Buzz Worthy | There was a serial killer in my neighborhood

I live in Tampa, and I work at night in a bar. The bar closes at 3 a.m., and the bartenders work even later, doing whatever bartenders do at the end of their shift. Setting up for the next day, I guess.

A few weeks back, on a Monday night, one of the bartenders I work with got home about 4:30 a.m. It was a cool, pleasant night, so he sat on his front porch and cracked open a beer. Then he heard a bang.

“Well, there’s another one,” he said to himself.

He had just heard the gunshot that killed the fourth victim of the Seminole Heights serial killer. About 100 feet from his house, just around the corner, the victim lay in the street. My co-worker got pictures of the victim’s body on his phone.

Until October, no one outside of Tampa had heard of my part of town. Now Seminole Heights is national news because of four murders that are exceptional for their apparent abject senselessness.

I have been reading accounts of how the neighborhood has been in a panic, how people have been terrified. Even the local media portrayed the neighborhood that way, repeatedly. As if, before the suspect was arrested, we were all holed up in our houses, afraid to step outside.

I really didn’t seen that. I saw a neighborhood that was concerned, cautious and frustrated. People adjusted their schedules, walking their dogs at dusk instead of after dark and stuff like that. I like to take the bus whenever I can, but since October I haven’t done that. I’d heard that two of the first three victims had just gotten off the No. 9 bus, and one had been waiting at the bus stop on that line. The No. 9 bus stops right in front of my house, and I’ve ridden on it probably thousands of times over the years.

My point is, we made little adjustments, and life was just a little different for a couple of months. There’s a diner in the neighborhood I go to sometimes after I get off work at the bar. It’s easy walking distance from the murder scenes, and for the past few months there have been noticeably more cops than usual eating there, and they’ve all been wearing bullet-proof vests. But the place still has had plenty of civilians eating there, even at 3 a.m.

Life was, to use the post-9/11 phrase, the “new normal.” We weren’t a neighborhood in panic. We weren’t, to use one sensationalistic description I read, “a neighborhood held hostage.” We were a neighborhood with a serious problem that we felt pretty sure would get solved quickly.

Seminole Heights is an old neighborhood, with lots of bungalows built in the 1920s. It was pretty run-down in the 1970s, when I first moved there, but in recent years it has become Tampa’s trendiest area, known especially for its great restaurants. After the first three murders, which happened in quick succession, night-time business was noticeably sparse in many of those restaurants, especially the ones with outdoor seating.

But business returned, and the fourth murder, which happened right outside one of the most popular restaurants, didn’t seem to dampen business a whole lot. It probably helped a lot that Tampa’s new police chief Brian Dugan, whom everyone I know thinks has been impressive through this ordeal, has been encouraging people to keep going out and to watch out for each other.

It was apparently the nature of the murders, not their number, that caused them to be widely known. In fact, just about a year ago, there were three murders in Seminole Heights, with bodies found in alleys. One body was right behind the house I owned from 1975 until 1991, virtually in the back yard.

Those murders, just eight blocks from the recent killings, were never solved, as far as I know. But no one talks about them anymore (I only recall them because a friend reminded me) and they weren’t reported by news media in other cities the way these four recent ones have been. We weren’t significantly more concerned about the recent killings than we were about last year’s slayings.

I don’t know anyone who was truly scared, but everyone was just a little tense for a long time. I think we kind of got used to being tense, and we were surprised at the depth of our relief when the police made an arrest.

Now we’re all wondering why this happened. It feels a lot better than wondering when it’s going to happen again.

This story was originally published December 1, 2017 at 2:11 PM with the headline "Buzz Worthy | There was a serial killer in my neighborhood."