A firefighter scurried to prepare hose lines as a house fire raged in Suntree, an unincorporated area north of Melbourne.
The following are images from some of the stories I've covered recently in my job as a breaking news reporter for Florida Today.
I've been trying to get to a good structure fire, and this was my first in about 15 months on the job.
The homeowners went to New York and left hurricane shutters on their house. That slowed the firefighters trying to access the home.
The fire was contained mostly to the garage, but the rest of the home received smoke and water damage.
A shelf cloud moved over the scene of the Suntree fire.
This crash, near Pineda Causeway and U.S. 1 in the Palm Shores area, happened during one of the first rainstorms of the summer season. People just can't drive in rain here.
There were reports of a gunman at Melbourne City Hall, prompting the police to set up a perimeter of assault rifle- and Glock-toting officers.
Two people had exchanged a pellet gun in the lobby of city hall. Above is one of them. They were not charged with a crime, since the weapon wasn't a firearm. The police, however, think they planned to rob the joint.
An elderly main lost control of his pickup and slammed into an oak tree in Grant-Valkaria. This was one of the many, tragic fatal crashes I've covered.
This was one car crash in which no one died. Nor was the driver even injured. But she did take down some power lines.
I actually had just been assigned a story about the power company. So this incident was pretty convenient.
The cops said this guy was texting and not paying attention when he drove his pickup into the back of a bunch of cars waiting at a stop light in West Melbourne. One woman died. He kept texting on the back of his Ford.
Some residents staged a counterprotest to a rally against Republican Gov. Rick Scott's budget cuts. The sprinklers came on, and counterprotesters figured it was a conspiracy.
This woman in Melbourne Beach lost the roof to her patio during a severe thunderstorm.
The roof ended up in the street.
I cover many shootings. The victim in this one drove himself to the hospital, where I snapped this.
In one Melbourne shooting, the victim was loaded into a car, then a driver tried to take him to the hospital. The driver stopped in the middle of U.S. 1 when the victim lost consciousness. The victim was pulled onto the pavement, where passing nurses stopped and performed CPR in the middle of the roadway. But he died.
This SUV, which was stopped at a red light, was hit from behind by a truck owned by a pest-control company. The driver wasn't paying attention.
Someone torched this West Melbourne home. I got there just after the flames had been extinguished. Unfortunately.
This bad motorcycle wreck occurred late one evening on my route back home. A car cut the motorcycle off, and the Harley ran into the car. The rider apparently survived the initial crash but was in rough shape.
Another motorcycle wreck in Melbourne. In this one, the police said a rider was speeding when he ran into the back of a mowing tractor that had just pulled onto U.S. 1.
Two people died in this plane crash in Palm Bay. A back-seat passenger suffered only minor injuries. It was some sort of mechanical failure.
