By Shira Moolten, Angie DiMichele
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
BROWARD, Fla. — The Broward Sheriff’s Office has concluded its internal investigation of the Tamarac triple murder, Sheriff Gregory Tony announced Friday, firing an additional six deputies and disciplining 11 others.
Nathan Gingles is accused of shooting his estranged wife, Mary, her father, David Ponzer, and a neighbor, Andrew Ferrin, while hunting her through a Tamarac neighborhood early on a Sunday morning in February, their 4-year-old daughter following him. Gingles has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder.
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The Sheriff’s Office released a nearly 250-page report detailing the sequence of events that morning and the numerous policy failures that Tony said led to the three deaths six months ago. The Sheriff’s Office split the investigation into two distinct failures: Deputies’ handling of the investigation leading up to the murders and their active shooter response that day.
At a news conference announcing the firings Friday, Tony focused on the active shooter response, walking reporters through a video that outlined the events of the morning, minute by minute, and showing how several deputies and a sergeant arrived at a meeting point a block away to “stage” but did not respond to the scene to confront Nathan Gingles until it was too late. He harshly condemned his deputies, comparing their actions that morning to BSO’s response to the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, a failure he had been tasked with as a new sheriff to prevent from repeating.
“They could have been at that house within two minutes, max, running cold three,” Tony said. “There was no traffic on those streets that night. There was nothing to obstruct their ability, in a marked unit with lights and sirens, and the powers and authority invested in them from this state, to get there and do the damn job. So it’s absolutely unacceptable.”
Prior to the firings Friday, the Sheriff’s Office had demoted the captain of the Tamarac district, Jemeriah Cooper, and fired him, as well as a probationary employee. In total, 19 deputies have been either fired or suspended.
Despite the numerous deputies disciplined and policies violated, Tony maintained that BSO’s handling of both the investigation and the response that morning were not evidence of a systemic problem.
“I can train you, I can supply you, I can give you all the tools to be successful,” Tony said. “What I can’t coach is courage and effort.”
Dan Rakofsky, the president of IUPA 6020, which represents BSO’s deputies and sergeants, told reporters Friday that he was “disappointed” with the conclusion of the investigation, saying it had a “predetermined outcome” based off of Tony’s comments immediately after the murders where he promised to fire his employees.
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Rakofsky disagreed with Tony’s comments about a lack of systemic problems.
“There are definitely systemic problems,” he said. “Whether or not they are at fault in this scenario, I can’t say, but they’re certainly worth looking at. The actions of the employees can never be independent of the systems they work with.”
The following deputies were fired Friday:
- Sgt. Travis Allen, for investigative procedures and response.
- Deputy Lamar Blackwood, for response.
- Deputy Eric Klisiak, for response.
- Deputy Brittney King, for investigative procedures.
- Deputy Daniel Munoz, for investigative procedures.
- Sgt. Devoune Williams, for investigative procedures.
Two other deputies, Cooper and Stephen Tapia, were fired before the conclusion of the internal affairs investigation.
Eleven other deputies face discipline. Five face discipline over their response:
- Deputy Dia Cross, 10-day suspension.
- Deputy Eric Baide, 10-day suspension.
- Deputy Daimeon Nelson, 10-day suspension.
- Deputy La’Toya Isaac, three-day suspension.
- Deputy James Redfearn, one-day suspension.
Six face discipline over the investigation:
- Deputy Daniel Lovallo,10-day suspension.
- Deputy Sophie Riggs, 15-day suspension.
- Deputy Ilany Ceballos, five-day suspension.
- Sgt. Yausel Pompa, three-day suspension.
- Deputy Raul Ortiz, one-day suspension.
- Deputy Kyle Schnakenberg, one-day suspension.
Two other deputies, Joseph Sasso and Michael Paparella, were investigated but not disciplined; findings on their role came back not sustained.
