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Published on Monday, May 19, 2008
in the Tampa Bay News 9
A deadly day, ten years later
On May 19, 1998, Hank Earl Carr killed two Tampa detectives and a Florida Highway Patrolman.
The series of tragic events began when Carr killed his girlfriend's 4-year-old son Joey Bennett and ended that evening when Carr took his own life while barricaded in a Hernando County gas station.
About 10 a.m. on May 19, 1998, Bennett was shot and killed with a rifle in Carr and Bowen's Tampa apartment. More Information
A few hours later on the way to the police station, Carr used a key to escape his handcuffs and shot and killed Tampa detectives Rick Childers and Randy Bell, who were investigating the toddler's death. Carr contended the child's death was an accident.
Carr escaped the police cruiser he killed the detectives in, carjacked a truck and headed north on Interstate 75. A short time later, he ambushed and killed state trooper James Crooks in Pasco County during a traffic stop.
He continued on, eventually being forced off the road near State Road 50 in Hernando County. After holing up in a Shell station along the interstate for almost five hours, Carr took his own life.
Hank Earl Carr, seen shortly after the death of his girlfriend's son on May 19, 1998.
Many lives were changed that day, including Bernice Bowen, Carr's girlfriend. She is serving time in prison for her role in the crimes. She won't be eligible for parole until 2017.
Bowen's mother, Connie told Bay News 9's partner newspaper, The St. Petersburg Times she still doesn't understand how the crimes happened 10 years later.
"I still don't know why he did it,' Connie Bowen said from her home in Ohio. "And how anybody can take a little baby's life like that and innocent people's lives to destroy families like that I don't know."
Connie Bowen is raising her granddaughter Kayla, who was five when her brother Joey was killed. Kayla, who has been through therapy said she hopes her mother will be released soon.
Published on Monday, May 19, 2008
in the Tampa Tribune
Shooting Rampage Leaves Decade Of Pain
TAMPA - There's a place in Tampa where George McNamara won't go.
A career law enforcement officer who has risen to the rank of major with the Tampa Police Department, McNamara never pulls off Interstate 275 at the Floribraska Avenue ramp.
"I won't. I just can't do it," he said.
It's been this way since 10 years ago Monday.
That's when McNamara walked along the ramp toward an unmarked police car, a green Ford sedan with a Miami Dolphins license plate, and saw two detectives shot to death inside. Ricky Childers and Randy Bell had worked for him.
The men were victims of a shooting rampage that spanned the Bay area and only ended when the gunman, Hank Earl Carr, killed himself after holding a woman hostage for hours. Carr also killed two others -- his girlfriend's 4-year-old son, Joey Bennett, and Florida Highway Patrol Trooper James B. Crooks.
Five were dead by the time darkness fell. But the people who would suffer the pain of that day -- May 19, 1998 -- numbered in the hundreds, even thousands, counting those who lined the funeral routes clutching American flags.
Greg Stout felt it more than others. He sat that morning at police headquarters with Carr and remembers him as affable and calm. Stout, a detective, came close to riding with Childers in the green sedan on a trip with Carr to where the boy was shot. Bell went instead. On the way back, Carr killed the detectives with Childers' gun.
"Everyone lost some innocence that day," Stout says today. "You honestly treat everybody differently now."
Carr's legacy includes changes in law and policy so officers can do a better job protecting themselves and others. Anyone carrying a concealed handcuff key, as Carr did, can be charged with a third-degree felony. The Tampa Police Department changed the way it transports prisoners.
But Ricky Joe Childers II, now 33, one of the detective's sons, still feels the pain.
"My children were cheated out of not seeing their grandfather," said Childers, of Lake Panasoffkee. "I have an hour's drive to work every day. I'll spend time thinking about what went wrong for that to happen."
Lives Converge Over Boy's Shooting
A convicted felon, Carr, 30, shared an apartment at 709 1/2 E. Crenshaw St. with his girlfriend, Bernice Bowen, and her two children, Joey and his sister, then 5. He kept several weapons including two SKS assault rifles.
That day, about 9:50 a.m., Carr and Bowen drove Joey to a Tampa fire station at Nebraska Avenue and Hanna Street. The boy had been shot in the head. Paramedics pronounced him dead and called police. A sergeant sent Childers and another detective to the scene.
Carr was wanted on a marijuana trafficking charge from Ohio, but at that moment, Tampa police didn't know who he was. He called himself Joseph Bennett, the name of the children's biological father, and he called Bowen his wife.
