Terri Sweeting-Mashkow was a 47-year-old female deputy with the Indian River County Sheriff's Office who was killed in the line of duty on November 21, 2025, while assisting with a court-ordered eviction at a residence in the Bermuda Club community off A1A in Vero Beach, Florida. She was one of three deputies, along with a locksmith, sent to the home on Governors Way that morning after her agency received paperwork from a mother seeking to formally evict her adult son.
The call was treated as a routine civil process, and there was no advance indication in official records that the situation would turn violent.
According to investigators, the deputies and the locksmith entered the home's entryway around 8:40 a.m. as part of the eviction process when the resident, identified by authorities as 37-year-old Michael Halberstam, retreated deeper into the house, retrieved a firearm and suddenly opened fire on the group. In the burst of gunfire that followed, Sweeting-Mashkow was fatally wounded inside the residence. Another deputy, Florentino “Tino” Arizpe, was shot in the shoulder but managed to escape to the garage area, while the locksmith, later identified as 76-year-old David Long, was struck multiple times and critically injured. A supervising sergeant on scene returned fire, hitting Halberstam.
Emergency responders rushed the wounded to a nearby hospital. Sweeting-Mashkow was pronounced dead that day, and her body was later escorted in a motorcade to the medical examiner's office as fellow law enforcement officers lined the route in tribute. Long, the locksmith, succumbed to his injuries two days later, on November 23. Halberstam, who had been taken to the hospital in critical condition after being shot several times in the exchange of gunfire, died from his injuries the following afternoon at about 3:41 p.m., leaving no surviving suspect to arrest or prosecute in the case.
In the days after the shooting, investigators and reporters pieced together more about the events leading up to the eviction. Court records showed that Halberstam's mother had filed for eviction on November 5, and deputies had been called to the home multiple times during the month over domestic concerns related to her efforts to remove him from the property. Despite those calls and some troubling social media posts attributed to Halberstam, including negative comments about law enforcement and conflicts with a former employer, officials said there had been no clear legal basis to flag him as a prohibited firearm owner or to treat the eviction as a high-risk tactical operation ahead of time.
Sweeting-Mashkow herself was a 25-year veteran of the Indian River County Sheriff's Office, having started her career as a dispatcher before moving into patrol and later transferring to the Legal Process Civil Unit in 2023, where she handled duties like serving writs and eviction papers. Colleagues and family members described her as deeply dedicated to her work, with a reputation for compassion and a “heart of gold.” In recognition of her service and sacrifice, she was posthumously promoted to the rank of sergeant. A large memorial grew outside the sheriff's office, and community vigils and tributes were held throughout Indian River County as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement opened a formal investigation into the shooting, which is standard procedure for officer-involved incidents. Funeral services were scheduled in Vero Beach in early December, with law enforcement from across the state invited to honor her memory.
