ORLANDO, Fla. — The man shot by Deputy Bruce Stolk in December 2020 is suing him and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, accusing them of aggravated battery. This comes after charges against the deputy in the shooting were dropped earlier this year.

In addition to aggravated battery, for which the deputy was indicted in 2022, the lawsuit filed last week accuses Stolk and the agency of negligence. The suit claims Stolk shot then-18-year-old Edenilson Urbina despite being unarmed and only suspected of a traffic offense as he was surveilled by undercover deputies.

The 11-page complaint further alleges false imprisonment, accusing Stolk of unlawfully shooting and arresting Urbina for resisting without violence. That charge was dropped by prosecutors two months after the shooting, according to the document, “once the entire factual basis for his case was reviewed.”

“My goal is to find out who knew what and when,” Andrew Darling, Urbina’s defense attorney who brought the lawsuit, said in an interview Tuesday. “You’re doing undercover operations that lead to a traffic stop on a motorcycle going 25 mph? That’s the question I am excited to ask.”

A sheriff’s office spokesperson declined to comment, saying the agency “does not comment on pending litigation.”

Urbina was shot during a nighttime foot chase prompted when deputies approached him at a gas station in Oak Ridge as he waited in line at a food truck. He ran off as deputies said they intended to issue a ticket for improper eye protection while Urbina rode his motorcycle, according to an arrest affidavit.

Shaky body-worn camera video shows Stolk fired his gun seconds after hopping out of his vehicle as Urbina ran between nearby apartment buildings. The bullet struck Urbina in the leg and video showed him immediately on the ground with arms outstretched, groaning in pain as Stolk shouted “get your hands out of your waistband.” No weapons were ever found on Urbina despite Stolk claiming he acted in self-defense.

“Listen to me,” Stolk bluntly warned on video, “if you reach anywhere toward your waist, I will f—ing smoke you, you got me?”

At the time of the chase, deputies cited “high crime” in the area of the Kingsgate Drive neighborhood as the reason they were there, but that wasn’t enough for the grand jury that indicted Stolk nearly two years later. Stolk never denied he purposely shot Urbina, but prosecutors under Orange-Osceola State Attorney Andrew Bain in March overruled the grand jury and dropped the case entirely, writing in a 30-page memo they believed the deputy was lying.

Darling said after the case was dropped that he was furious at the decision because Urbina was cooperating with the State Attorney’s Office as it readied to take Stolk to trial: “Now he gets no justice because the person who shot him is a law enforcement officer.”

“The tragedy here is Mr. Urbina is going to have to deal with the injury to his leg as well as the mental injuries and the mental health consequences of that entire interaction,” Darling said during Tuesday’s interview. “His charge was resistance without violence —that’s the charge that justified him getting shot, according to the sheriff’s office. We can’t lose sight of that.”

Adding to the controversy, Bain’s office blamed his predecessor — Monique Worrell, who Bain was appointed to replace by Gov. Ron DeSantis following her suspension — for botching the prosecution, calling it a “disregard for the pursuit of truth and justice” by not entertaining the possibility before the grand jury that the shooting was accidental. The matter was taken to the Florida Bar after a judge declined to release the transcript of the grand jury proceeding, arguing the dispute came down to “policy differences.”

The Bar later cleared two prosecutors probed for ethics violations while presenting the case against Stolk before the grand jury under Worrell, who handily defeated Bain in November’s election to retake her position as region’s top prosecutor. Since the shooting, Stolk, who was hired by the sheriff’s office in 2017, has returned to work.

After his case was dropped in March, the sheriff’s office said it would conduct an internal investigation and “the findings will be public.” An agency spokesperson did not answer a question on the status of that investigation and a public records request for its findings filed by the Sentinel in October has not been fulfilled.

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