Bowen perpetuated that façade. "He told me to tell everybody his name was Joseph Bennett," she later said in a transcript related to the case.
May 19 was supposed to have been the last day Childers and Bell worked together for a while. Bell, 44, had been transferred to Internal Affairs. Childers, 46, and his wife had a vacation in Key West planned.
"I can still close my eyes and picture it," said Vickie Metzler, who was Childers' wife. "I was cleaning up some breakfast things, and he kissed me on the cheek. We said, 'I love you.'"
Bell was excited about his new assignment – and about finding "a treasure trove of Beanie Babies" at a card store near police headquarters, Stout said. One of Bell's daughters collected the toys, and he bought a bunch that morning.
Missing A Date With Death
At the fire station, Carr ran once he heard the toddler was dead. He darted across the street right in front of the green sedan as Childers pulled up. Childers brought him to headquarters in handcuffs. He seated Carr next to Stout's desk and went to the men's room.
Carr was "very friendly, very talkative," Stout said. He spoke about running to check on his "daughter" and said the shooting of his "son" was an accident.
"I don't think anybody anticipated what he was capable of doing," Stout said.
McNamara said Carr's duplicity fooled them. "Here's a guy who says, 'I didn't shoot my son.' We're thinking we're dealing with a grieving father, and we're dealing with the Devil."
Stout said Childers asked him to join the interview with Carr, but he declined because he had another one scheduled. So Bell took part instead.
On tape, Carr told the detectives Joey had been dragging an assault rifle by the barrel and the gun fired when Carr grabbed it to take it away. The detectives decided to drive Carr back to the apartment where the family lived and have him walk them through the chain of events.
"That was the last time I saw them alive," Stout said.
Carnage In A Green Sedan
Documents from the case state that the blood spatter in the apartment wasn't consistent with Carr's story. "They started calling me a liar," Carr would say later in a live radio interview aired while he held his hostage.
Childers and Bell confiscated one of the SKS rifles and placed Carr, his hands cuffed in front of him, into the back of the green sedan for the ride back to headquarters. They didn't know he wore a handcuff key on a chain around his neck, or that he often said he would rather die than return to prison.
Childers was driving. Using the key, Carr slipped out of the handcuffs, reached up front and shot the detective with his own 9mm handgun. Then he shot Bell. "I shot them both in the face," Carr said in the radio interview. "I had to shoot one twice because I shot him and he was still trying to get the gun so I shot him again."
The sedan stopped on the Floribraska exit ramp. There, the gunman carjacked an auto-parts truck and, with the rifle, headed north.
Stout, out of the office, heard on police radio that two people had been shot in a carjacking. He was the first Tampa police detective to arrive at the scene. When he saw the sedan, he recalled, "I thought, 'Rick Childers beat me to this.'"
Metzler, Childers' wife, was working as information systems manager at the Tampa Police Department and remembered supervisors calling her upstairs about 2 p.m.
"Something didn't feel right," she said. "They said Ricky was out on an investigation and he's been shot and he didn't make it. Suddenly, the bottom dropped out."
Scrambling To Stop The Killing
With emotions swirling, detectives swung into high gear. Stout interviewed the carjacked man and put out an alert about the truck.
Others focused on Bowen, the girlfriend.
Unable to find booking photos of Bennett, police wanted any names the gunman might use. Police and court records related to the case say Bowen continued to say her boyfriend's name was Joseph Bennett.
Shortly before 2:30 p.m., a Florida Highway Patrol trooper stopped at Floribraska Avenue to report other troopers had spotted the truck on Interstate 75 in Pasco County.
Crooks, 23, a trooper on the job just eight months, pulled up in traffic behind Carr on the exit ramp for State Road 54.
Timothy Bain, now 30 and living in Sarasota, was a University of South Florida student driving to a job at the Saddlebrook Resort that afternoon. Bain said he saw Carr pop out of the truck and raise a gun.
"I ducked down," Bain recalled. "I was just praying I wasn't going to get shot."
Bain said he heard gunfire, then glass shattering. He peeked over the dashboard to see another motorist try to run over Carr. Carr climbed back into the truck and drove away.
The trooper's car began rolling down the exit ramp. Bain said he ran after it, reaching inside to apply the brake. The trooper had been shot in the head.
"It was obvious he was beyond saving," Bain said.
