The Tampa Tribune

Long Hours And Luck: Solving The USF Slaying

By ANTHONY McCARTNEY and CANDACE J. SAMOLINSKI The Tampa Tribune
Published: Jul 2, 2006

TAMPA - Detectives Mike Conway and Jeff Collins pull up outside the apartment building a couple of hours after the
gunfire.
They survey the dark parking lot. Someone has learned the victim's name, Ronald Stem, from cards in his wallet.
He is a 57-year-old former University of South Florida student, back on campus to visit his girlfriend. A Vietnam
veteran and model train collector, Stem was living and working at a nearby woodshop. He had no car. He walked
almost everywhere.
It will take more than a month of long hours, creative detective work and some luck before investigators arrest three
teens suspected of the killing.
But in the early morning hours of Feb. 10, Collins and Conway, USF's only permanent detectives, face what they
have worried about for years - a complicated whodunit.
They realize they have little to work with. Standing on the black asphalt are just three yellow, foldout evidence
markers.
One is for the body. Another marks a pair of eyeglasses. The third signals a mysterious shell casing, made for troops
on a mission far away.
Ron Stem walked into USF's Magnolia Apartments about 8 p.m. to visit his fiancee, Sarah Cobb.
His latest paycheck had bounced. Stem, once homeless, was upset.
He wished out loud for a gun. To shoot his boss.
Better yet, he said, for his boss to shoot him.
By 11:30 p.m., Stem had calmed down. As he walked out of the building, he paused to remark to a woman returning
home from work about how cold it was.
Moments later, people inside the Magnolia Apartments and in the parking lot heard what they thought was a
firecracker or blown tire.
Stem was shot through the heart. His wallet, with only $1 inside, was still in his pocket.
His killers ran off, past the open eye of a security camera, to a waiting car.
The morning after Stem's killing, Conway, Collins and USF Detective Christine Bennett convene in a cramped
conference room at police headquarters.
This will be where they assemble clues to solve the campus' third slaying since its opening in 1960 and the first in
nearly 12 years.
Conway has been with the department for all three homicides. An experienced training officer, he also handles
security for dignitaries who visit USF.
Collins, a former highway patrolman, now specializes in the meticulous work of white-collar crime investigations.
For Bennett, a former patrol officer now on a two-year stint with the detective squad, this is her first murder case.
About a week into the investigation, the trio is joined by veteran Special Agent Lee Strope with the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement. It's not the first campus homicide he's worked.
In 1990, a year after he joined the FDLE, he was seeking justice for five students at the University of Florida slain by
a serial killer.
With retirement looming, Strope's goal is to keep the USF detectives focused.
He tells them, "The reason you're here is Stem. You have to keep reminding yourself."
Stem's picture gets posted on a wall.
Within days, photos of suspects start to surround Stem's.
Before long, other departments call and offer the detectives help.
Their problem is knowing what to ask for.
The shell casing, Stem's clothes and other evidence are sent to FDLE's Tampa lab for analysis.
While they wait, Bennett, Conway and Collins go back to the Magnolia Apartments.
With 500 occupants, it is one of USF's smaller residence halls. To the detectives trying to talk to everyone, it doesn't
feel that way.
They meet the woman who talked to Stem briefly before he was shot, and plenty of people who heard the pop, but
hadn't called police.
Nothing that brings them any closer.
Their captain, Bob Staehle, starts to worry about them.
He walks into his office in the morning and Collins is already there, staring at the security tape from the night of Feb.
9.
He leaves for the night and there's Collins, still staring at tape.
Staehle keeps reminding his detectives to go home, to not burn out. The first week, Collins and Bennett log 80 hours.
Conway tops 100.
They sometimes barely get home and crawl into bed when they're called back out on a lead.
Days after Stem's killing, though, no obvious suspects emerge.
Bennett creates a flier using some screen shots from a security camera. The department alerts the media and asks
for the public's help.
It's a sign, Staehle admits, that the dead ends are piling up.
