An email exchange with a police chief in Lake Mary, Florida, where George Zimmerman was arrested for allegedly threatening his ex-wife and ex-father-in-law. 
 
 An email exchange with a police chief in Lake Mary, Florida, where George Zimmerman was arrested for allegedly threatening his ex-wife and ex-father-in-law. ||||| The dramatic, tearful 911 call was unambiguous in at least one respect: George Zimmerman was about to step into the media spotlight yet again. 
 
 The disbelief that ricocheted around the nation Monday at Zimmerman's latest high-profile encounter with the law was summed up piquantly by the police chief of Lake Mary, Fla. After answering the 20th media call of the afternoon, Chief Steve Bracknell told a Los Angeles reporter what he really thought of the man acquitted in the killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. 
 
 "Man, it would be fantastic if you have an apartment out there [in California] for George Zimmerman," Bracknell said. "This guy is killing me." 
 
 Lake Mary police swarmed a home Monday afternoon after a 911 call from Zimmerman's estranged wife, Shellie, who told the dispatcher: "I'm really, really afraid. I don't know what he's capable of." 
 
 She filed for divorce last week. 
 
 "He's in his car, and he continually has his hand on his gun and saying, 'step closer,'" Shellie Zimmerman tells the dispatcher during the 911 call. "He's just threatening all of us with his firearm, and he's gonna shoot us. He punched my dad in the nose. My dad has a mark on his face." 
 
 She says her husband smashed her iPad and cut it with a pocketknife. 
 
 "Dad, get inside the house," she says. "George might start shooting at us, I don't know." 
 
 As police arrive, the dispatcher urges her and her father to stay inside the home. "Oh my god. Oh my god!" Shellie Zimmerman says. 
 
 "Shellie, you're doing really good, OK? This is a tough situation for anyone," the dispatcher says. 
 
 Shellie Zimmerman can be heard weeping quietly. 
 
 Officers briefly detained George Zimmerman while they investigated the incident, but did not arrest him. He went free when his wife and her father "both refused to press charges and [gave] us statements to that effect," Chief Bracknell said. 
 
 Zimmerman's attorney, Mark O'Mara, downplayed the encounter. 
 
 "I know the 911 tape suggests that Shellie was saying something, but I think that was heightened emotions," O'Mara told the Associated Press. "There may have been some pushing and touching. That happens a lot in divorce situations.… Nobody was injured." 
 
 Emotions ran high, O'Mara said. Over the weekend, Shellie Zimmerman had gone to the house where the couple had been living to pick up some things, the attorney said, and surprised her husband by returning Monday. An argument ensued. 
 
 "He acted appropriately," O'Mara told CNN, confirming that his client had a gun. "He never took the weapon out." 
 
 Bracknell said in a phone interview that investigators had gathered as much information about the altercation as possible, adding, "people change their minds" about prosecution. 
 
 Florida law allows officers to make a domestic violence arrest without the victim's consent. Prosecutors potentially could build a case using surveillance video from cameras outside the house and from video from the squad cars that responded. 
 
 George Zimmerman's first brush with notoriety came in February 2012, when the neighborhood watch volunteer spotted Martin walking in a gated community in Sanford, Fla. Zimmerman called police to report a suspicious person. At some point he got out of his vehicle, had a confrontation with Martin and shot the teenager to death. Zimmerman maintained that he acted in self-defense. 
 
 Martin had been visiting his father and his father's fiancee and had walked to a convenience store to buy Skittles and a soft drink. ||||| Justice In Email, Zimmerman’s Local Police Chief Agrees He’s Another ‘Sandy Hook’ Waiting To Happen CREDIT: 
 
 Lake Mary Police Chief Steve Bracknell 
 
 Police Chief Steve Bracknell, who is responsible for the Florida town where George Zimmerman resides, agreed in a series of emails that Zimmerman is a “ticking time bomb” and another “Sandy Hook” waiting to happen. 
 
 Bracknell expressed his views in response to two emails from Santiago Rodriguez, who reached Bracknell through a contact form on the police department’s website. Bracknell confirmed the emails’ authenticity to ThinkProgress and subsequently tried to distance himself from the remarks. 
 
 Rodriguez’s first email was an extended, and sometimes angry, critique of how the Lake Mary Police Department handled their response to the recent altercation between George Zimmerman, his wife and his father in law. Rodriguez told Bracknell that he had a responsibility to charge Zimmerman because he was another “Sandy Hook… waiting to happen.” Bracknell responded with a detailed defense of the police department’s conduct, but explicitly endorsed Rodriguez’s comments on Sandy Hook. 
 
 [Ellipses are from the original email.] 
 
 Asked to elaborate on his email, Bracknell attempted to distance himself from Rodriguez’s comments, saying he did not agree and was “referring to the fact that [Zimmerman] seems to be involved in incidents” involving firearms. 
 
 In his second email, Rodriguez called Zimmerman a “ticking time bomb” who will snap “sooner or later.” Again, Bracknell agreed. 
 
 The full email exchange between Rodriguez and Bracknell is available here. 
 
 The police are still deciding whether or not to charge Zimmerman in connection to the incident. They are attempting to recover video of alleged assault that Zimmerman’s wife, Shellie, recorded with her iPad. Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’Mara, acknowledged that Zimmerman broke the iPad into pieces before the police arrived. According to witnesses, Zimmerman also punched his father-in-law in the nose. 
 
 In her call to 911, Shellie Zimmerman told the police that Zimmerman was threatening her with his gun. “I don’t know what he’s capable of. I’m really, really scared,” Shellie said. 
 
 Zimmerman told police at the scene that he did not have a gun, according to Bracknell and a police department spokesman. O’Mara, however, insisted on CNN that he did have a gun on him during the entire incident. Bracknell told ThinkProgress that one of them isn’t “telling the truth.” 
 
 What is not in dispute is that Zimmerman, despite his legal troubles and the police chief’s concerns, is still permitted to carry a concealed weapon in the State of Florida. In Florida, unlike other states like New York and New Jersey, authorities have no discretion over whether to grant or revoke concealed carry permits. Dr. Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, recently told Salon, “You’ve got all kinds of George Zimmermans and everything in between there who fall through the cracks of our exclusions. But if you ask any reasonable person how comfortable they are with an individual like that running around with a concealed, loaded gun, the vast majority would say they are not.”
– Apparently Zimmerman does not have a friend in his local police chief. Steve Bracknell, who heads the department in Lake Mary, Florida, where Zimmerman lives, agreed with some pretty intense criticisms of the acquitted killer contained in two angry emails he received Tuesday about Zimmerman's recent altercation with his wife. "Zimmerman is a Sandy Hook, Aurora waiting to happen," the emailer, Santiago Rodriguez, asserted, in an email posted online. "Your job is to protect the communities you serve, and you are failing big time." Bracknell responded with a lengthy defense of his department, but then threw in, "Your reference to Sandy Hook..............I agree." (Ellipses his.) Bracknell confirmed the emails' authenticity for Think Progress, but later backpedaled from the remarks, telling WTSP that he only meant that Zimmerman "seems to be involved in incidents" involving guns. In the followup email, Rodriguez called Zimmerman a "ticking time bomb." Think Progress reports that Bracknell replied, "on a personal note....I agree," but that email doesn't appear to be posted online. And on Monday, Bracknell had this to say to an LA reporter, per the Los Angeles Times: "Man, it would be fantastic if you have an apartment out there [in California] for George Zimmerman. This guy is killing me."