by Lee Butcher
“You won’t.”
“I’ll get the death penalty. I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing? Should I let you come here and kill me?’”
“You didn’t wake up this morning and say, ‘I think I’m going to out and kill a cop,’” Batista said. “It was not a premeditated action. It happened in the heat of passion.”
“It wasn’t premeditated.”
“So what are you saying here, Chino? What are you telling me?”
“I feel like I’m going to get the death penalty anyway.”
“How do you know that, Chino?” Batista had thought of something he could use to help calm Chino. “Jackie Simpson was involved in a shooting of a police officer in 1988 in the city of Tampa, and he got life. Life doesn’t mean life anymore. You do twenty years, you are a model prisoner, and you educate yourself. Fifteen years go by. You go before the parole boards and say, ‘Look, this guy made a mistake in 2001. But in the last fifteen years, he has been a model prisoner.’”
The case of Jackie Simpson, who murdered rookie police officer Porfirio Soto, was bizarre in more ways than one. Soto’s partner was Charlotte Rowse Johnston, whose twin sister, Jennifer Rowse, was also a Tampa policewoman. Johnston was in a gun battle with Simpson as he struggled with Soto, who was attempting to deliver a warrant.
Simpson received life in prison for Soto’s murder and thirty-five years for the attempted murder of Johnston. The sentences were to run concurrently and Simpson could have been free in twenty-five years. Unfortunately for him, Simpson hanged himself in prison with a pair of trousers.
The twin police officers were never the same. They resigned from the police department and were routinely arrested on drug charges over the next several years. They committed suicide together in 2005. The tragedy was an example of how a murder can reach out to change the lives of family members and acquaintances.
“Hold on for one second,” Chino said. “Do you have people in the attic? On the roof?”
“I don’t know. I’m not in a room. I’m in a house.”
“Do you have a SWAT team on the roof right now, because I hear walking?” Chino’s voice was pitched with anxiety.
“I don’t know. There may be a SWAT team. There are SWAT people all over the place. But they’re not coming in there.”
“No? What are they doing?”
“They take different positions,” Batista said. “I don’t know. I’m a negotiator. I’ve just been told there is nobody up on the roof. So you may be hearing something else from next door. There’s nobody there, but we have SWAT people all around us. The building is surrounded.... There are police cars everywhere. There are media people everywhere. You’re probably watching on TV. Television shows you everything that is going on. I’m sure you’re watching TV right now. Is Paula okay?”
“What happened?”
“Is Paula okay?”
“I think so.”
“How about you, man? Are you settled down a little bit?”
“Yeah, I’m settled down.” Chino had asked earlier for a pack of cigarettes. “What happened with the pack of cigarettes?” Chino asked. “I’m fucking, like, shaking like a fucking leaf.”
“Nobody is smoking. We’re trying to find somebody with a—”
“My mother.”
“Your mother smokes? She’s not here. Let me see if I can get you at least a couple of cigarettes out there until we get a pack or something.”
“I need a new pack. You people can be snakes.”
Batista knew that Chino wanted an unopened package of cigarettes because he was afraid the police would lace the cigarettes with poison or a drug to knock him unconscious.
“We want to get the cigarettes to you,” he said. “But we don’t want you to hurt anybody else trying to deliver them. What do you do for us if we give you a pack of cigarettes? Let Isaac go?”
“Yeah, I’m going to let him go for a pack of cigarettes ?” Chino mocked. “And you rushing right out there, so I have to give up or you’ll shoot me right down there.”
“No, we’re not going to rush anything. We got all the time in the world. We want to resolve this. I told you that from the very beginning. We don’t want you to get hurt, we don’t want Paula to get hurt.”
“I’ll call you back in a little bit.”
“I’ll call you back. You want to come out of this alive, and you want everyone to come out of this,” Batista said. “I don’t think you want to hurt anybody else. I don’t think you want to hurt yourself or Paula or Isaac or anybody else in there. Do you?”
