An ex-convict living in The Villages is back behind bars after threatening to give HIV to a police officer who tried to take him into custody.
Wildwood police were investigating a single-vehicle accident at 11:20 p.m. Wednesday in which the vehicle had crashed into a concrete barrier on U.S. 301. Both airbags had deployed and the vehicle was completely inoperable. A passerby told police a man had run from the scene of the accident to a nearby industrial area.
Officers spotted 24-year-old Devan James LaRue who lives in the Village of Ashland. When officers commanded him to stop, he would not comply and they were forced to taser him. After they had handcuffed him, a police officer had his hand on LaRue’s shoulder to support him. That’s when LaRue said he wanted to bite the officer and give him HIV. LaRue then clarified that he wanted to bite the officer on the hand.
Officers loaded LaRue in an ambulance to transport him to The Villages Regional Hospital for treatment of injuries suffered in the crash. Due to his being combative, a police officer rode with EMS personnel in the ambulance. LaRue began spitting blood and saliva at the police officer and an EMT. LaRue was then sedated.
At the hospital, the police officer learned that LaRue had both alcohol and cocaine in his system and he had intentionally crashed his vehicle into the concrete barrier.
He is being held without bond at the Sumter County Detention Center on charges of battery of EMT/police officer, hit and run, driving while license suspended, reckless driving and resisting arrest.
LaRue had been released last April from the Florida Department of Corrections. He is currently on probation which is set to run through Oct. 21, 2021.
In 2008, LaRue was sentenced to nine and half years in prison in connection with the death of a woman in Pinellas County.
When he was only 15, LaRue snuck past his sleeping mother, stole her keys and sped off in her Mitsubishi Eclipse. As a Pinellas County sheriff’s deputy was trying to pull LaRue’s vehicle over, he hit the gas and smashed into a Jeep Wrangler carrying Danielle Edwards, 34, and her co-worker Bradley Womack, who was 20 at the time.
Edwards died. Womack was seriously injured.
Last June, LaRue was arrested after allegedly throwing a water bottle at a woman at the Lynnhaven postal station. At the time, he had reportedly been acting irrationally.
In September, LaRue was acquitted by a Sumter County jury after his family retained criminal defense attorney Cary Rada.
“The worst is over. Justice prevailed God was looking over this one all along! The truth will always set you free,” Dawn LaRue, Devan LaRue’s mother, wrote in a post on Facebook immediately after the verdict.
