Kill For Me (3 page)

You’re sound asleep. A noise in the night startles you awake. Ten minutes later, your life has been turned upside down.

It started at about two o’clock that same afternoon, July 5, 2003, when Anthony “Tony” Ponicall walked into his Pinellas Park, Florida, home from his job at US Airways in Tampa. Tony was bushed. It had been a long shift. Sandee Rozzo wasn’t home. According to Tony, he and Sandee had dated for the past two years. They met at US Airways. Both were ramp attendants. Tony had seen Sandee earlier that morning as she walked in from a prior night’s shift. It was right around sunup, near five o’clock.

“I was up in the morning,” Tony told police. “I wasn’t ready to go to work yet, but I was up when she came in.”

They said hello. How was your night? Get some rest. Those little things friends and perhaps lovers say to one another casually during the course of a day. Those words that come out of our mouths at random, as if we’re programmed to say them. Yet never, in our wildest dreams, do we think “Have a good day” will be the last thing we ever say to someone we care about deeply.

According to some who knew Sandee well, Sandee said she had finally fallen into the relationship with Tony. For a long time, she had viewed what she and Tony had as roommates and friends. Nothing more. She knew Tony was good for her. They made the ideal couple. The guy was great. Kindhearted and gentle. Hard worker. Family man. He adored Sandee. Treated her as though she were the only woman in the world. They were happy, Tony later claimed. That morning they discussed the day ahead and agreed to see each other later on that night when Sandee returned from her bartending job at the Green Iguana.

Sandee was a voracious note-taker. She liked to keep track of her days—dates, work schedules, meetings with friends, things to do, birthdays, important things going on in her life—in a day planner she always kept with her. Tony knew, because Sandee had checked her schedule and told him, that she was working that night. She would be home at about eleven. Tony didn’t park in the garage because he knew Sandee liked to put her BMW away at night. He was generally asleep when she got in.

The townhome on Sixty-sixth Way North in Pinellas Park, which Tony and Sandee shared, was something they had both worked hard for. The front door opened into a small foyer area laid out in peach-colored ceramic tile. To the right, almost as soon as you entered the home, the kitchen’s white cabinets beckoned you toward the room. There was a door into the garage inside the kitchen. The west side of the spacious living room had a double slider door leading out onto a covered porch. A small half bath was underneath the stairs leading up to a second floor, where Sandee and Tony had separate rooms.

As the night wore on, Tony got sick of watching television. Shut it off. Then dozed off in bed upstairs. It was close to nine, he later recalled, when he faded out.

“I was sleeping,” Tony told police. “And I heard loud bangs.”

Pops was more like it. Sharp cracks, followed by booming echoes.

Tony had been asleep for approximately two hours by the time he was awoken by the noises.

There was no reason for alarm. It was the Fourth of July weekend. Florida was party central to begin with. Fireworks are a Southern tradition. Loud, big-bang fireworks, in fact. Everyone, it seemed, had fireworks in Florida during the Independence Day celebration.

The noise woke Tony up.

Wow,
he thought, opening his eyes, groggy from sleep,
people are shooting off firecrackers, either
right
in the yard or, you know, very close to home.

The noise that startled him, Tony later asserted, was intensely loud and sounded as though it had come directly from below his bedroom window.

Which was odd.

Tony said he sat up in bed; then he decided he had better get downstairs and check things out. No need for kids or the neighbors to be shooting off fireworks in the front yard of the townhome. And this late?

“It was a series [of loud pops],” Tony recalled, “roughly four…. My heart was racing because it startled me.”

Tony was a light sleeper.

So he got up. Didn’t even put on his slippers or a bathrobe.

Downstairs, wearing his boxer shorts, Tony took a look through the peephole of the front door. It sounded as though the fireworks had been set off right outside on the small lawn.

He didn’t see anything.

Tony then walked through the kitchen toward the garage door. Maybe, he thought, something had exploded. Paint? An aerosol can? Gasoline?

Passing through the kitchen, perhaps as a habit, Tony took a look at the LED clock on the microwave. It was 11:10 on the nose.