“This is not all about hurting people,” Chino said. “This is all about profiting.”
“You don’t sound like a bad person at all. I talk to a lot of people on these things. You sound like a person who is down on his luck. You made a mistake and you got caught.”
“Yeah, that sucks.”
“You’ve got to surrender and move on,” Batista told him. “What’s done is done. You can’t change the past, man, but you can change the future. Think about your daughter and your girlfriend, and your girlfriend raising your daughter, not some stranger or state agency. Ashley’s father needs to talk to her, too, and you will be able to as long as you are on this earth. I could talk all night, whatever it takes. The bottom line is you are in control here. It’s up to you.”
“If I was in control, I would be seeing my daughter right now.”
“You could see your daughter very quickly. All you got to do is tell me you want to come out. I’ll tell the SWAT guys. They’ll take you into custody, bring you downstairs, and you can spend some time with your daughter. We can make that happen like that. It’s up to you. You could show me some good faith by letting Isaac leave. That will show everybody, ‘Hey, look, this guy really doesn’t want to hurt anybody. This guy wants to work things out.’”
“Let me talk to Paula.”
“I’ll stay on the line. Go ahead.”
“No, like I want it to be private.”
“You want me to call you back then?”
Batista asked Chino if there was a solid door by the kitchen, where a police officer could place the telephone that they would use for further communications. This was the telephone with the miniature camera that would telecast what was happening inside the apartment to the police. Chino told Batista there was a door that faced the stairs. Batista rejected that.
“It’s not safe for our guys, man. We want a solid door. Is the kitchen a solid door?”
“There is going to be no solid doors,” Chino said flatly.
“Does the kitchen door have a window? Let me talk to these SWAT. Let me see what’s going on. Let me call you right back.”
Batista watched as a member of a SWAT team crouched low and went upstairs to place the telephone by the kitchen door. It was a risky maneuver by the police officer to expose himself to fire. Fortunately, Chino didn’t see him.
“All right, we’ve put the phone there,” Batista said when he called Chino. “We wanted to put it there safely and back away. That’s what we did. You want to go get—”
“How’s my mother?”
“Your mother is okay. I haven’t seen her in a while, but she is okay.”
“I don’t want anyone treating her like shit, you know.”
“Nobody’s going to,” Batista said. “She is a very nice lady. She is very upset, of course. She wants this thing resolved. She wants to see you. She wants you to come out alive. You think that we are going to hurt you and we’re not going to. We want everybody to come out alive. So, when you—”
“Okay, I’m going to get the phone now.”
“When you get the phone, there is a button you have to press to talk. If you don’t press the button, I’m not going to be able to hear you.”
“It’s like a two-way radio?”
“More or less, but it’s a secure line because the media is listening,” Batista said. “It’s nobody’s business, just us.”
“Isn’t that against the law?”
&
nbsp; Batista agreed that it was and Chino said he would get the telephone and call him back.
The clock was ticking and almost 2½ hours had passed since the standoff began. The July sun glared white-hot and turned the asphalt, where police were stationed, into a griddle. Police officers baked beneath their bulletproof vests and inside an armored tank that was at the staging area. The police were prepared to do whatever it took to defuse the situation, and an assault was becoming more probable with each passing minute.
State Attorney Mark Ober looked out at the scene and worried out loud: “This could turn out to be a real bloodbath.”
Everyone hoped it wouldn’t.
Chapter 11
Chino looked nervous and scared. The television had just broadcast a news update showing police swarming around the apartment grounds, including SWAT teams with their military-type uniforms, rifles, and shotguns. Davis thought that Chino believed that time was running out and that the apartment would soon be assaulted.
Paula said, “We need to call people in New York before whatever’s gonna happen, happens.”
“You know what we have to do,” Chino said. His voice was persuasive, but he wasn’t giving a command, so far as Davis could tell.