‘Rally point’ delays response to shooting
Just before 6 a.m. on Feb. 16, Nathan Gingles drove into the Plum Bay community where Mary lived with her father, David Ponzer, who had been staying with her to protect her, according to the internal affairs report. Gingles canvassed the neighborhood, then crept up to his former wife’s home, where he waited outside the home for approximately 20 minutes.
At that point, he walked around to the back of the home and shot Ponzer dead, the report shows. Mary and her daughter fled outside, and he chased them, then dragged Mary between two of the homes and Tased her. Her screams could be heard on video footage.
By 6:01 a.m., the first 911 call came in. A man said he heard gunshots and screaming at a home the next street over. Shortly after, another 911 caller reported hearing four shots, as people screamed and one person said “Oh my God.”
Dispatch relayed the call as a “Shooting Just Occurred” call. Sgt. Travis Allen, hearing the call over dispatch, directed all five available Tamarac deputies to respond, besides Cross, who was at the scene of a call about a mentally ill person, and Baide, who responded to back her up, according to the report. He then told the dispatcher to have deputies Blackwood and Tapia choose a “rally point” for all deputies to stage prior to responding to the call.
None of the deputies — Blackwood, Tapia, Klisiak, Isaac, or Nelson — activated their body-worn cameras at first as they responded to the call, according to the report. Neither did Allen. They proceeded to a location about a half-mile away from the scene.
Speaking to the dispatcher, Allen asked for more information. The dispatcher told him that the caller no longer heard shots but heard a woman and child’s voices.
By 6:06 a.m., deputies Blackwood, Tapia and Klisiak had arrived at the rally point, according to the report, approximately one-and-a-half blocks from Gingles’ home.
Some of the deputies recalled feeling concerned by the details of the call at the time, but responding to the rally point anyway. Tapia, the trainee, who was with Blackwood, told investigators that when he heard the initial details, he thought “probably we have someone who was murdering someone,” according to the report, but that he “wasn’t sure” if it still involved an active shooter.
Meanwhile, as deputies staged at the rally point, Mary Gingles fled from Nathan and began banging on the door of a neighbor, screaming for help, the report shows. He followed her across the street, video footage shows, their daughter trailing him as he pointed his gun at his estranged wife. She continued to run, and he chased her into a yard, pulling another gun out of his backpack.
By that point, another 911 call came in.
“I can’t believe there is this many cops in the neighborhood and no one has responded yet,” the caller said.
In the next several seconds, Mary Gingles entered the unlocked door of Andrew Ferrin’s home, closing it behind her. Nathan Gingles followed her inside with their daughter, shooting her and Ferrin dead, according to the report.
At the rally point, Blackwood, his trainee, Tapia, and Klisiak told dispatch they had arrived, asking if there had been additional calls. Dispatch told them a second caller had reported hearing gunshots.
By 6:08 a.m., video footage showed, Nathan Gingles had left Ferrin’s home and was walking back to Mary Gingles’ home. He left the home and began walking through the community three minutes later.
Dispatch began reporting that nine gunshots had been heard, but deputies continued to arrive at the rally point, not the scene of the shooting. Later, they said they were following instructions and did not know if there was an active shooter situation.
At the same time as this was occurring, just before 6 a.m., K9 Deputy Justin Forsberg had arrived home after an overtime shift in Deerfield Beach and heard the initial call about the shooting. He decided to head to the scene since it was near his home, texting a fellow K9 deputy about it. While other deputies later said they didn’t think it was an active shooter at the time, Forsberg said he did, due to the reports of gunshots and someone calling for help.
By 6:10 a.m., Allen arrived at the Plum Bay community. Forsberg arrived two minutes later, saying he stopped at the rally point only to put on his body armor. Then he headed to the scene, Redfearn right behind him. The others did not immediately follow, according to the report.
Four minutes later, Allen, who was still driving to the rally point, asked the dispatcher if they heard a child’s voice, and she said that a woman had been heard screaming and a child crying. He then reported seeing a “a suspicious white male” walking with a child, saying he didn’t know if they were related to the shooting call.