First thing he saw after opening the interior door into the garage was Sandee’s car.

She was home.

Strange.

“I didn’t expect to see it. I didn’t think she was home yet.”

The garage door, Tony noticed, was still open. But with an automatic garage door opener, this was on point with Sandee’s MO.

“She would normally leave it open.”

The light from the overhead garage door opener was still on. It was one of those automatic-timer jobs, which meant that Sandee had pulled in only minutes ago.

But where was she? Tony couldn’t see Sandee.

Coming from the doorway between the garage and the townhome, Tony walked down the few flights of wooden stairs after he thought he heard a “noise” inside the garage. He was not wearing shoes.

As he walked along the driver’s side of Sandee’s car, Tony was struck by thousands of tiny shards and bits and pieces of broken glass on the cement floor of the garage by the driver’s-side door of Sandee’s car. He was walking on glass.

Then he heard a “faint voice.”

Looking up from the ground, Tony Ponicall noticed that the driver’s-side door window of Sandee’s BMW was gone.

Shattered.

Weird. What was all this glass doing on the floor? How did Sandee’s window get smashed? Nothing made sense. Nothing registered.

Then Tony took a few more steps forward, leaned in through the broken window, and saw Sandee.

Tony Ponicall was baffled for a brief moment by what he saw. He stood next to Sandee Rozzo’s BMW and stared at the broken glass all over the floor underneath his bare feet. The driver’s-side window was missing. Sandee’s car wasn’t running. The garage door was open. Then there was that whisper of a voice he thought he heard.

The scene was not something one expects to walk into after falling asleep and being startled awake. But here he was, nonetheless, inside his own garage, staring at Sandee’s car, a smashed window, and Sandee was nowhere to be found.

Tony looked inside the car and—lo and behold—there was the woman he loved, hunched over the console between the driver and passenger seats. Sandee’s legs were still underneath the steering wheel, but from her chest up, Sandee was lying on the passenger seat, her head slumped over the edge of the seat, almost on the floor.

There was glass all over the inside of the car.

My God, Sandee…

Tony pulled Sandee upright, then ran to the other side of the car.

“Sandee? Sandee? Sandee?” he screamed as he opened the door.

Then he saw all the blood. Sandee’s face was covered with it. There was blood all over the inside of the car. Glass too. Sandee didn’t seem to be breathing.

Or was she?

What in the name of God was going on?

“Sandee?”

Tony tried to sit her upright.

“Sandee?”

What the hell happened?

She wasn’t moving.

Tony grabbed Sandee’s cell phone.

Dialed…

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

Tony sounded out of breath and frantic; yet there was a stoic matter-of-factness in his voice—all business. “I don’t know. My girlfriend came home. She’s in the car. The window’s broke. She’s bleeding.”

The facts.

As the operator asked Tony for the address, he talked over her, adding, “I cannot get her to wake up.”

The operator asked for the address again.

Tony gave it to her.

After they discussed a discrepancy in the address Tony had given, she said, “Okay…so you have no idea what happened to her?”

“No…I—I…heard a noise…. It woke me up…. I came down and she’s bleeding, and I cannot get her to respond.”

“Okay, so what is your cell phone number, please?”

“She’s bleeding very badly…,” Tony said before giving the woman the number.

“What kind of car is she in?”

Details. Particulars. The operator wanted to keep Tony talking. Keep him focused.

“She’s in a black BMW in my garage.”

“I’ve got rescue on the way,” the operator said. “I need to speak with a paramedic. Hold on, sir.”

“Thank you,” Tony said tiredly, still trying to catch his breath.

He waited a beat.

“Sandee? Sandee?”

As the operator called on paramedics, Tony was saying calmly, “Sandee, wake up, honey…wake up…. Sandee, wake up….”

Sandee was not moving.

