On April 23, 1987, a mass shooting occurred in Palm Bay, Florida, when 59-year-old retired librarian William Bryan Cruse Jr. opened fire outside a shopping mall, killing six people, including two police officers, and injuring 14 others before being captured by police in the early hours of the following day.

He then loaded his car, a white Toyota Tercel, with a shotgun, a pistol, and a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle.

[6] As he drove in the direction of Palm Bay Shopping Center, he stopped at his neighbor's house.

As Cruse started shooting, 27-year-old Ronald Grogan, a Palm Bay police officer, approached the scene in his patrol car.

Another Palm Bay police officer, 28-year-old Gerald Johnson, also entered the parking lot behind Grogan and exited his patrol car.

[7][8] Cruse tried negotiating with the police and ordered them to bring his car to the back of the store to allow him to drive out of Palm Bay.

At 1:56 a.m. Cruse was captured alive when police found him lying in a prone position in the southwest corner of the store.

At 3:30 a.m. Palm Bay police announced that in total six people had been killed and 14 others had been injured during the shooting.

In 1985, Cruse moved to Palm Bay with his wife, who was sick and suffered from Parkinson's disease.

Cruse, who hated homosexuals, later told investigators that employees of one of the grocery stores he had targeted thought he was gay.

[14][15] On July 28, 1989, Cruse was sentenced to death in the electric chair for the murders of Grogan and Johnson, the two police officers killed in the shooting.

His reasons for doing so were that he accepted the defense's argument that Cruse had "severe mental disturbance" which lessened the penalties for the murders of the four civilians.