Chapter 3
I’d spent about twenty minutes with the witnesses.
The man who had seen the shooting go down didn’t have much for me that I hadn’t already heard—other than that he was pretty confident he could ID our guy in a lineup.
The woman and pair of guys who’d seen the suspect flee added a little.
The woman claimed that the suspect had a slight limp.
And one of the guys, a Jeff Kunzelman, said he was one-hundred-percent sure the suspect’s Honda had a broken-off passenger-side mirror.
In such a public place, I’d hoped for a little more but couldn’t fault any of the witnesses for keeping their heads down while bullets were flying.
I spoke with some other witnesses, and aside from a few saying that they went to the truck to check on the driver, there wasn’t much more to be had.
I left Rey to get some written statements from the witnesses and walked into the grocery store.
Catching a Midwest officer just inside the entrance, I got him to walk me back to a security office, where I found Steve looking over the shoulder of a store employee seated at a desk pushed up against the wall.
In front of the worker were three separate monitors, all displaying individual camera feeds.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Everything,” Steve said, glancing at me over his shoulder. “We also have a view of the tag but not enough resolution to make it out. I already sent a text to Wade. He said he was heading over.”
“Good,” I said.
After a quick introduction to the thirty-something store employee, a general manager named Aaron Trainor, I learned that the surveillance cameras had captured multiple views of the shooting as well as what preceded and followed it.
He’d also described the situation as “crazy” and “unreal” about five times in the span of a minute.
The GM loaded up a piece of footage and pointed at the center monitor of the three before him. “This is going to start with the guy entering the lot and pulling into the parking spot,” the manager said.
“This is the one we just watched a minute ago?” Steve asked. “That had the actual shooting on it?”
“Same clip, yeah,” the manager said.
The camera footage, aimed down the parking lot aisle where the shooting had taken place, appeared to be captured from somewhere in the lot closer to the street than the entrance to the store.
The victim’s truck entered the frame, slowly drove forward, and pulled into the spot where it currently remained.
“He’s just going to sit there for a bit,” Steve said. “Maybe he’s on his phone or something.”
I watched the time stamp on the top right of the monitor for almost a minute, and as Steve had said, the victim never got out of his truck. Some other cars drove past, yet none were a nineties Honda.
“The shooter is going to come from over here.” Steve held his finger out and just a couple of inches from the rightmost side of the screen. “Any second.”
Our shooter came into frame a moment later.
And not more than a second or two from the time he first appeared on screen, the man walked straight to the passenger side of the truck, yanked a pistol from his waistline, and started shooting.
While the video contained no audio, it appeared that the shooter did in fact unload his weapon.
The man then quickly ran from the passenger side of the truck and disappeared from the footage.
“Damn,” I said.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Zero hesitation. And it doesn’t look like he said anything to the vic. He just walked up and started shooting.”
“Do you want to stay on this one or see him get into his vehicle and flee?” the manager asked.
“Does anything else happen in this clip?” I asked.
“Just a couple people running up to the truck to check on the driver,” he said.
“Okay. Let’s check out some of the other footage,” I said. “Let’s see the getaway.”
“All right,” the manager said.
He brought up the clip and pointed at the screen as it started playing.
I watched the guy run to his vehicle, which did in fact seem to be an early-nineties Honda, jump in the driver’s side, launch backward from his parking spot, and peel out.
The passenger side of the vehicle wasn’t visible in the footage, so I couldn’t confirm whether there was any damage to the mirror.
I also couldn’t make out the license plate, but it did appear to be Florida-issued.
From his movement, I didn’t notice any limp like one of the witnesses claimed to have seen.
“It looks like it’s just him in the car,” Steve said.
“Yeah. I didn’t see anyone else in there either,” I said. “Did Wade give you an ETA?”
“He just said he was heading over. Do you want me to give him a buzz?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s get Garcia out here too.”
“Garcia has that doctor’s appointment at two o’clock,” Steve said. “I can call Ryan in from home if you really think we need an extra set of hands.”
“Nah, we don’t need to call Ryan in. I just figured I’d get Garcia unglued from his desk,” I said. “I forgot that Garcia had told me about ten times that he had a checkup scheduled today. See if he wants to come out until he has to go to his appointment, though.”
“Yep.” Steve stepped from the small office to make the call.
“Can we see when this Honda pulls in and parks?” I asked the manager. “I want to see if he was already in the parking lot or if he followed our victim in.”
“It looked like they showed up right around the same time, but let me bring up when the shooter pulls in.” The manager shook his head and cracked his knuckles. “Can’t say that I expected this today when I got up this morning.”
“I wouldn’t imagine so,” I said.
“Just crazy. I still can’t believe this. What the hell is wrong with people?”
I didn’t have an answer for him.
He cued up the footage that I requested, and I jotted down in my notepad the time the Honda had arrived and parked.
Like our victim, the suspect remained in his vehicle for about a minute before stepping out and standing at the open driver’s-side door.
He appeared to be looking in the direction where the pickup truck had parked and the shooting had taken place.
After another thirty seconds or so, he swung the driver’s door closed and started in the direction of the victim.
“That looks like he was there to do exactly what he did,” I said beneath my breath. “Let’s pull up the first video you showed me again. I want to get the exact time off it.”
The manager did as asked, and it appeared that both the suspect and victim had parked within seconds of each other, with the victim pulling into his parking spot just prior to the suspect.
“Can we pull the footage from maybe the top of the grocery store?” I asked. “Or something that has a larger overview of the entire parking lot? I want to see if we can catch both vehicles pulling in. To see if maybe our victim was being followed.”
“Gotcha. Yeah, let me see what we have there.”
Since I had just written down the exact times that both vehicles parked, it made for quick work locating the vehicles entering the grocery store parking lot—and the victim was in fact followed in by our suspect’s Honda.
“Wade is just down the road,” Steve said as he walked into the room. “Garcia should be on scene here in about fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“Okay,” I said.
I let the manager know that we were having our tech lead come out to get our department some copies of the video and excused myself from the security office.
I wanted to check with neighboring businesses to see if they had any video that could give us a better look at the Honda’s license plate. Steve followed me out.
“So what’s your take?” Steve asked as we walked outside.
“Same as what you were thinking,” I said. “Either premeditated or some kind of spillover road rage that we don’t know about. Those seem to be the two most logical guesses.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I’m leaning more toward the premeditated hypothesis than the road rage at this point.”
“Reasoning?” I asked.
“Just the way the video showed that the parking went down. You’d think if this was road rage, the Honda would have been on the truck’s rear bumper through the parking lot.
When the truck parked, I would have imagined that the suspect would have hopped out all pissed off and maybe had some verbal altercation prior to the shooting.
But our victim pulling in and just sitting there didn’t appear to me as if he knew someone was following him or was expecting any confrontation.
And our suspect parking a row over and waiting a bit as well?
I don’t know. I would think if this was a road rage thing, it would have been more heat of the moment, I guess.
There seemed to be too much of a cooling-off period between everything for our suspect, and nothing that suggested our victim was aware that he was being followed. ”
Steve had made solid points, and I tended to agree with everything he’d just put out there.
“All right,” I said. “If we are thinking premeditated, then I’d imagine we would be able to connect the suspect and victim.
Let’s grab a couple of uniforms and have them start pounding the pavement looking for some more video of this Honda.
Hopefully, we can get some footage that gives us a better look at that tag.
As soon as we can get a positive ID on our vic, we’ll start setting interviews with friends and family. ”
“Sounds good,” Steve said.