“Just find it odd that they are walking around at this time of the morning, and she has no shoes on,” Allen said.
The man was Nathan Gingles, walking with his daughter. They passed Allen on the street. He did not follow them.
Seconds later, Forsberg arrived at the scene of the shooting call, where he spoke to Redfearn.
“Where is everyone else?” he asked, to which Redfearn replied, “Can you get on the radio and ask because they’re (expletive) standing back there like (expletive)s.”
By 6:18 a.m., almost 20 minutes after the first 911 call came in, four other deputies joined Redfearn and Forsberg at the site of the shooting call. At 6:26 a.m., Forsberg said there was a possible dead person.
Following the shooting, internal affairs investigators questioned all of the deputies who had been in the area that morning. Klisiak, who was later terminated, said he regretted not responding sooner but was following orders, referencing a prior domestic incident during which he was lectured for responding without waiting for backup.
“Sadly, a lot of it was coming down to I’m listening to what I’m told to do, you know?” he told investigators. “And that was one of the things that I kinda beat myself up over. I was like, you know, I should have went in regardless of what we were told.”
On Friday, Tony said that the deputies should have ignored Allen’s orders that morning and responded to the scene anyway, pointing to Forsberg as an example; the Deerfield Beach deputy ended up being one of the first to arrive at the scene despite not having been called out initially and coming from outside of Tamarac.
Among the deputies fired over their response, Tony focused his attention on Allen, describing him as a “coward.”
The sergeant told investigators that he did not believe the incident was an active shooter at the time, even after hearing about the calls reporting increasing numbers of gunshots. Still, he said that he should not have instructed everyone to meet at a rally point.
“Based on the proximity of the rally point to the location of the ‘Shooting Just Occurred’ call, (Allen) believed Deputy Blackwood, Deputy Tapia, and Deputy Klisiak could have prevented Mary Gingles’ death if they had responded to the scene when they arrived at the rally point,” the report said.
Allen also said that he did not confront Nathan Gingles or his daughter because he wasn’t sure they were connected to the shooting, due to the fact that they were walking and the girl was “not screaming,” the report says.
The next day, on Feb. 17, during roll call, Allen and the other deputies debriefed their response to the shooting. Multiple deputies told internal affairs that Allen had made a comment to suggest he was nervous about what might have happened if he had confronted Nathan Gingles the day prior. Allen denied their allegations.
“What I said was, with this investigation of what we found out on scene, I said, with this guy’s mental state and what he did to those people on scene, I said, possibly if I had to make contact with him, he possibly would have engaged me,” Allen said. “And I said I would have killed him.”
Events before murders
The two most notable incidents that deputies failed to properly investigate were when Mary Gingles reported in October 2024 the discovery of a GPS tracker hidden on her car, while having proof that Nathan Gingles purchased it, and in December 2024 finding a backpack filled with suspicious supplies that Mary Gingles referred to as a “Crazy Person Kill Kit.”
Neither the suspicious backpack, which also contained narcotics, nor the car tracker were initially collected into evidence and should have been, the investigation found. Munoz at one point told Mary Gingles she could throw the backpack away. King, who was assigned the car tracker case, didn’t try to contact Mary Gingles or collect evidence until January — 58 days after she had been assigned to the case, according to the report.
‘This was my tracker victim’
Mary Gingles called the Sheriff’s Office on Oct. 29, 2024, after finding the GPS car tracker hidden on her car.
A community service aide, Samantha Simeus, was the person who initially handled the call. Multiple people during the internal investigation said a community service aide should not have handled that type of call and are not allowed to collect evidence. After Simeus wrote a report, the case was assigned to King on Nov. 5, and Ortiz assisted her.
Ortiz wrote in a case report on Nov. 26 that investigative leads pertaining to the tracker had been “exhausted” and the case was inactive, pending new information.
