LEESBURG, Fla. – An Orlando man arrested late last month during his son’s Pop Warner game at Leesburg High School is accused of pulling a gun and threatening other parents over some alleged trash talking.
Police responded to the high school’s campus around 6:45 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30, locating 40-year-old Quan Isom in the passenger’s seat of a gray pickup truck that dispatch reported he was trying to get away in. A woman driving the truck identified herself as Isom’s wife and was instructed to exit the vehicle before officers told the man to walk back toward them. During this time, Isom allegedly argued with the officers and threatened to kill a K-9 at the scene, police said. While reportedly refusing further commands to lay flat, he was “eventually escorted to the ground and detained” in the high school’s parking lot along Yellow Jacket Way, a police report states.
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Isom’s wife told officers that they were from the Orlando area and were attending the youth football game for their son, who was a participant, according to the report. She said her husband was arguing with other parents from the Leesburg youth team, one of whom had allegedly made a remark that their son was better than Isom’s, upsetting him, according to the report.
It was then that Isom reportedly went to the truck, retrieved the gun and was seen by others sticking it in his waistband, police said. Other parents ran away when they saw the gun, which Isom “carelessly and openly displayed,” police said. Isom’s wife said she rushed toward him, urging him to calm down and get in the truck, the report states. She also told officers her husband was intoxicated, which was why he was in the passenger’s seat during the stop, according to the report.
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A .357 revolver was found under the driver’s seat of the pickup with four rounds of .38 Special ammunition, one of them ready to fire, police said. A check of Isom’s record showed 11 prior felony convictions, indicating he could not legally possess a firearm. The couple’s juvenile children — with redactions obscuring an exact number of said children — were sat in the back seat of the truck at the time of the initial stop, police said.
Isom was booked early Sunday, Oct. 1, at the Lake County jail to face charges of careless exhibition of a firearm on a school campus, resisting or obstructing without violence, possessing a firearm on a school campus and possession of a firearm and ammunition by a convicted felon, records show. Police added he was also trespassed from the school.
Isom was issued a $15,000 bond that remains unfulfilled at the time of this report.
The school’s homecoming was taking place at the time of Isom’s arrest, prompting a brief lockdown at the event, according to the following statement from Lake County Schools:
The event surrounding this incident was not affiliated with Leesburg High School and none of our students or employees were involved. We briefly locked down homecoming while police responded. That is our normal protocol when there is law enforcement activity near a school.
Lake County Schools
The incident was just days before a shooting at a Pop Warner football practice in Apopka on Monday, Oct. 2, what police said involved an 11-year-old boy retrieving a gun from his mother’s vehicle and shooting two other children, both 13. The boy was arrested on a charge of attempted second-degree murder, with Apopka police Chief Mike McKinley adding some adults could also face charges in the shooting because the child was able to retrieve a firearm that was not secured.
“Your firearm was in a box that didn’t have a lock on it,” McKinley said. “We will be pursuing charges. For that crime, it is a second-degree misdemeanor. For all the parents out there, you have a firearm in your car or a firearm in your house, you have a responsibility to make sure that that firearm is secure and not accessible to your children because it only takes one bad decision and a split-second to ruin their lives.”
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