According to the arrest affidavit, 32-year-old Courtney Irby was arrested June 15, and charged with armed burglary of a dwelling and grand theft of a firearm after she entered the apartment of her husband, Joseph Irby, gathered his guns and turned them into the Lakeland Police Department.
The guns were previously ordered by a judge to be turned in, but when Courtney Irby dropped them off at the jail, an officer told her she was breaking the law.
“So are you telling me that you committed an armed burglary?,” asked the officer, and Irby answered, “Yes, I am, but he wasn’t going to turn them in, so I am doing it,” reports the Lakeland Ledger.
Irby had already applied for a temporary injunction against her husband and the two were in the process of a divorce, according to court records.
From the Ledger:
Joseph Irby’s arrest affidavit from the Bartow Police Department notes that officers met Courtney at the station on June 14 regarding a domestic aggravated battery. According to the affidavit, the estranged couple are married with two children and have resided together in the past. They were attending court that day regarding their divorce, and after court, a verbal altercation allegedly occurred.
Police reports said that when Courtney tried to leave the courthouse, Joseph allegedly followed and began ramming his vehicle’s front bumper into the rear bumper of her vehicle. She told police that he began yelling and screaming, and ran her off the road while she was trying to contact Bartow Police dispatch via telephone.
Police wrote in his affidavit that they saw scratches on Courtney’s rear bumper, and noticed that she was uncontrollably crying and telling officers that she feared for her life. According to the arrest affidavit, Courtney told police she had several restraining orders on him in the past.
“She was actively protecting herself and her family from an estranged husband who had not turned over his firearms to law enforcement, and was arrested for it,” said State Rep. Anna Eskamani in a statement. “We should be outraged by her arrest, and Irby should not be prosecuted by the local State Attorney’s office.
We reached out to State Attorney Brian Hass' office for comment, and will update this post if and when he gets back to us.
Last legislative session, Eskamani and Senator Lori Berman filed SB1206 and HB941 to keep guns away from people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence offenses, and essentially close loopholes in Florida’s 2018 risk protection order law, which states that only a law enforcement officer or agency can file a petition for a risk protection order, and essentially remove firearms from a respondent that “poses a significant danger.”
Both bills died without a hearing.
“Federal gun laws already protect women from domestic abusers by prohibiting gun possession for people convicted of a 'misdemeanor crime of domestic violence' or subject to a final domestic violence restraining order,” said Eskamani. “But dangerous gaps and weaknesses in the system remain at the state level.”
Unfortunately, the link between gun violence and domestic abuse is a common and uniquely American issue. According to the gun research nonprofit Everytown, roughly 4.5 million American women alive today have been threatened with a gun by an intimate partner, and 92% of all women killed with guns in high-income countries in 2015 were from the U.S.
According to a 2016 study from The Trace, a woman in the U.S. is shot and killed by a current or former intimate partner every 16 hours.
Eskamani says she and Berman plan to refile both bills in 2020.
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This article appears in Jun 20-27, 2019.