after a road rage incident was sentenced on Friday.
Brandon Beever, 29, of Fort Lauderdale, received three years in prison for opening fire at another driver during a road rage incident on the Sawgrass Expressway.
According to victim Bill Fyfe, 63, of Coconut Creek, he was heading to his job in Parkland on November 11, 2021, when Beever fired two shots from the driver’s seat of his black Mercedes Benz on the Sawgrass between Lyons Road and State Road 7.
“It’s like a surreal incident,” recalls Fyfe to Parkland Talk.“You’re not believing that you’re sitting on the Sawgrass with both of your front windows blown out of your car, glass all over the place, bleeding, and wondering if you got shot.”
According to the Florida Highway Patrol, Beever aimed his gun at Fyfe, who was behind the wheel of a gray Nissan Altima, which Beever had cut off in traffic before they flashed each other their middle fingers.
It was just a typical exchange of him cutting me off, me flashing him the bird, and then it just escalated from there with Beever slamming on his brakes. “You know they brake check ya, its crazy stuff. He came around my vehicle on the other side, yelling at me, rolling his window down, and screaming at me, and I thought, “Oh my God, this is crazy!”
Fyfe said it was quick because he was in the exit lane to get off on 441 to go south when he produced the weapon.
“I was a couple of lanes away from him, so I saw the weapon, and I was like, ‘Oh, look at this guy!’ I figured he was probably flashing the gun just to scare me; then I saw smoke come out of the barrel.”
Nothing happened on the first shot, but the second shot blew his windows out. Fyfe was later treated for cuts.
Fyfe gave FHP enough information to track down Beever and arrest him.
“He had his 11-year-old daughter in the vehicle with him, so that was the sad part of the whole thing. She ended up being the prosecution’s star witness,” he said.
Fyfe and the prosecutors didn’t want to put the 11-year-old on the stand to testify against her father and possibly put him in jail for 20 years. This allowed Beever to accept a plea deal for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The deal will send him to prison for three years; then, he will serve two years of house arrest and ten years of probation once he finishes his sentence, according to Fyfe.
“Judging by where the bullet came out, it missed by a couple of inches.” Fyfe said, “so I think the message that should go out to everybody is, “Let it go. Just Let it go. It’s just not worth it.”
He is relieved that it happened on a holiday, “It wasn’t your typical 8:15 in the morning traffic, which would be more than it was that day; it was light to medium traffic, so you gotta think about it: if the guy was shooting and it was a typical real busy morning, where do those two bullets go? Where do they end up? They could have hit someone else.”
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