Man believed to have given gun attachment to accused Stuart murderer arrested

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. (CBS12) — New developments in a Thanksgiving shooting in Stuart, as St. Lucie County deputies arrested a Port St. Lucie man who is accused of selling the gunman a deadly piece of equipment.

Police say, Derick Moulton, supplied an auto sear to Lonnie Smalls III, who faces first-degree murder charges following the shooting of Mattie Jones. Jones was sitting in her living room watching TV when a stray bullet hit and killed her., as the Glock recovered at the scene of the crime was modified with one.

Smalls was attempting to swap an auto sear Moulton supplied him with. Communications between Moulton and Smalls were found on Smalls' cell phone, showing Smalls' attempts to acquire an auto sear for a Glock pistol. Moulton sent several pictures of auto sears to Smalls according to police, and his prints were identified in those photos, holding the auto sears.

See previous coverage: Police: Thanksgiving triple shooting in Stuart, 1 dead, 2 critically injured

An auto sear can turn a semi-automatic weapon, such as a pistol, into a machine gun, firing every bullet in the magazine for as long as the shooter holds the trigger.

“With a Glock, what it does, it actually will block the firing pin from locking up on the trigger bar, so when you pull the trigger, as long as you’re holding the trigger, it never locks up, so it’ll continue to fire until you let go of the trigger,” explained Brian DeVito, the President of The Tactical Store in Fort Pierce.

Not only does the weapon fire rapidly; Martin County Sheriff William Snyder says it sprays bullets uncontrollably.

“Adjust for recoil, come back on target and pull the trigger again," he said of a semi-automatic pistol. "With a fully-auto, you get such a burst of 9 millimeters (bullets) flying through that the gun starts moving. As it moves, it starts spraying unintended targets.”

Sheriff Snyder says the attachment is hard to spot without holding the gun, and says it’s becoming more prevalent along the Treasure Coast.

“We are seeing them here in Martin County, we’ve had several shootings out towards Indiantown where our video observations show that they were clearly using these fully-automatic handguns," he told CBS12 Friday. "There’s no doubt we’re going to see more of this.”

DeVito says these auto sears are being imported into the country illegally. The sheriff says deputies can no longer assume that a pistol is just a pistol.