A Knife in the Heart. Michael Benson
free momentarily and hurl it into the distance.
Paramedics from the fire department appeared and worked urgently over the fallen Sarah; squad cars from the Pinellas Park Police Department (PPPD) came immediately behind.
First responders noted blood on the minivan’s driver’s seat, floor, and interior wall panel.
The victim’s parents arrived on the scene. Her father, a big man on tortured knees, arrived first and saw all; he saw Sarah, supine in the street, perpendicular to the minivan, her life slipping away.
“Lying in a puddle of blood” was how he remembered it.
Charlie Ludemann could tell by the sharp and urgent exchanges between paramedic firefighters that she was still alive—but it didn’t look good.
Joshua Camacho arrived and went berserk, screaming that “somebody stab Sarah, somebody gonna get stabbed.”
Police actively had to keep concerned witnesses back, so they couldn’t interfere with the paramedics. A noisy ambulance, with SUNSTAR painted on the side, arrived.
Sarah—gray, limp, motionless—was placed on a gurney, loaded into the vehicle, and the ambulance pulled away, with siren screaming like a blues guitar. The ambulance was escorted by police officer John Coleman in his squad car.
The ambulance took the victim to Northside Hospital and Heart Institute, a little more than a mile away to the south; Sarah’s parents were right behind.
Back at the crime scene, it took some time to calm everyone down and figure out who was who. Loud and unruly eyewitnesses were separated; first to halt hostilities, then to keep them from comparing notes.
The girl who’d had the knife was Rachel Marie Wade—thin, with big, sad eyes—now in possession of no knife. She complained of injuries to her head and face, but none were visible.
An hour after her arrival at the hospital, just before 2:00 A.M., Sarah Ludemann was pronounced dead.
One girl killing another wasn’t common in Pinellas Park, or anywhere else. Ninety-six percent of all homicides involved a male victim and/or killer. Males usually killed during the commission of other crimes, such as robberies and drug deals gone bad. Female violence, as a rule, was emotional and involved matters of the heart. Girls fought over relationships: parents, siblings, and boyfriends. Girls were possessive about relationships. Intrusion and disrespect easily led to violence, sometimes pernicious violence, but almost never fatal violence. That was what made this one special.
The homicide investigation immediately dug into the emotional relationships between the players, revealing that Rachel Wade had a history of fiery and sometimes short-lived romances. Sarah Ludemann did not. Camacho was Sarah’s first and only.
Now, as the rotating lights of cop cars still pulsed over the scene, the culprit sat quietly on a bench. All of her personal belongings had been confiscated as possible evidence, and she looked as dangerous as a sullen cheerleader.
“Can I have a cigarette?” she asked a cop.
Contents
PART ONE: THE TENDER SAVAGES
Chapter 1: UNTHINKABLE CARNAGE
Chapter 2: THE BUILDUP
Chapter 3: LISA
Chapter 4: LAST DAY
Chapter 5: “WE NEED AN AMBULANCE. PLEASE HELP.”
PART TWO: THE INVESTIGATION
Chapter 6: THE LEAD INVESTIGATOR
Chapter 7: POSTMORTEM
Chapter 8: JUDGE BULONE
Chapter 9: TWO GIRLS IN JAIL
PART THREE: THE TRIAL
Chapter 10: DAY ONE
Chapter 11: DAY TWO
Chapter 12: DAY THREE
Chapter 13: VERDICT
Chapter 14: AFTERMATH
Chapter 15: SENTENCING
Epilogue
Chapter 1
UNTHINKABLE CARNAGE
Pinellas Park, Florida, was a working-class town, between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1911, the town started out as one huge housing development when a Philadelphia publisher named F. A. Davis purchased almost thirteen thousand acres of undeveloped land and ordered a city to be built.
In the modern era, it became an industrial city, home to major corporations, such as UPS and FedEx, which utilized Pinellas Park as a hub for their distribution, working out of large warehouses. Most folks had blue-collar jobs.
In addition to industry, Pinellas Park had a large, close-knit residential community made up of people who were born and raised there, and chose to stay.
The major highways into Tampa went through Pinellas Park. At night the population was approximately fifty thousand residents, but hundreds of thousands passed through the city during daytime hours.
It was the third largest city in Pinellas County, behind Clearwater and St. Petersburg, and—perhaps revealingly—the county’s only landlocked town.
There had been a time, a half century before, when the city was predominantly white, and its citizens liked it that way. Back then, prejudice ruled. But over the years, integration came and progressive thought pushed its way in.
Of course, old-fashioned beliefs had not left completely, but groups of young people were far more inclined to be comprised of races mixing together than were those of their elders.
Because there was no waterfront, there wasn’t a lot of money in Pinellas Park. Rich folks, for the most part, chose to live near the shore where ocean breezes provided nature’s air conditioning, where there were marinas for yachts and private boats. Instead, in Pinellas Park there were quite a few trailer parks and God-fearing people who worked hard and had kids.
The springtime was the best season in Pinellas Park. The hard rains of winter were over, and the oppressive heat of summer had yet to come. On the third Saturday of March, after the Florida State Fair and the Florida Strawberry Festival, the city hosted an annual event called “Country in the Park.” There was a free daylong concert in the band shell behind City Hall, amusement park rides, NASCAR displays, and a firefighter chili cook-off.
Like anywhere, there was a segment of the local youth that had antisocial difficulties. These kids lacked upward mobility and hope. Regardless of race, they were apt to be caught up in the prevalent “gangsta” culture.
Pinellas Park High School—whose notable alumni included major-league baseball player Nick Masset, Playboy Playmate Pamela Stein, and former New York Jets quarterback Browning Nagle—was known for tragic and scandalous events. The school, in fact, had an uncomfortable history of violence, a Columbine-like legacy.
On February 11, 1988, the school was thrust into the headlines when two students—Jason Harless and Jason McCoy—brought stolen guns to school with them and shot three members of the faculty and administration, killing one. Harless was sentenced to seventeen years in prison, but he served only eight. McCoy was sentenced to six years in prison, but he only served fourteen months in a juvie facility.
In 2005, the school again earned unwanted publicity when police were called to break up a fight and used a Taser three times on one unruly student. That same year, a teacher was busted after he enticed several female students to e-mail him nude photos of themselves.
In mid-April 2009, a time when the young people of Pinellas Park should have had their minds on upcoming proms, graduation, how many teens could fit into a limo, and other celebrations of youth, teenaged Sarah Ludemann was battling the Joshua blues. Simultaneously, news came to her attention of unspeakable carnage.
On Friday