“Come on,” Chino said, motioning toward Davis with the MAC-11. “You’ve got to stick your hand out the door and get a telephone.”
Chino marched him to the kitchen door at gunpoint, Chino’s hand grasping Davis by the neck. A knot twisted inside Davis’s stomach as he thought about the SWAT teams outside and the guns that were probably being aimed at the kitchen door. At Chino’s direction he got on his knees, opened the door a crack, then reached out, grabbed the telephone, and brought it inside.
“Maybe we should turn ourselves in, Chino,” Paula said, sounding hysterical.
Paula started talking in Spanish on a cell phone and Davis thought she was saying good-bye. She wept and her voice cracked.
Chino pointed the muzzle of the MAC-11 toward the ceiling and pulled the lever back. It made a clicking sound. Davis saw him remove the magazine and take two bullets out, look at them, put them back, and reinsert the magazine. He did the same thing a second time and placed the gun on the table next to the Glock.
Chino picked up the MAC-11 again and counted the bullets in the magazine. He looked at Davis.
“It looks like a toy,” Davis said.
“You pull the trigger and it fires many times,” Chino said.
“It goes brrrrrtt! Like an automatic?”
“Yes. You pull the trigger and it keeps on firing.” Chino looked at him. “Don’t worry. We aren’t going to hurt you.”
Chino lit one of the cigarettes from the package the police had left with the telephone. He inhaled deeply, held it, then exhaled. The television newscast showed a panoramic scan of the apartment building, which teemed with police officers.
“They’re everywhere,” Paula said. “They’re everywhere.”
The feeling of imminent danger grew inside the apartment. Although they were both scared, neither Paula nor Chino showed much affection toward the other, nor did they try to comfort one another. Davis was frightened: Chino and Paula could kill him or he might get killed in the cross fire of a shoot-out with the police. He felt his heart beat.
“I’m going to do it,” Chino said.
“Yeah, okay,” Paula said.
“We talked about it before.”
“There are alternatives,” Paula said. “I’ll probably get ten or fifteen years and then come out of prison. Then I can take care of Ashley.”
“I want to go home with my father,” Chino said. “I don’t want to go to prison. I just want to put a bullet in my head.”
Paula, on an emotional roller coaster, changed her mind again and decided that she should commit suicide. Chino wanted her to do it and she always did what Chino wanted. She made a last telephone call to her mother in New York and left a message in Spanish on the answering machine:
“We went to rob a bank and the police came up from everywhere. Please take care, very much. I love you with all my heart, and please, you can be with the mother of Chino. Call me if you can do that . . . mistake. What am I going to pay for this, I know. Good-bye, Mommy. Bye, Daddy. Ciao, Lisa [Paula’s sister Louisa]. Ciao, Helen. Bye to everyone. Say hello to the entire family. I love you very much. Bye.”
The cell phone rang while Chino talked to Batista. It was Paula’s mother, Melba. “Don’t do it,” she said. “Please, please, do not do it. I am going to send angels to come and get you.”
Lisa, Paula’s sister, came on the line. “He’s brainwashing you,” she said. “You’ve got to snap out of it.”
“I know, I know.”
“Please do not do this,” Lisa pleaded again. “Think of Ashley.”
On the police phone Batista yelled, “Chino! Can you hear me?”
Chino slumped in a corner facing the front door, where he expected the SWAT team to attack. He held the MAC-11 and smoked a cigarette as he cradled the telephone between his shoulder and ear.
Paula got off the phone with her mother. She stepped across Chino’s legs. Both Paula and Chino appeared to be calm.
“You can come out first,” Batista said. “It’s up to you. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
Chino lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Man, I’m shaking like a fucking leaf.”
“What do you say, man?” Batista asked.
“I think I’ll send Isaac out first.”
Chino called Davis out of the bathroom, where he had been hunkered down in the tub to avoid gunfire if the police staged an assault. Davis took the telephone from Chino and listened as Batista told him to strip down to his shorts and come out with his hands up. Davis did as instructed.