“On Tuesday November 26, 2024 at approximately 12:00 PM, I attempted to make landline with the reporting person and was unsuccessful due to the phone number being disconnected,” Ortiz’s case report said. “At this time, Gingles believes that the tracker belongs to her ex-husband, however, she was unable to provide any evidence suggesting that the tracker belonged to her ex-husband. Additionally, Gingles did not provide her ex-husband’s name, DOB, address, or phone number.”
In his interview with internal affairs, Ortiz was asked if it was sufficient to try to contact a victim only one time. He said he “definitely could have asked” Mary Gingles for her husband’s information but “also thought that King” would investigate further.
King’s first contact with Mary Gingles about the tracker wasn’t until January.
“When asked if this was acceptable, she replied, ‘No ma’am,’” according to the report.
Allen during his statement told internal affairs he “was unaware at the time that placing a tracker on a vehicle was a crime,” according to the report. Cooper also said the community service aide might not have known that was a felony. King also in her own statement said at the time she didn’t know that it was a crime. Someone should have collected the tracker, Cooper said to internal affairs.
As of Feb. 13 , Mary Gingles’ GPS tracker case was one of 68 cases assigned to King that remained open, records previously obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel show. Cooper said during the internal investigation that the average number of open cases for a detective in Tamarac was 30 to 40, which is “manageable,” and that he knew King struggled with managing her caseloads.
King took the tracker into evidence on Jan. 2, the records show, which was a few days after Mary Gingles was granted a second restraining order against Nathan Gingles. There was no evidence King had started to review the case before then, Williams said to internal affairs.
On Jan. 16, King authored an application for a search warrant for the GPS tracker in support of a domestic violence stalking charge, records previously obtained by the Sun Sentinel show.
It was denied by the State Attorney’s Office because of “an issue with the charge and the probable cause,” King said to internal affairs. She sent a second application later that month, changing the charge to electronic stalking.
“Detective King was asked what happened after the search warrant was sent off to the State Attorney’s Office for the second time, and she responded, ‘That was it, I was waiting for…’” the report said.
From submitting the second warrant on Jan. 23 to the date of the murders, “King advised that she did not follow up on the search warrant for the tracker,” the investigation report said.
On the day of the shootings, King was “very distraught,” Williams said in his statement, so much so that he put her in his car to try to calm her down.
“Sarge, this was my tracker victim,” King told him, according to the report.
King gave the Mary Gingles case file, which was confidential and part of an active criminal investigation, to her personal criminal attorney after the murders “so he could see what she did on the case and to protect herself,” which resulted in a sustained allegation that she tampered with physical evidence, according to the investigation report.
‘Kill bag’ investigation
Munoz went to Mary Gingles’ home on the afternoon of Dec. 29 about a suspicious backpack she had found after in-home surveillance videos showed Nathan Gingles, wearing gloves, entering their home when he was not supposed to be there at all, according to the internal affairs report.
The backpack had restraints, a note about “needle air embolisms,” pills and items that Mary Gingles said could be used to torture someone, among others. Mary Gingles told Munoz that it looked “like a crazy person kill kit,” according to a transcript of body-worn camera video included in the report. She mentioned the car tracker case from October and how she still had it with her. He found that “odd,” he told internal affairs investigators, according to the report.
Mary Gingles told Munoz she was going through a difficult divorce with Nathan Gingles, showed him where she found the backpack and that she had footage of him coming into the home. At one point, she said, “he is planning to murder me, and he thinks he can get away with it somehow.”
She asked if Munoz could take the backpack because there were drugs inside. During the internal investigation, Munoz said given that the backpack had a felony narcotic inside, “this is something he could have done differently that day.”
Ultimately, Munoz left the call without taking the backpack because he said there was no evidence of a crime, according to the report.
“Knowing what he knows now, he wishes he could have done more, given the opportunity,” the internal affairs report said. “He felt that he had documented everything he could. He assumed that something would be done in the future, such as building a case against Nathan Gingles.”
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