Sidney Carter, 44, a White male, was shot during an early-morning confrontation on July 11, 2025, in Palatka, Florida, after a burst of road rage flared at the intersection of Crill Avenue and Laurel Street. Just before dawn, 911 calls began to flood dispatch at 5:46 a.m. Officers arrived to find a white Ford pickup riddled with bullets and crashed into the sign of Little Sprouts Learning Center, a daycare just off the roadway.
Two men lay wounded inside; Carter would be rushed to the hospital, where he died from his injuries hours later, while the second victim, identified as 45-year-old William Krueger, was listed in critical but stable condition. The daycare itself was closed and uninvolved, an eerie backdrop to a sudden eruption of violence on an otherwise quiet stretch of morning traffic.
Police quickly focused on a single suspect at the scene: 51-year-old Justin Dale Mullins, who had already phoned authorities to report he had shot “at least one person.” Investigators said multiple rounds were fired from Mullins’ vehicle into the passing pickup, and in the chaos that followed the wounded driver lost control, veering into the daycare’s concrete sign. Mullins remained nearby as first responders arrived, according to police, and was taken into custody.
Court filings later sketched a fuller picture of what preceded the gunfire: tailgating, bright lights, shouting, and gestures exchanged at a stop sign. Mullins told detectives he feared for his life, but surveillance cameras at the daycare captured a sequence that contradicted parts of his account—showing him wave the truck around and then open fire from inside his Mazda as the pickup moved past, before it accelerated and crashed. The images and recovered evidence—shell casings and a handgun—formed the spine of the case built in the days that followed.
By that afternoon, authorities announced Mullins had been arrested and booked on charges of second-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony; records indicated he was being held without bond as the investigation continued. Local outlets chronicled the shaken neighborhood, the shattered truck, and the fatal arc of a commuter dispute that turned into a homicide in minutes. Carter’s death was also memorialized by obituary notices and gun-violence registries, which fixed his name, age, and the date of the shooting in the public record as prosecutors prepared their case.