An Audience Before Dying
Speeding through Pasco County, Carr exchanged gunfire with Pasco deputies and shot a truck driver in the shoulder. He barreled into Hernando County and fired through a floorboard of a sheriff's helicopter before being wounded in the buttocks.
About 3 p.m., Carr pulled into a gas station just off Interstate 75 on State Road 50 and scrambled inside for refuge. He took 27-year-old clerk Stephanie Kramer hostage.
"You know what he's done already," said Hernando County Sheriff Richard Nugent, who at the time supervised the negotiators at the scene. "We're not going to let him leave."
Tactical officers and snipers surrounded the station. So did officers from Tampa, Pasco and the highway patrol, along with news crews from the Bay Area and Orlando.
"We had the news helicopters overhead with our helicopter," Nugent recalled. "We had to call down to the TV stations to quit showing our SWAT team live."
The negotiators had no mobile command post and set up at a nearby hotel, Nugent said. As they worked with the phone company to limit Carr's phone access, WFLA, 970 AM, dialed into the gas station for an on-air interview.
The station's news director asked Carr to describe what had happened and urged him to release Kramer. "Not until I hear from my wife," Carr said in a transcript.
Police flew Bowen in a helicopter to speak to Carr – a gamble Nugent said they had to take. "You don't know what they're going to say, but our options were limited."
Carr released Kramer unharmed at 7:20 p.m. Before sending her out, he gave her the handcuff key to give to Bowen, along with letters for his mother and the children.
Then he shot himself in the head.
Dealing With A Decade Of Pain
Detectives Childers and Bell are buried in Myrtle Hill Cemetery. The year after they died, Tampa police issued a policy requiring all prisoners to be handcuffed behind their backs and to be transported in a patrol car with a screen separating the front and back seats or with an officer beside them.
"Hopefully, that will prevent this from happening again," said Metzler, who in 2006 married a retired Tampa police officer.
Bell's widow also remarried and moved out of state. The detectives' children are rearing children of their own.
"I don't cry often because I think he's in a better place," said Demetra Jones, 33, of Fort Myers, one of Bell's daughters. "He was doing what he loved to do, and he died a hero."
Bowen is housed in the Homestead Correctional Facility in Florida City, serving a 21-year sentence for being an accessory. She is scheduled for release in 2017.
Stout is president of the union representing Tampa police. Bain, who stopped the slain trooper's car, has become a Sarasota police K9 officer.
"It was so horrible, so inhuman, the events that took place," Bain said. "I felt so helpless at the time, and I never wanted to feel that way again."
Some of those who lived through that day will cope today by remembering the lives lost.
McNamara planned to take the day off to visit the cemetery. Metzler said she and her husband will, too. They will bring fresh flowers.
"My advice to people is, live today like it's your last, and treasure moments. It's not the material things that matter," she said. "In my heart, I treasure moments."
Published on Sunday, May 18, 2008
in the St. Petersburg Times
Former Pasco County deputy recalls chasing killer
The cop killer raced his white pickup north on Interstate 75, fleeing the carnage he'd created but unafraid to inflict more.
A Pasco County Sheriff's deputy jumped into the chase.
Flying up the highway at 100 miles per hour, the killer turned and leveled an angry, scary, teeth-clenched stare out his back window, then raised his right fist and shot a bird at his pursuer.
The deputy shot one back.
"That was my introduction," recalled Jim Campbell, "to Hank Earl Carr."
• • •
Their encounter took place 10 years ago tomorrow.
The events of May 19, 1998, left an indelible mark on law enforcement throughout Tampa Bay. Three law enforcement officers were killed that day, along with a young boy. In the aftermath, police policies would change and weapons would be upgraded. Officers everywhere were reminded of their constant vulnerability.
Campbell, who found himself in the thick of the rampage, says he wasn't personally changed by that extraordinary day. He was already a veteran cop by then, and he knew what to do.
"I was glad it was me chasing him and not a rookie deputy," Campbell said, "because he would have been right up on his bumper and he would have been killed."
• • •
On May 18, the day before Carr's treachery, Campbell had stopped for breakfast at the Denny's at State Road 54 and I-75. Walking in, he saw a familiar face. It was Florida Highway Patrol Trooper James "Brad" Crooks. Campbell and Crooks had worked several accident scenes together. Crooks was a 23-year-old rookie.
The next day, both would work the interstate, and both would encounter Hank Earl Carr.
• • •
Crooks was first.
He spotted Carr farther south on the interstate and pulled him over on the SR 54 exit ramp. Carr bolted out of the pickup and shot Crooks dead.
