This story originally appeared in the St. Petersburg Times on December 31, 1999.
TAMPA—Beside the pool, a man lay shot to death, draped over a blue lounge chair. At the rear of the hotel, near the employees’ entrance, lay two more bodies, sprawled in front of a minivan. In the hotel’s lobby, near the registration desk, was another body. Elsewhere in the hotel were three more people, shot but still alive.
The stunning scene unfolded in the space of just a few minutes Thursday afternoon at the Radisson Bay Harbor Hotel on Courtney Campbell Parkway.
The dead and the injured were all hotel workers—and so was the gunman, Tampa police said. They identified him as Silvio Izquierdo-Leyva, a 36-year-old refugee from Cuba who had worked at the hotel for only a couple of months.
A fifth person would die before one of Tampa’s most tragic days was over.
After the gunman fled the hotel in a stolen car, he abandoned it near West Tampa’s famous La Teresita restaurant. He shot and killed a motorist who refused to give up her car, police said. Then he stole another car—after thanking the driver for getting out promptly—and sped off.
Minutes later, cornered by police on a city street, the suspect gave up quietly.
Two of the wounded Radisson employees remained hospitalized late Thursday, one in critical condition; the other, serious.
Izquierdo has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder.
What had set off the killings? There was no clear answer to that question late Thursday.
Tampa police Chief Bennie Holder said at an 11 p.m. news conference that Izquierdo had refused to talk to police and was maintaining a casual demeanor.
“At this time we don’t have a motive for the shooting,” Holder said. “Apparently he’s not concerned about what happened. He’s upstairs sleeping.”
Some relatives of Izquierdo’s told the Times that during the rampage, he went after his sister-in-law, Angela Vazquez, who supervises housekeeping at the Radisson.
Vazquez and one of her daughters were in the lobby collecting their paychecks when the gunman stormed in. He fired at them but both escaped without injury.
“My uncle came in just shooting,” Izquierdo’s niece, Liza Izquierdo, said later. “He was chasing Mommy through the halls.”
Silvio Izquierdo came to the United States from Cuba in 1995, and has no criminal record in Florida or Alabama, where he lived before coming to Tampa. Relatives said he has a daughter in Cuba and visited there a month ago, returning intent upon becoming a priest in the Santeria religion.
It appeared that only hotel workers were the gunman’s targets.
Wendy Sobaski, a member of a Missouri women’s college basketball team staying at the hotel, told her_father that one of her teammates, Robyn Gerber, came face to face with the gunman as she tried to flee.
“He told Robyn he wasn’t interested in [shooting] anyone else, the team was okay,” Kenny Sobaski said.
‘I THOUGHT THEY WERE_PLAYING SOME GAME’
Thursday’s mayhem started about 3 p.m. amid Christmas lights spread throughout the waterfront Radisson Bay Harbor Hotel. Employees were milling around the lobby preparing for the night shift to come in.
Waitress Kathy Pruniski heard sounds—Pop! Pop! Pop!—and assumed they were part of the holiday celebrations at the hotel.
“Isn’t that funny, they’re getting a jump on New Year’s,” she said to some guests.
Rafael Barrios, a bellman at the hotel, had arrived to get his paycheck when he saw men and women running out of the lobby and hiding behind cars.
“I thought they were playing some game,” he said.
Diana Izquierdo, the suspect’s niece, was just about to leave with her mother when the shots started.
“I thought it was firecrackers. My mom was screaming, ‘Diana, come on! Come on!’ ” she recounted, crying and clutching her baby daughter’s teddy bear.
Silvio Izquierdo saw them and began firing, said Liza Izquierdo, who spoke to her mother by telephone afterward. Police identified the weapons as a 9mm semi-_automatic handgun and .38-caliber revolver.
Diana Izquierdo said she could not fathom a motive. “My uncle snapped,” she said.
Rafael Barrios, 20, the bellman, pulled up in his white Honda Accord. He saw the men and women running out of the lobby and hiding behind cars. Suddenly, a man calmly stepped from the bushes, stood in front of his car and lifted a pistol.
“He pointed it at me right through the window,” Barrios said.
The man didn’t say a word, but his expression said everything.
“Evil—just evil in his face,” Barrios said.
Barrios watched in horror as the man reloaded a clip. “My life was in his hands,” Barrios said. Barrios jumped from the car and ran before the man could reload.
The man, whom Barrios recognized from housekeeping, walked back into the hotel. A few seconds later, Barrios heard more shots.
When Barrios finally went into the hotel, he saw people he worked with lying on the floor, shot.
“It’s tragic. There’s so many things going through my mind right now,” he said.
The hotel was bustling with fans preparing for the New Year’s Day Outback Bowl between Purdue University and the University of Georgia.
Carson Woods of Dayton, Ohio, said he was leaving the lobby to retrieve a bag from his car when he heard shots.
“I heard two pops and saw people running out of the hotel,” said Woods, who was wearing a Purdue shirt. “I knew I had to get out of there.”
Members of the women’s basketball team from Missouri’s Truman State University, in town for a game against Eckerd College, encountered a body as they fled a pregame meal. None of the players was injured.
Wendi Sobaski, a junior guard for the Bulldogs, told her father that as they were finishing their meal, “employees from the hotel came in and said, ‘Get out! Get out!’ ” said Kenny Sobaski, who talked to his daughter by phone Thursday evening.