Tony and Sandee had moved into the townhome that February, just about five months before he woke up and found her lifeless body in the garage. Before that, they had lived together on Rocky Point Drive in Tampa, not too far from where Sandee held her part-time bartending job at the Green Iguana. The Rocky Point Green Iguana Bar & Grill was a popular “Ten Best” restaurant/club in the region. Sandee had been “furloughed” from her job at US Airways, Tony later explained, and started working as a waitress/bartender to make up some of that lost income. She also had worked for the Masquerade, a club in Ybor City, just outside Tampa, and at several other bars and clubs over the past decade.

Sandee did some modeling, and like most struggling actresses/models, she made ends meet by working tables and taking drink orders behind the bar. Everyone who knew Sandee spoke of her in a reassuring, gentle way. One trait Sandee had that many agreed was one of her strong points to be admired was that she never stayed mad for a long period of time if there was a falling-out. She knew how to forgive
and
forget, something that is sometimes hard for people, especially for a friend who felt scorned. This didn’t mean Sandee was a pushover. Far from it, actually. She was strong-willed and tough, particularly when it came to what she believed in.

Several of Sandee’s coworkers from the Green Iguana, where she had been working since January, said Sandee was preparing—and was prepared—to do battle with a former “acquaintance and coworker” whom she had met years before during a stint at one of the bars she’d worked at. The guy was a bouncer. He had become infatuated and obsessed with Sandee. There was an outstanding charge against the guy—one of many he’d had against him over the years—for sexual assault and kidnapping. Sandee had lodged the complaint herself and had decided to see it through until the end. She had been waiting for her day in court, which happened to be just a matter of weeks away. She visualized herself sitting in front of the creep, telling her side of what had happened between them. Rape is brutal, and hers was a horror show—like nothing Sandee had dreamed she’d ever be a part of, much less a victim.

When paramedics arrived at the Park Townhomes in downtown Pinellas Park somewhere near 11:30
P.M
. on July 5, 2003, Sandee Rozzo still had a pulse, faint as it was.

Tony Ponicall seemed strangely cool, calm, and collected. Maybe he was in shock and couldn’t believe—or, perhaps, conceive of—what was happening. Then there was the whole question of how Sandee had gotten hurt. No one seemed to know. And nobody could tell at this early stage. What actually had happened? Tony had no clue, he said. One moment he was sleeping, the next he was awoken by fireworks, loud bangs. Pops. Whatever. And Sandee now lay bleeding and fighting for her life.

Who could make sense out of any of this?

As the ambulance pulled out of the driveway, heading to Bayfront Medical Center in nearby St. Petersburg, Sandee struggled to hang on to her life. Tony Ponicall got into his red SUV and followed. Patrol officers were already responding to the scene, taping off the driveway and the townhome. Tony never said he was leaving. He hopped in his truck and hightailed it out of there.

This happened just as detectives were being awoken and called in to find out what in the world had happened to Sandee Rozzo.

Only in the state of Florida could you grow up in a town called Treasure Island. What a place for a kid. Sand as white and soft as Styrofoam. Palm trees so perfect they looked fake, made out of plastic, something out of a Disney video. And, of course, year-round warm weather that most anyone could force themselves to get used to.

Like many in the state, Detective Paul Andrews and his family were Florida transplants. Paul was born in New Jersey. His father died when he was two months old. His mother remarried within a few years. Detective Andrews has two stepbrothers, two sisters, and a half brother. “Pinellas County”—Treasure Island being a small beach community there—“is the most densely populated county in Florida. It’s small, and it’s just
packed
with people,” Paul said.

The area might have a Disney feel to it and look like a movie set, but like many other beautiful places in the country, crime is part of the landscape. The biggest city in the county is St. Petersburg.

“There’s an area of our county, like many of the other metro areas, under a drug epidemic,” Paul explained. “They have five hundred eighty-five police officers.”

When Paul Andrews was seventeen, a senior in high school, he and his stepfather found themselves sitting in the principal’s office of Boca Ciega High School discussing Paul’s future in law enforcement as a full-time night-shift dispatcher for the Treasure Island Police Department (TIPD). It was Paul’s first professional taste of the real world of cops and criminals, something no one in his large family had ever done. Paul had been involved in the Police Explorers program in Florida for several years, but this was an opportunity to work a real law enforcement job. A paycheck. Guns. Knives. Arrests. Sitting at the phones all weekend long, answering calls, Paul was going to hear it all. Straight from the men and women he aimed to be like someday.

