Lake Streety crime shocks Florida at the height of the pandemic

Americans are passionate about reporting events. The proliferation of series like American Crime Story, True Detective, The Wire..., as well as the hundreds of films that are released every year based on crimes and violent events, only confirms this tendency to consume insanity and the macabre, something that has been exported to the world thanks to the mass media and universal mass culture. These days, the outcome of the investigation into a triple crime that took place last week on the East Coast is being followed nationally in the United States, and has caused a huge stir in Florida, where everyone is talking about what happened on the Lake Streety road, about two kilometres from the small town of Frostproof. No one remembers the cancellation of the Republican Convention that was to take place in Jacksonville in a few days and which was bounced from Charlotte, North Carolina. Candidate Donald Trump has had to give his arm and suspend the big event on his election calendar, where he was planning to take a bath in the crowds of nearly 20,000 acolytes, after having "snatched" it from the neighbouring state of Georgia where there is a Democratic governor. And the talks have been put on hold because of the imminent celebration of the final phase of the NBA, which begins in a few days in the Walt Disney World pavilion, where the stars of the second most popular sport in the country will meet, although without an audience to enjoy their clashes. Even the general consternation for being the state that is registering more cases of coronavirus has been left in the background.

The event is shocking and it won't be long before it jumps into the minds of the screenwriters to make a new series or feature film, because to find the origins of violence in America you have to take notes from nature. Perhaps Nick Pizzolatto will be interested in narrating in images the brutality of this crime, or Taylor Sheridan will dig into the roots of the victims and the killer, snooping around in the rickety caravans where they all lived humbly with their families. I could be wrong, and let Vince Gilligan take on the artistic challenge of making a film out of this event, even though with no apparent drugs involved it is unlikely to interest him in his tormented stories of drug addicts. Or Jim Mickle with his black and marginal humor. But whoever adapts to the screen what happened in Florida this hot summer of the coronavirus, the audience will be overwhelmed.

Brandon Rollins, Keven Springfield and Damion Tillman have been friends since childhood. They all live in Polk County, in the geographic triangle formed by Orlando on the Atlantic coast, Tampa on the Gulf of Mexico and the great Lake Okeechobee. All of them are plain people, having shared childhood, adolescence and maturity in a depressed area of sunny Florida, the Sunshine State that also has its B-side as The Florida Project recently showed the world. They are 23, 30 and 27 years old respectively, and have one common hobby: fishing, although they also like to hunt wild pigs. Despite being an area hit by so many crises and unemployment, the place where they live can be considered a paradise for fishermen, because as in the rest of the state's orography there are hundreds of lakes and natural aquifers that you come across every two steps (Lake Clinch, Ready Lake, Lake Ida, Lake Livingston or the Kissimmee River), and the fauna that you can find there is very rich, including alligators... Brandon, Keven and Damion were left on Friday July 17th to spend the afternoon fishing for carp in Lake Streety, a three minute pick up from the town of Frostproof. When they go hunting, the three friends always take their pit bulls and some Catahoula dogs, called the leopard dog in those lands for their speed and ability to hunt their prey however fast it is. But that afternoon, with 84 degrees Fahrenheit and 79 percent humidity, they only took out their rods to spend a quiet twilight and then go to dinner together. They arrived at the lake road a few minutes before 10 p.m. on Friday night in their vans with the cargo side open, red the one in Tillman and white the one in Springfield, where Brandon Rollins was also traveling. When the vehicles stopped, and before they could get off to take out their fishing gear, an assailant jumped on them and began to yell at Keven, accusing him of having stolen his truck, to which he replied by denying the accusation as well. The tension mounts and the assailant shoots repeatedly at the three young men with his 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson, completely unloading the magazine. A hail of bullets kills Brandon, Keven and Damion, although the former still has a lifeline to call his father from his mobile phone, who comes to the scene to find the bodies. 

The news hits Polk County. Last weekend there was not a single local who did not already know what had happened on Streety's road, and the fear of going out on the streets in the middle of a pandemic and being infected was joined by the uneasiness of the families of those killed and the fear of knowing that there is a dangerous criminal armed and loose on those roads. County Police Chief Grady Judd offers several rewards for any reliable information about the triple murder. At a press conference held on the same ochre-colored dirt road where the shooting took place, Chief Judd expressed dismay at the scene he witnessed when he arrived at the scene: "They were murdered. Worse than that, they were massacred." But the investigation starts with some promising data. A shopping bag with the logo of the Dollar General store, very popular in the United States, and a shopping ticket have been the evidence that has been pulled by homicide investigators. Checking the security cameras, it turned up the image of Tillman waiting to pay for hours before going to the lake with his friends. 

At one point in the recording, he was exchanging a few words with someone, who appeared clearly on camera a moment later: Tony T.J. Wiggins, a 26-year-old maladjusted local resident with a long criminal historial, who had been singled out in his calls by many county residents as a possible perpetrator of the deaths. In his statement, the store clerk confirmed that Damion Tillman had told Wiggins he was going fishing on the lake with Springfield and others. Since Monday, the investigation has focused on him and his girlfriend, Mary Whittemore, because at his age he has more than 200 felonies on his record, the first of which was committed when he was only 12 years old. He's out on bail for a fight in which he broke his opponent's arm, and he's a specialist in armed robbery, assaults on the elderly, resisting arrest... A real social outcast. 

After several hours of conflicting testimony, the police search his car, discover a 9-gauge casing from T.J.'s gun, and arrest him. He is now believed to have acted undercover by his girlfriend and her brother Robert, both now on minor charges but implicated in the events. After committing the triple murder, the three went to the McDonalds in Lake Wailes and asked for ten double cheeseburgers and two McPollos out the window of their van. That was only half an hour after the gun was fired on the three victims. 

Wiggins could face a death sentence, if found guilty by the court, because capital punishment was reinstated in Florida almost half a century ago. If it is true that they argued over the engine of a stolen van, we are looking at an event from Trump's Depressed America, which already existed in the Obama years and was even shown in the cinema (see Comanchería, a paradigm of the banking crisis in South Texas). Three deaths from a broken-down truck.