As the team heeded the warning, some members encountered a body and “took off running,” Sobaski said.
‘I KNEW TO GIVE HIM THE CAR’
The gunman sped away from the hotel in the Honda owned by Barrios, the bellman.
Inside a food concession stand in the parking lot next to La Teresita, restaurant owner Confesor Rodriguez saw what happened next:
The assailant, who had abandoned the Honda, aimed a nickel-plated handgun at a woman in her four-door burgundy Mercury.
“Lady, give me the car,” he told her, said Rodriguez.
When the woman didn’t comply, the gunman shot her through the driver’s side window, Rodriguez said.
After she was shot, she put the car in reverse and_began to back up.
The gunman moved on to the next car. He shot at a Jeep traveling south on Lincoln Avenue. The vehicle was hit, but the driver sped away, Rodriguez said.
“He was acting real crazy,” Rodriguez said.
Next, the gunman turned to the owner of a sports utility vehicle parking in the lot. He wanted the car, but before he took it, he asked whether it was a standard or automatic transmission, Rodriguez said.
It was the owner’s lucky day. The car had a stick-shift, and the gunman wasn’t interested.
Just then, he saw a white Chevrolet Celebrity station wagon heading toward him on Lincoln Avenue. Inside, Angel Marteliz was heading home, listening to an afternoon radio talk show.
The gunman stepped from the curb as Marteliz came to a stop. He pointed his nickel-barreled gun at Marteliz.
“Take the car,” Marteliz told the man, as he stepped out.
“Thank you,” he replied.
“I knew to give him the car,” Marteliz said later. “I didn’t argue.”
Soon after—about 3:40 p.m.—Izquierdo barged into the home of Angela Vazquez, his sister-in-law, at 3023 Green St. The house, which faces Interstate 275, was a place he had stayed off and on over the last year.
Nely Rodriguez, 16, a longtime friend of the Izquierdo family, said she was the only one at the house when Izquierdo barged through the front door.
He was dressed entirely in white, as was his custom, and had an urgency Rodriguez found unsettling. She hadn’t heard a word about the shootings.
“Where everybody at?” he demanded, as Rodriguez sat on the couch, watching TV. She said she didn’t know.
“He looked weird. He looked paranoid,” she said.
“They in back?” he called to her, as he darted into a bedroom where he sometimes slept, now used by Angela’s daughters.
When he didn’t find anyone, he went to the kitchen sink and splashed water on his face.
He ran outside, then. The faucet was still running. He left the door wide open.
Rodriguez said she stood in the door frame, watching Izquierdo go toward a white station wagon. She dialed a number on the family’s portable phone.
Izquierdo suddenly wheeled around.
“He looked at me. Like paranoid,” Rodriguez said. “Maybe he thought I was calling the police.”
But he turned around, jumped into the car and drove off. Police cruisers stopped the car a few blocks away near Spruce Street and N. MacDill Avenue. The block is next to the city’s MacFarlane Park and around the corner from St. Joseph’s Catholic School.
Police Chief Holder said Izquiedro was calm immediately after his arrest: “It was just like someone had been stopped for a traffic violation.”
It was one of the deadliest days in Tampa’s history.
In July 1983, Billy Ferry Jr. firebombed a Clair Mel Winn-Dixie grocery store, killing five people and injuring 13.
Newton Slawson murdered a family of two adults, two children and an unborn baby in Tampa in 1989.
Thursday’s rampage at the Radisson brought back sharp memories of Jan. 27, 1993, when a man fired eight months earlier from the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. office at Rocky Point walked into a cafeteria at lunch time and shot five company supervisors, killing three of them.
Paul L. Calden, 33, fled the scene and took his own life later that day with a revolver at Cliff Stephens Park in Clearwater where he often played Frisbee golf.
‘OH, MY GOD, THIS IS JUST AWFUL’
Soon after Thursday’s shootings at the Radisson, staffers, such as Dana Hagerman, streamed in for work. She had no idea about the shootings until she saw the mob of reporters and emergency workers.
“So that means George was in there? And Sam? Did any of the managers get hurt?” she asked, breaking into tears. “Oh, my God, this is just awful.”
Guests, many barefoot and in T-shirts, wandered teary-eyed and visibly shaken. They were told it would be two hours before they could get to their rooms.
Hotel employees, paramedics and guests received counseling from the Critical Incident Stress Management Team, a group of volunteer paramedics, police and mental health counselors. They plan to meet again next week after the shock of Thursday’s events have sunk in.
“A lot of guests were stepping over bodies,” said_Diane Fojt, director of the counseling team.
Thursday evening, relatives and family members of the victims walked out of the hotel crying and holding on to one another.
One woman wailed over and over, “Why Lord, why?”
Written by Times staff writers Steve Huettel, Linda Gibson, Kathryn Wexler, Leanora Minai, and David Karp. Also contributing were Times staff writers Wes Allison, Graham Brink, Jean Heller, Amy Herdy, Sharon Ginn, Joe Newman, Alicia Olazabal, David Pedreira, Scott Purks, Adam C. Smith, Pete Young, Times artist Don Morris, and Times researchers Caryn Baird, Kitty Bennett, John Martin, and Cathy Wos.