He wanted to take the job, Paul told his principal, John Demps. After the school year was over and he graduated, Paul was going to be working there full-time, anyway. Why not start now? Paul had brought along his stepfather, Andy Kohut, to ask the principal for permission.

“As long as
you
don’t object,” the principal said to Paul’s stepfather.

Paul had taken right to police work after a friend of his asked him if he wanted to join the Explorers, back when Paul was fourteen years old. Since that time, he had never given up on the idea that law enforcement was in his blood and going to be part of his life.

“Back then,” Paul said, “we were allowed to ride with the officers. You were essentially an attachment to the police officer. We got to see a lot of things.”

In 1984, the Pinellas Park Police Department (PPPD) had around forty officers on payroll. A friend of Paul’s had taken a PPPD job. He saw Paul one day. “Listen, Pinellas Park is starting their own communications center. It’d be a great opportunity for you to come up there and work.”

Paul had some years behind the dispatch line at Treasure Island by then. It was time for a change. Maybe get out on the road. Do some
real
police work. Still, he was skeptical. Unsure of himself.

Not a day went by afterward when Paul didn’t ask himself:
Should I stay or should I go?

He was caught in the middle.

“Treasure Island,” Paul explained, “if I stayed there, I knew that when the time was right, they would make me a police officer and send me for training. They would hire me.”

After ruminating on his vocation for a while, Paul decided to head up to Pinellas Park and take the job. What the heck. Give it a shot. See where it led.

He went from PPPD dispatcher to Community Services officer to patrol. By 1987, Paul was cruising the streets of Pinellas Park, learning the ropes of what went down on the other side of that phone line he had come to know so well.

His first homicide was called in from a trailer park, one of those “over fifty-five” hamlets so popular in Florida. Paul was first on the scene. A guy had been shot dead by his wife’s boyfriend. His bloodied body was out there by his truck.

But the most chilling moment Paul recalled off the top of his head from those early years was a call at Pinellas Park High School. It was February 11, 1988—a day, it would turn out, that would shock the country.

A report came in that a suspended student was trespassing on school grounds. When he was confronted by school staff members, a friend with him opened fire on lunch crowds, who fled the shots. They then escaped the scene out the front door.

Paul was attending a deposition at a courtroom downtown. While he was there, someone mentioned what was happening at the school and he was called out to the scene.

Came to find out, it wasn’t one shooter—but two.

Sixteen-year-old Jason Harless and fifteen-year-old Jason McCoy broke into a house. Using weapons they had stolen from the home, they next entered the school. Ultimately they shot three people, killing assistant principal Richard Allen and injuring two others.

“It was one of the first [high-profile] high-school shootings in the country,” Paul recalled. A memory he wished he didn’t have to share.

Similar to many of his colleagues, Paul yearned to get into Investigations, a division of police work many cops see themselves heading for as they get on in years. At the PPPD, joining Investigations was a “lateral transfer,” Paul explained. “We rotate detectives in and out. There are no permanent positions.”

It’s not clear whether the cops on the force agreed with this protocol, but not allowing detectives to get comfortable in their jobs for too long gave everyone the chance to be trained as an investigator, Paul said. It created a constant flow of talented, experienced investigators.

“It’s got its positives and negatives.”

Paul said his stepfather presented a good work ethic in the household, and it helped. By 1989, Paul’s bosses noticed his tenacity and hard work and chose him as a Traffic Homicide investigator. Two years later, Paul had a detective’s badge in his wallet and was part of the PPPD’s Detectives Unit (DU). Then, a year later, at twenty-six years of age, Paul was promoted to sergeant.

“It was unusual. I was pretty young.”

Now back in Patrol, Paul stayed until 1998, almost seven years. Then went into the Bicycle Unit (BU). By 2001, Paul was again part of DU; though this time around, Detective Paul Andrews was the supervisor, with seven to eight detectives working under him.