“Go stand by the front door,” Chino told him. “Stand facing inside.”
Davis did so, his knees trembling.
Chino put the telephone down and looked at Paula. “I’m killing myself,” he said.
He demonstrated how they would kill themselves together by putting the muzzle of the MAC-11 under his chin. Paula was to use the Glock.
“Like this,” Chino said. “On the count of three. One, two, pow.”
Paula leaned over and kissed Chino on the lips. Davis’s stomach couldn’t take the tension anymore and he threw up.
“Are you ready?” Chino asked, putting the gun back under his chin.
“I can’t do it!” Paula screamed hysterically. “You do it for me.”
“What’s going on, man?” Batista yelled over the telephone.
“I’m gonna put a bullet in my head,” Chino said.
“No! Don’t do that, man.”
“Yeah. I’m leaving on three. Ready?” he asked Paula.
Paula wasn’t ready, she was scared. “Yeah,” she said.
“On the count of three,” he said.
Chino pushed the muzzle of the MAC-11 into his chin. “One, two . . .”
The MAC-11 fired and sent a bullet through Chino’s brain. He slumped to his right side and slid down the wall. Davis’s knees gave way and he fell to the floor. He not only saw blood gushing from Chino’s head, he heard it. Paula didn’t pull the trigger because she kept thinking that Ashley needed her. She stepped over to Chino and touched his shoulder.
“Good-bye, sweetie,” she said. She picked up the telephone. “Hello?”
“What happened?” Batista asked.
“He’s dead.”
“It’s over, Paula. Come on out. Your daughter needs you.”
“They’re gonna charge me with the killing of the officer.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Batista said. “Go to the front door and close your eyes. A SWAT team is coming.”
A SWAT team took Davis into custody, placing handcuffs on him. He was taken to police headquarters and held until police were satisfied that he was a victim and not part of the robbery and murder. Paula was also taken downtown, where she would be interviewed. She felt relieved that it
was all over, but everything had a dreamlike quality to it, as if not really happening.
At police headquarters Paula was given a bottle of springwater. She had not eaten since breakfast, but she wasn’t hungry. More than anything, she wanted to see Ashley. The police would allow that, but first they wanted to take her statement while everything was fresh in her mind.
Batista was emotionally drained. He had tried for three hours to defuse the standoff and have everyone come out alive. No other police officers had been killed and the hostage was released unharmed. Throughout the negotiation he had not allowed himself to think of Lois because of the emotional impact it would have on him. Now he remembered their friendship over the past eighteen years, her bright smile, perky attitude, and her generous spirit. He wept.
Chapter 12
Detective Aubrey “Gene” Black, of the homicide division, began interviewing Paula at 4:39 P.M., shortly after she was taken into custody. He had been the second point man with Batista during negotiations with Chino and Paula, keeping Batista informed of police activities. Black was an experienced police officer, having served twenty-five years with the Tampa Police Department. Seventeen of those years were as a detective and he had conducted hundreds of interviews with suspected lawbreakers and knew how to get them to talk. Paula wore a camouflage T-shirt and denim shorts; she looked small, fragile, and vulnerable. She was meek and spoke in a soft voice with a Spanish accent.
The interview was held in the conference room at the downtown police station. It was a large, comfortable room, with carpeted floors. Joining Black were Detectives Jeanette Hevel and George Lease, both of the robbery division. Black read Paula her rights and she initialed a form acknowledging that she understood. At the top of the form was a blank line the detectives used to write in the crime with which a suspect was charged. That space was left blank on the sheet Paula signed. Black began asking questions that Paula answered mostly in monosyllables or with the fewest number of words possible. Black established that Chino was her boyfriend, that they lived together, and had a daughter named Ashley.
“What I’m gonna ask you is, would you like to talk to us and tell us about what happened today?” Black asked. “And if you would, what I’d like to have you do is just sign your signature across the bottom line.”
