2 Farmers Blast Away Until Both Die : 40-Year Feud Comes to a Bloody Ending

Two farmers firing at point-blank range from their pickup trucks killed each other in a parking lot shootout, ending a 40-year feud that began when they were children, officials and residents say.

A total of 15 rounds were fired Wednesday in the gunfight between Lake Harbor rancher Haywood Bryant, 49, and Clewiston farm employee James MacDonald Booth, 47, said Hendry County Sheriff’s Lt. Hugh Smith.

Both men suffered gaping chest wounds but kept firing until they died, Smith said.

“They just fired until they ran out of bullets or until the guns jammed,” Smith said. “They never left their trucks.”

The two bitter enemies began shooting at about 11 a.m. as Bryant dropped off his grandson in the parking lot of a highway market. Booth followed him into the parking lot, pulled up even with Bryant’s truck, and the two began shooting, Smith said.

Bryant wielded a .30-caliber short-barrel rifle. Booth used a .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol, Smith said.

The two men had a long history of filing complaints against each other in the three-county area surrounding this rural Lake Okeechobee town, the center of Florida’s sugar-producing country.

“Each accused the other of cattle-stealing, barn-burning, and poisoning cows,” Smith said. “There was never a witness to give us a sworn statement, so we could never prosecute.”

Witnesses did not see what touched off Wednesday’s shoot-out. Town residents say the two started as boyhood friends 40 years ago when Bryant’s father worked in the fields for Booth’s family, then turned enemies.

Racism may have helped separate the two, said Clewiston City Commissioner Dan McCarthy.

“It goes back a long time,” McCarthy said. Bryant was black; Booth was white.

McCarthy said shots had been fired into Bryant’s home on several occasions.

On Dec. 10, 1982, someone placed a bomb under Booth’s truck, blowing away part of his right leg. He also lost most of his hearing.