In San Carlos Park, an intoxicated man reached for the handgun in his back pocket and pointed it at a deputy. A disturbed man in Sarasota warned officers he was armed, led them on a foot chase and suddenly pulled a cordless drill from his waistband.

And in East Naples, a man on a bicycle casually rode up to deputies at a traffic stop, fumbled around in his backpack and produced a very real-looking pellet gun.

All three men were shot multiple times. The latter two survived.

In each case, deputies had but moments to decide whether their lives were in danger.

If only the first situation was truly life threatening — the .357-caliber was loaded — the other two mimicked it perfectly.

Each time, officer training kicked in, and the results were the same — a suspect suffering serious gunshot wounds.

Were deputies turned into unwitting executioners?

A new study suggests that suicide-by-cop, a phenomenon in which a suspect provokes an officer into using deadly force, is far more common than previously thought.

In the March issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, researcher Kris Mohandie reports that 36 percent of the more than 700 officer-involved-shootings he studied could be classified as suicide-by-cop.

“It appears that there is a high degree of desperation, hopelessness, impulsivity, self-destructiveness, and acting out among subjects encountered by the police in such an event,” he wrote.

Mohandie’s study comes as a handful of local officer-involved shootings suggest suicidal suspects.

George Vincent, 49, of San Carlos Park died of his wounds after he pointed the loaded gun at Lee County deputies responding to his home. He had told his mother he was “tired” and didn’t have any money left.

Chason Mass, 31, of Sarasota, had cut himself on his arms and sent pictures of his wounds to his girlfriend via cellphone.

Jose David Giracca, 30, the Naples bicyclist, later said he wasn’t sure why he approached the deputies. He was sentenced to three years in prison for aggravated assault.

None of the three shootings were classified as suicide-by-cop; local agencies don’t make the distinction. Researchers, though, are trying to do just that.

“Here’s a guy that wants to die,” explained John Violanti, a former New York state trooper and current professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “And he doesn’t know how to do it, but he knows that if he threatens police, they’re going to kill him.”

“They’re going to push the envelope, pushing and pushing and pushing,” said James J. Drylie, a former law enforcement officer and a professor at Kean University. Violanti and Drylie co-authored “Copicide,” an examination of the phenomenon.

Unlike Mohandie, Drylie and Violanti exclude shootings in which the suspect was known to be mentally ill.

That a suspect’s behavior was voluntary — that he knowingly precipitated the response — is important in making a distinction, Drylie said.

“However momentarily, they’ve given it thought, that ‘I’m going to make this person do this,’” Drylie said.

The other factors are whether the suspect exhibited a threat of deadly force, be it real (the loaded .357) or perceived (the cordless drill), and whether the suspect communicated a suicide wish.

Drylie and Violanti estimate roughly one in 10 officer-involved-shootings fit their criteria, a frequency far lower than Mohandie’s.

Most suicide-by-cop suspects exhibit similar traits, experts agree. The suspects are typically white men in their 30s or 40s who are unwed.

They usually act out a script that ends in their death, Violanti said.

Whether elaborately planned or crafted on the spot, the script is made to provoke a reaction from a responding officer.

“These people are better planners than a normal suicide,” Violanti notes.

But does the suicide-by-cop distinction really matter? Isn’t a man with a gun a man with a gun, regardless of his state of mind?

“Legally it makes no difference what the suspect’s intent was at the time of the event,” Michelle Batten, a spokeswoman for the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, wrote in an e-mail.

Instead, she said, so long as the suspect presents a lethal threat to anyone on scene and the officer determines deadly force is the only way to stop that threat, the shooting is justified.

It’s not a difficult standard to meet.

“The reality is if a person is really intent on making an officer shoot them, they can do it,” said Patrick Flahive, assistant director of the Southwest Florida Institute for Public Service, which trains future law enforcement officers.

Institute instructors teach students to recognize mental illness and the likelihood that someone may be trying to provoke them into a fatal shooting. Talking is important, Flahive said; keep the suspect talking and you keep him from making impulsive decisions.

Instructors also train investigators in recognizing the signs of a suicidal suspect.

Yet, in the heat of the moment, when a weapon — or something that looks like it — is produced, don’t expect an officer to search for signs the person is suicidal, Flahvie said.

“There’s all kinds of little things that tell that tale later,” the instructor explained. “But often it’s unrealistic to expect officers to recognize those things at that moment.”

Mohandie’s study found that a suicide-by-cop suspect is in fact more dangerous to others than a suspect who is not suicidal. In one out of every three cases he studied, either a bystander or an officer was hurt.

“(A) suicidal individual poses a greater risk of homicide or at least violence toward others, than a non-suicidal individual,” he concluded.

Preparation can still pay off, said Cherie Castellano, the founder of Cop 2 Cop, a New Jersey hotline for troubled officers and the wife of a police officer in the state. Castellano is in a unique position to witness the toll a suicide-by-cop can take on the officer involved.

“All the research shows that if an officer feels like he was in control of the shooting... they have less psychological problems,” she said. “If they feel like they were out of control, like the perp or suspect does something bizarre... they feel (bad) afterwards.”

In short, they feel used.

But such judgments often comes in hindsight. The moment of decision is a blur.

Tunnel-vision quickly sets in during any officer-involved-shooting situation, Castellano said. Officers tighten up.

Castellano and Drylie give seminars to officers on recognizing suicide-by-cop traits.

She said one officer who attended a seminar later told her he was in a suicide-by-cop situation soon after. The man ran at him with a knife, he said, and the officer was able to shoot and wound him.

“He was so prepared that he felt like he could focus and really perform well,” she said.

Situations vary, to be sure.

For that reason, Drylie said, it’s important for dispatchers to recognize the signs of suicide-by-cop so that officers can tailor their response as much as possible.

“I believe through education and understanding, the dynamic can perhaps be better controlled,” he said.