On Feb. 21, FDLE's crime lab calls.
The lab has more information about the bullet that killed Stem, the one with the unique stamp at the base of the shell
- "WCC 88."
It's a 9mm, hollow-point round manufactured by the Western Cartridge Co. in 1988 for NATO, the European-
American defense alliance.
They need to find more bullets like it, and the gun that fired it, so Bennett keeps asking about ammo recovered in
other crimes.
Nothing matches.
Collins reviews more and more security tapes, looking for suspicious cars or the suspects, on the off-chance they've
returned to the scene.
In an attempt to find the gun or other evidence, Tampa police divers scour a pond near the parking lot. They find
nothing.
Bennett starts to ask about every recent robbery and gun crime committed in Hillsborough County.
She reads the papers. Scours arrest reports. She logs on to the social networking site, Facebook.com, and looks for
pictures of students holding guns.
She finds one, a USF freshman football player, pictured holding two 9mm guns.
Conway calls him in for an interview and learns they're BB guns. He makes the player sign a sworn statement
anyway.
Attention turns to a local rap group, and its producer, who doubles as a nightclub bouncer.
Photos of the rappers get posted on the wall of suspect photos, next to Stem's.
Conway, Collins and Bennett are convinced this is their best lead.
Strope is unsure.
Don't get homed in on the rappers, he warns.
On March 2, the detectives return to the Magnolia Apartments. It's been three weeks of long hours and many busted
leads. An anonymous tip line has received no calls.
The detectives start to wonder what else they can do.
They announce a $10,000 reward for information.
Their breakthrough comes about 4:15 p.m., a robbery five miles away at the U Name It smoke shop on North Florida
Avenue.
An off-duty sheriff's detective, on his way home, hears about the silent holdup alarm. He is five blocks away.
He pulls up, tucks his badge under his guayabera shirt and tries the front door. It's locked. He looks inside and sees
a man holding a silver handgun to the clerk's head.
He calls for backup and stands out of sight, waiting for the man to come out.
When a sheriff's cruiser pulls up, sirens screaming, the man explodes through the front door. The detective yells at
him to stop. Instead the man, laden with merchandise from the store, points his gun at him.
The detective fires three times. The man keeps running.
It doesn't take long for K-9 and patrol deputies to flush Rashad Taylor out of a wooded area nearby.
The lanky 17-year-old's legs are scratched, and he acknowledges he was the one the detective shot at. He doesn't
say much else.
Deputies retrace Taylor's path from the store. A block from U Name It, they find a silver gun, a Star SA 9 mm, in a
Dumpster.
There are three bullets inside, all with the same headstamp, "WCC."
Conway and Collins don't know anything about the find, but after hearing of Taylor's arrest, they decide they should
interview him.
On March 8, the detectives are driving east on Interstate 4 to the juvenile detention center when Bennett calls.
She's at the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, talking to detectives about the U Name It robbery.
Bennett tells her partners about the headstamp. Collins pulls over. She asks about the rest of the inscription.
The detectives don't remember. They call headquarters, and word comes back - WCC 88.
Bennett heads for evidence and checks the bullets from Taylor's gun.
She reads the headstamp. WCC 88.
It's their first break.
They postpone the Taylor interview and head back to USF.
The pictures of the rappers are about to come down.
The bullets and gun go to the FDLE lab in west Tampa for analysis.
Conway, Collins and Bennett wait a tortured day.
The lab calls. It's a match.
It's March 10, a month and a day after Stem was killed.
Things begin to move quickly now.
Collins and Strope serve a search warrant on Taylor's house and start asking about the teen's friends. They leave
with a couple of names - including a kid named "CJ" or "TJ" who drives him around sometimes.
Bennett goes to King High School and asks an officer there about "CJ" or "TJ."
Only one kid comes to mind: Najee Hunter.
Bennett and Collins cruise the parking lot, looking for his car, a white Mitsubishi Galant.
Collins recognizes it instantly. He's seen it before - in the surveillance video - but didn't realize its significance.