Minutes later, unaware of what had happened to Crooks, Campbell picked up the chase.
The pickup barrelled on, passing cars in the median and on the shoulder.
"I saw him fire a couple shots into civilian cars," Campbell said.
• • •
Campbell is retired now. He left the Sheriff's Office in 2006 with 31 years in and an engraved gold watch.
He and his wife, Zaida, live in a tidy waterfront house in Land O'Lakes. He takes his motor home to NASCAR races and is a longtime Bucs season ticket holder.
Campbell, 61, is still a quintessential cop, a smoker with an unsentimental speaking style who dresses impeccably, even in retirement.
His memory of May 19, 1998, is vivid but imperfect. He remembered Carr driving a Chevy S-10. It was a Ford. Campbell thought the first call went out about 1:15. It was nearly 3 p.m.
He doesn't get emotional recalling his close encounter. He saw worse as an Army Ranger in Vietnam.
"It never entered my mind to stop — and I wasn't trying to be a hero or anything like that," he said. "It was just the training that I had that I was chasing a wanton killer."
• • •
Campbell stayed at a tight but safe distance from the truck's bumper. But then Carr turned and fired a bullet that tore through Campbell's windshield, past his right ear and into the safety cage behind him.
"I knew what it would take to do that," Campbell said.
He had thought Carr was armed with a handgun. But a handgun couldn't cause that kind of damage to his car.
In fact, Carr had an SKS assault rifle. That morning, authorities believe, he used it to kill his girlfriend's son, 4-year-old Joey Bennett. Two Tampa detectives investigating that crime confiscated the weapon and put it in their trunk as they took Carr into custody.
They never noticed the handcuff key around his neck. Sitting in the back of the detectives' car, Carr used the key to get loose, reached over the seat and grabbed one officer's gun.
Then he killed Randy Bell and Ricky Childers, veteran homicide detectives whom Campbell had known and respected.
• • •
On most days, Campbell would stop by the station at the beginning of his shift and check out an assault rifle to have in the car for extra fire power. But first thing on the morning of May 19, he was told to catch up on a backlog of calls and didn't get a chance.
After Carr shot at him, Campbell got on the radio and alerted other officers about Carr's firepower.
"It could cook through our cars like Swiss cheese," he remembers saying.
Carr kept shooting. Campbell had to keep a good distance between them and could not get off a clean shot in return. Then a fragment from one of Carr's bullets caught Campbell in the neck. He pulled over briefly, realized he wasn't badly hurt and pressed on.
Dozens of law enforcement vehicles had joined the pursuit. A sharpshooter tried to take out Carr from an overpass. Hernando deputies sprayed the truck with bullets.
Carr never let up, even shooting at a police helicopter.
With a bullet in his buttock and driving with a flat tire, Carr coasted into a gas station just across the Pasco-Hernando county line. Campbell pulled off behind him and unloaded five or six rounds from his shotgun at the pickup.
But it was empty. Carr had run into the convenience store and taken a clerk hostage. Campbell stayed at the scene for about 45 minutes until his body suddenly shut down.
"I had lost enough blood and my adrenaline was crashing," he said. He woke up in an ambulance, with the siege at the convenience store still on.
He watched from an emergency room TV as a smoky flash from SWAT team explosives lifted the roof off the convenience store. He and his wife both remember how the monitors beeped loudly as Campbell's heart rate slowed when the news came: Carr had shot himself dead.
• • •
Campbell cried when he learned of Crooks' death. He attended Bell and Childers' massive, public funeral in Tampa with his arm, embedded with broken glass from the chase, in a sling.
He took about a week off from work, then returned to a desk job overseeing deputies' off-duty assignments. He hated it.
For a time he worked in the agriculture unit, then went back into road patrol before retiring.
Campbell received the sheriff's medal of valor for his work on May 19, 1998. And that's exactly how he regards his actions: work.
"I wasn't going to stop chasing him," he said. "That's what I was paid to do, and I was going to earn my money that day."
So why did he reciprocate Carr's hand gesture?
"I really don't know," Campbell said. "Just to show him I was as pissed off as he was."
Published on Saturday, May 17, 2008
in the St. Petersburg Times
Hank Earl Carr's rampage started with the killing of a child, then escalated.
The worst day for police in Tampa Bay history happened 10 years ago. It began in an old apartment with no telephone, as the rising sun warmed Sulphur Springs, when a fugitive with a fake name shot his girlfriend's son in the face.
