Death penalty trial
I’ve never covered one. My county hasn’t had one in quite a while. This will be my first. After a four-day jury selection, openings finally began in the trial against a man accused of killing a Tampa police corporal.
Here was the first story:
Cindy Roberts closed her eyes, breathed, chewed her gum with intent.
In a Hillsborough courtroom, on the opening day of the trial she has awaited for more than two years, she was about to hear the last recorded words of her husband, Tampa police Cpl. Mike Roberts. He spoke to dispatchers at 9:58 the night of Aug. 19, 2009 using two codes — the first, his call sign; the second, his plan to approach a subject for interrogation. “Lincoln 61,” he radioed. “Signal 80.”
The recording is one of silent stretches and scant words. At 3 minutes and 40 seconds, came a short, inaudible transmission police consider a sign of distress. The dispatcher reacted: “Lincoln 61.”
No answer. She asked if any units were headed that way. She called out again to Roberts, “10-34?” Was he okay?
Some in the courtroom, including the dispatcher on the witness stand, began to cry, knowing the answer.
Roberts was on his back, with a bullet in his chest.
For the next two weeks, the question of life or death will turn to another man.
The one with the gun…
Humberto Delgado never asked for mercy, and he didn’t get it Friday.
His victim’s widow called him a cop killer and told him to choke on his own blood.
There was no prelude from the judge, except just six words:
“All of this on your hands.”
Delgado, 36, said nothing when he was condemned to death…
Teamwork
Recurring theme these past several weeks: Shared-byline 1A stories. A good way to make a story the best it can be, especially on deadline – and double especially if all hell is breaking loose – is to work together.
Murder! When deputies caught up to Jeremiah Fogle on Sunday, after two pastors were shot in church, the accused gunman told them what to do: ”If you go to my house, you will find a full confession and my wife.” They found 56-year-old Theresa Fogle, dead. And they found a confession, but not the one they expected. It was written in her voice, a catalog of sexual infidelities with a list of partners at least 25 long. Polk County deputies said Monday her husband may have forced her to write it. Jeremiah Fogle told the deputies he loved her. But he had loved others before. The 57-year-old former deacon with a velvet voice had married at least six women before he made Theresa his wife. And he had killed one…
Mayhem! They found ingredients to build pipe bombs. They found schematics for Freedom High School. They found a manifesto, a plot to kill even more people than the 13 massacred in 1999 at Columbine High. Police this week thwarted a “catastrophic event the likes of which Tampa has not seen,” Chief Jane Castor said at a news conference midday Wednesday. An hour earlier, skinny, shaggy-haired Jared Cano had appeared in juvenile court, accused of it all…
Crazy punctuation! He considers himself a “sovereign citizen,” above the laws of government and, apparently, the rules of grammar. He punctuates his name Jacob-Franz: Dyck. He is a disgraced former dentist who went to prison for stealing silver and gold. He has sued the banks, a governor, the United States of America. Yet Dyck’s name appears on hundreds of real estate records throughout Florida, written into the deeds of homeowners desperate to try anything to avoid foreclosure — including paying him to put their properties in “pure trusts.” Dyck says such trusts can’t be taken or taxed because they fall under “common law,” out of the reach of government. One problem: That’s not true…
Flying Cubans! They loaded airport luggage carts with thousands of pounds of America, zipped up in duffel bags and stacked on more duffel bags and shrink-wrapped for protection from pilfering. The Thursday flight to Cuba would span only 344 miles, but its 67 passengers were packed for a voyage to another planet. Because, in many ways, that’s where they were headed — an island severed from free commerce for half a century, where basic necessities are scarce, the black market reigns and the only way to experience certain comforts is to get them imported by relatives in the States. And so, those relatives packed: Clothes, medicine, diapers, toilet paper. Christmas decorations. A candelabra. A 47-inch LCD TV…
Wilderness rescue by cute schoolchildren! Francis Netto set out Wednesday with books, snacks and a cell phone and walked into Wilderness Park for the 15-mile hike he makes several times a month. Along the way, he greeted a group of kids on a field trip, and they had a chat about fishing before parting ways. ”Bye!” they told him. Neither the hiker nor the kids could have predicted the circumstances under which they’d meet again. Netto kept walking. By official account, he stopped to eat, opened a book and took his sinus medicine. Then, he did something a hiker should never do when he has only a snack and a book and antihistamine: Amid 16,000 acres of cypress swamp, hardwood floodplain forest and pine flatwoods — amid the alligators and the mosquitoes and the snakes — Netto fell asleep…
Best of the Bay
A big thanks to Creative Loafing for awarding me “Best New Long-Form Narrator” in its 2011 Best of the Bay issue. And a bigger thanks to the bosses who have long supported and improved my writing, especially my editor (and an award-winning feature writer herself) Patty Ryan. Here it is:
BEST NEW LONG-FORM NARRATOR
Alexandra Zayas,
St. Petersburg TimesIn an era when media often cater to the shortest possible attention span, the Timescontinues to support long-form narrative by writers like Lane DeGregory, Michael Kruse and Ben Montgomery; their prose only occasionally makes its way into the paper, but it always makes a maximum impact. This year you can add the 28-year-old Zayas to the list of reporters skilled in writing “creative non-fiction” — in her case, chronicling the human stories that unfold within the Hillsborough County court system. In 2011 she was moved off the regular courts beat, but she’s still utilized for breaking judicial cases (Kevin White, Jared Cano).