They go back to headquarters, and Collins calls in a USF patrol sergeant, Drew Caffarelli, who's an expert at
identifying cars from a distance.
Caffarelli, it turns out, just days before the killing, had repositioned the security camera outside the apartment building
to capture the parking lot. He looks at the video.
His best guess: a 2001-04 Mitsubishi Galant with no hubcaps and something in the back window, over the top brake
light.
Collins recalls that Hunter's car had something over the brake light - a Florida A&M University sticker.
It's a perfect match to the car in the video.
The detectives find Hunter after a lengthy wait outside his apartment March 14.
He tells them his version of what happened Feb. 9.
It was supposed to be a simple robbery.
Hunter drove three friends to USF after a call from Taylor.
They would rob someone and split the money four ways.
It was a Thursday night - the start of the weekend on many college campuses - and there were plenty of potential
targets.
The teens had the next day off from school.
Around 10:48 p.m., Hunter's Galant pulled into the parking lot, paused for some reason in front of the camera, then
turned around and pulled away.
Hunter parked in a corner, out of the camera's view. He waited in the car, listening to music on his cell phone, while
the others walked the campus.
About 40 minutes later, his friends came running back to the car.
Two days after Hunter's arrest, detectives arrest Morgan Tyler Nelson, a 16-year-old student at Freedom High
School.
With three suspects in jail, detectives focus on the fourth, a 14-year-old Freedom High School freshman.
He already has an attorney, and no indictment is issued. The detectives keep looking for more evidence.
On April 5, Staehle calls a news conference to announce the arrest of Hunter and Nelson.
Stem's fiancee, Sarah Cobb, attends the briefing.
She says she's relieved about the arrests, but hopes to channel some of her boyfriend's tendency to forgive.
"That is my prayer, not only that they be caught and brought to justice, but that I will be able to forgive them and have
peace and go on."
Hunter, Nelson and Taylor - the teen suspected of pulling the trigger - remain inmates at the Orient Road Jail.
On June 7, Hunter pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
He agreed to testify against Nelson, Taylor and the fourth teen if he's arrested.
Nelson's attorney, Joe Bodiford, doesn't say much about the case.
"He's a young kid," Bodiford says. "He's scared to death. We're just proceeding very carefully."
Hunter, 18, is scheduled to be sentenced in November.
In all likelihood, he will spend five years in prison, followed by probation, says his attorney, Mike Benito.
Like Hunter, Taylor has no prior criminal record. Agent Strope predicts that won't be enough to obtain a similar deal
from prosecutors.
In the conference room at police headquarters, the security camera photos, the extra tables, the pictures of
witnesses, the mug shots of potential suspects are gone.
But Stem's picture is still attached to the wall, a reminder that for Conway, Collins and Bennett, the case isn't over.
Bennett continues to work full time on it, hoping to indict the fourth teen, who would be a sophomore at Freedom High
next month.
Conway thinks of all the things Hunter, Nelson and Taylor stand to miss. None of the teens had serious records,
which makes the jump to murder so troubling.
"I think they all got caught up in the moment," he says.
The detectives consider their luck. Had Caffarelli not moved the camera, or Taylor dumped the gun, Stem's murder
might still be unsolved.
"Normally a gun used in a homicide, you never see it again," Strope says. "Rashad Taylor had an attachment to that
gun. He never talked to us, so we don't know why."
The investigators struggle with the thought the fourth suspect won't be arrested.
"At the end of every report we write in this case, we will include a paragraph saying it's still an active, ongoing
investigation," he says. "We won't stop because if we do, everyone will think it's over. It's never over until they're all in
jail."
GATHERING THE FACTS
Reporters Anthony McCartney and Candace Samolinski reviewed nearly 600 pages of court documents and
conducted numerous interviews with detectives and relatives of Najee Hunter to compile this account of the arrest of
three teenage suspects in the killing of Ronald Stem.
Reporter Anthony McCartney can be reached at (813) 259-7616.