The boy was Joey Bennett, 4 years old. The fugitive said his death was an accident.
"I swear I'll never touch another gun again," he told the detectives.
They didn't know he was lying, or that his real name was Hank Earl Carr, or that he was wanted in four states, or that he had once bitten off half a man's ear, or that he had been accused of stomping a puppy to death.
Nor did they know of his 133 IQ, his expertise in martial arts, his vow never to return to prison, his handcuff key on a hidden gold chain.
Tricked by false information that was corroborated by his girlfriend, the detectives mistook him for a man with no criminal record. And so they put him in the back seat of an unmarked Ford Taurus with no protective screen.
Tampa police detectives Rick Childers, 46, and Randy Bell, 44, were driving Carr from the apartment to police headquarters just before 2 p.m. when Carr used the key to free his hands. Then he grabbed the gun from Childers' shoulder holster.
Childers was a formidable homicide detective and one of the agency's most beloved officers. Bell had received an award of valor for leading a woman from a burning house. Carr shot them both to death.
A man in a delivery truck saw the struggle and pulled over. Carr ran to him and ordered him out. Armed with a rifle from the trunk of the Taurus, he sped away in the truck to his mother's house in Seminole Heights, where he changed his shirt and washed the blood from his hands.
"Kiss me," he told her. "You'll never see my face alive again."
He got back in the truck and drove north on Interstate 75, hoping to see his daughter in Ohio one last time. By then a description of the truck had gone out on the radio.
One man who heard it was Florida Highway Patrol Trooper James "Brad" Crooks, 23, son of a cattle farmer, engaged to be married later that year. When he saw Carr, there were 27 minutes left in his shift.
Crooks chased Carr into a thicket of traffic at the State Road 54 exit in central Pasco County. When both vehicles stopped, Carr got out of the truck, ran to the cruiser and killed Crooks with a rifle shot to the head. Then he got back on the interstate.
Next came a 22-mile car chase of exceptional speed and danger: Carr sprayed gunfire in all directions as he rocketed north at nearly 100 mph. Shards of glass hit a deputy in the chest and face. One round pierced the hull of a helicopter above. Another broke the arm of a truck driver. An officer's .40-caliber bullet lodged near Carr's spine. He drove on.
Finally, at State Road 50 in Hernando County, deputies forced Carr off the interstate by laying spikes in his path. When they shot out one of the tires, the truck rolled into the parking lot of a Shell station. Carr tore inside and made a hostage of the clerk, 27-year-old Stephanie Kramer. The standoff lasted almost five hours.
Nearly 170 police officers surrounded the gas station. Snipers tried in vain to line up a clean shot. Carr spoke by phone to two reporters, a hostage negotiator and his girlfriend, Bernice Bowen, who would later go to prison for being an accessory to his crimes.
"When you close your eyes at night," Carr told her, "think of all the good things about me. Don't think of the bad stuff and the fights. Please, think of how happy we were today, think of how we were going to go swimming."
He set the hostage free just after 7:30 p.m. Then police fired tear gas and used explosive charges to blow holes in the building. Carr shot himself in the head. Officers stormed through the wreckage and found him near the cash register, behind a wall of bulletproof plastic, his body covered in dust.
Those killed by Hank Earl Carr on May 19, 1998
Joey Bennett, 4, the boy Hank Earl Carr called his son, shot in the face and killed with an SKS semiautomatic rifle. Carr said he did it by accident; Joey's 5-year-old sister, Kayla, said at the time that it looked intentional.
Tampa Police Detective Rick Childers, 46, also known as "Chilly." Had a wife and two sons. Officer of the Year in 1990 for diving into a creek, breaking a window with his flashlight and rescuing a 17-year-old girl from a submerged car. Shot to death with his own gun as he drove Carr from the apartment to police headquarters.
Tampa Police Detective Randy Bell, 44, received more than 30 letters of commendation in a 20-year career with the department. Had a wife, three daughters, a stepson, a stepdaughter and a grandson. Riding in the front seat with Childers when Carr took Childers' gun. Tried to intervene but couldn't. Shot to death.
Florida Highway Patrol Trooper James Crooks, 23, native of Clewiston, lost 75 pounds to meet the agency's fitness standards. Planned to marry his sweetheart, a schoolteacher, the following November. Ambushed by Carr on an exit ramp in Pasco County; killed before he could draw his gun.
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