A man. A woman. A life sentence. Hope.
TAMPA — Debbie Holloman was 16 when she fell for a blue-eyed boy who looked like Vanilla Ice.
By 18, John Curtis Ivey had been to prison and back. He drank a lot, had no place to call home. She went to Brandon High. He wasn’t in school at all. Her family didn’t like the boyfriend she called Curtis, but she saw something special.
Once, he carried her through a field full of stickers.
Once, they watched a baby, and Curtis cleaned up the mess.
But the law notices only bad deeds. And Curtis was a thief.
On Feb. 21, 1992, Debbie saw him get sentenced to life in prison. It was her 18th birthday. She was pregnant.
Their son is now 19.
Debbie is 37. Curtis is 40 and still locked up. They’ve spent years trying to find a way to be together.
They’ve never been this close…
Update: what happened in court
Schenecker discovery
(collaboration with John Barry)
… By 10:20 a.m., Julie Schenecker sat handcuffed in a holding cell, the belt of her housecoat now gone, kept out of her reach. She was offered water, cookies and a coffee with cream and sugar.
A crime scene technician came in and photographed her. At her home, other pictures were being taken, of belongings scattered among evidence — smiling family portraits, the Scheneckers’ 19-year-old wedding invitation, a book titled, Excuses Begone! How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits.
Soon, photographers would capture the first iconic image of an accused murderer, stripped of all that said suburban housewife, now an inmate, shaking in the arms of police.
Into evidence bags went her robe, slippers, and pajamas. She had nothing else to wear.
Coming Down
A bright orange thumbnail appears over Zephyrhills, sailing toward earth, until it takes the shape of a parachute.
From the sky, Randy Swallows sees the world as small and distant. He doesn’t think about Iraq, or the friends he lost, or how it felt to kill. He feels released from the anxieties that bombard his dreams and scatter his thoughts.
The air is fresh and cool, and he breathes it deep, because his life depends on his ability to focus and relax. He could take a bad turn and crash. But he is a pilot, he tells himself, and his body is the control surface, and his mind is on a clear and predetermined path.
He jumps 40 times a month, paying for it with checks from the military, which considers him completely disabled. Only some of his injuries are physical; the rest are invisible.
For every 10 troops who go to Iraq or Afghanistan, one or two return with post-traumatic stress disorder, as Swallows did six years ago.
Over and over, he jumps out of planes, in search of firm ground.
He has come to believe that his feet will find the grass, and that his canopy will collapse behind him, and that he will be okay…
Documents: The ice cream man was unravelling
TAMPA —After masked robbers shot the ice cream man for $12, Michael Edward Keetley hired a felon bodyguard to ride in his truck with a gun.
That’s according to the bodyguard, David Beckwith, who told detectives Keetley was on a mission: Pose as a cop, find his shooters and “make ‘em disappear.”
One summer day, the bodyguard saw Keetley turn his investigation to a girl buying ice cream; Keetley thought she looked like a woman involved in the robbery. The bodyguard watched Keetley ask the girl, who was about 13, if she had a sister.
Keetley wanted to see a picture. The girl resisted, but Keetley became irate, impatient.
“He had her almost in tears when she finally took out her wallet and showed a picture,” Beckwith told detectives.
“And Mike goes, ‘Oh, that’s not the girl.’ “
The ice cream man was unravelling, witnesses would tell detectives. Intent on vigilante justice…
(collaboration with Jodie Tillman and Tia Mitchell)
