Martin County Sheriff IDs Driver Killed in 16-Mile High-Speed Chase as 'Frequent Flyer'

Walter Turner II had tried to get his mother to stop calling police on him. She had tried to get him committed. On Sunday, he drove her Ford Escape SUV at 100 mph the wrong way down U.S. Highway 1 and killed himself in a fireball near Jonathan Dickinson State Park — taking four innocent people with him into the wreckage.

Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek identified Turner, 43, of West Palm Beach, as the driver who touched off a 16-mile pursuit that began in Riviera Beach and ended in a three-vehicle crash on U.S. 1 near the state park in Martin County. Turner was a "bad guy" and a "frequent flyer" with at least 10 arrests dating to 2001, Budensiek said at a news conference.

Turner was ejected from the Ford Escape and pronounced dead at the scene, the Florida Highway Patrol said. The crash also involved a BMW carrying a 39-year-old woman, a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old, all from Brookhaven, Georgia, and a Land Rover driven by a 63-year-old woman from Jupiter. All four survivors are expected to live, Budensiek said.

The pursuit began when Jupiter police officers attempted to stop Turner's erratic driving. Officers managed to deflate one tire on a bridge during the chase, but the Escape continued at high speed until impact, the sheriff said. Some residents questioned publicly why the drawbridge was not raised to halt the vehicle, but Budensiek dismissed the idea. "If time were our friend, yeah, I think that would have been a phenomenal fix. But again, this was a rapidly evolving event," he said.

The sheriff staunchly defended Jupiter police and his own deputies, pushing back against critics who argued officers should have abandoned the pursuit. "We saw him driving the wrong way up the road. We know they're going to kill somebody," Budensiek said. "Those that are throwing stones at the Jupiter Police Department for chasing him are completely out of line in this one."

Turner's arrest history included charges as serious as aggravated assault with a firearm, the sheriff said. In 2025 alone, Turner was arrested twice for battery on his mother and once for aggravated battery on her. His mother told investigators her son had grown increasingly unstable after his father's recent death, had stopped taking medication and had been acting "extremely erratic" in the days before Sunday's chase. She had attempted to have him Baker Acted, officials said, but that effort did not succeed.

What drove Turner onto the highway that afternoon remains unknown. "Was he drunk? Was he high? Was he mentally ill? Was he trying to kill himself? We just don't know," Budensiek said. "We have to wait on the toxicology report, which will probably take another couple of weeks."

The Florida Highway Patrol is leading the investigation.

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