Month: May 2020

Since graduating in journalism from Auburn University in 1982, I have left a trail of news stories and features along the way. Sometimes these articles are saved in the archives so I can go back and look at my work. Sometime there are big gaps in data to be found online. Of the thousands of stories I’ve written over the years, maybe 15 to 20 percent are retrievable online. Googling around the other day looking for a name and contact of someone who had been a source of mine long ago on a case involving drug smuggling I found this totally unrelated feature, a story I thought had been lost forever. It involved three brothers and a close friend, killing themselves by suicide, one-by-one. I had searched for this story years ago and couldn’t find it so I figured it was forever gone lost in an ocean of electronic digitrash. So I was happy to know it still exists and I’m going to post it below to better its chances of staying in existence. Look for this to become an occasional feature. (Can’t wait to see what hat Columbus City Council meeting story — the one I dictated petrified with fear on my first real newspaper assignment. On deadline translating notes through cerebellum into something readable. In a phone booth with seasoned pro at the other end cracking jokes and talking me out of my shakes. Them’s how you learn the ropes.

Here’s a thumbnail of my career:

• 1980-1982 Auburn University. Besides a few, very few, stories I wrote for the school’s Plainsman, I also did a few pieces for the Opelika-Auburn News and the Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer.
• 1982-1987 — The Birmingham News.
• 1987-2001 — The Orlando Sentinel (where the below story was published).
• 2001–2011 — Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, Contra Costa Times, San Jose Mercury New (Bay Area News Group,)
• 2011 to present–The Birmingham New/AL.com.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1989-03-19-8903190238-story.html

‘Brotherly love becomes deadly bond‘

Bobby Junior Stone stood silently at the graves of his two younger brothers, Robert and Richard. A light growth of grass covered Richard’s grave, but over Robert’s coffin the sandy brown dirt was newly turned.

His mother, JoAnn Cord, snapped a photograph from 20 yards away.

It was late March 1988 and the sun was shining in Dade City. The ride to the cemetery from Leesburg had been uncomfortably quiet, as if all the words had been used up.

Richard Stone, the younger of Bobby Junior’s brothers, had killed himself in 1986 at age 21. Then Richard’s best friend, 19-year-old Jamie Fell, had committed suicide in 1987, two days before the first anniversary of Richard’s death. And now his other brother, Robert, had done it at 24.

Bobby Junior stood quietly at the graves, but the 28-year-old man was simmering with emotion. Before Robert’s funeral he sat on his sister’s bed and sobbed. “I won’t ever have to go through this again,” he said, “because I don’t have any brothers left.”

Patty Bowen couldn’t bring herself to go to the cemetery that day with her brother and mother. Now she looks at the photograph of Bobby Junior standing at the graves of Richard and Robert and can’t help wondering.

“I wonder what was going on inside his head,” she said. “I wonder if he knew then that they would soon be digging his grave right next to his brothers.”

Two months later they buried Bobby Junior. Like Richard, Jamie and Robert before him, Bobby Junior died by his own hand.

The four suicides in two years cast a ghostly pallor on bright memories of the young men. Survivors grope for answers and struggle against a flood of feelings from guilt to anger to empty sadness.

The reasons for the suicides are complex – broken homes, societal pressures, stormy love relationships and alcohol abuse. On the surface mounting personal problems seemed to take their toll on each of the young men. But beyond the problems was a bond so intense that they chose death rather than being apart.

Say what you will about the Stone brothers – they were wild, they were pool-hall tough – friends and family knew them to be unusually close. When Richard got leave from the Army for the first time, Robert sprinted across a crowded lobby in the nursing home where he worked to embrace his younger brother, a memory that still gives Bowen goosebumps.

It was as if each was tied to the same rope. And when Richard killed himself, Jamie Fell followed, then Robert, then Bobby Junior. The sinking weight of depression tugged harder with each death.

Beginnings . . .

The Stone family moved to Leesburg from Dade City in 1973. They lived in a small home on Colonial Street – the parents, Bobby and JoAnn, and the children, Bobby Junior, 13; Patty, 12; Robert, 9; Richard, 7; and Latonya, 6.

The parents worked at Golden Gem and later Minute Maid citrus-processing plants.

Bobby Junior was the quiet leader. Robert was the wild tough one who’d do anything if dared. And Richard, with the impish grin, was the even tougher youngest brother who tried to do everything Robert did.

In a house full of rough boys, Patty and Latonya had to learn to fend for themselves. The boys dubbed Latonya “Tonya Tornado” for the way she fought, with legs kicking and arms flailing.

The boys played tackle football on a field off their street.

“We called ourselves the Colonial Street Boys,” friend David Chastain said. “We used to laugh and say you didn’t mess with the Colonial Street Boys.”

It was a tough blue-collar neighborhood on the western edge of Leesburg. “I’d say about 80 percent of our neighborhood never finished high school,” Chastain said.

The neighborhood remains much the same. Mobile homes sit side by side with concrete-block and frame houses on the oak-lined street. Nearby woods, where Robert once rode his dirt bike, provide stomping grounds for a new generation of Colonial Street Boys.

In sandlot football games, Bobby Junior always was the quarterback. Richard and Robert would go out for passes. Bobby Junior demanded perfection in the patterns they ran, or he’d chew out his brothers.

The Stones always played on the same team and had a reputation for being fiercely loyal to one another. Opposing players didn’t mess with one without messing with the others. If a baseball coach hollered at Robert, the coach might have seen Richard stomping off the field with Robert.

Charlie Baker coached Richard and Robert in Little League and other youth baseball leagues from 1974 to 1978. He remembers the Stones as temperamental, athletic, and eminently likable. In four years they made All Stars every year but one and helped turn around a 1-17 team to 18-0 in two years.

“It was the first time a Little League team had gone undefeated in Leesburg, I’m pretty sure,” Baker said. “The Stone parents worked a lot, and Robert and Richard would call me on Saturday and ask if I’d pick them up to go out and pitch and hit. We got close.”

Robert and Richard were inseparable. “If you saw one you knew the other one was around somewhere,” Baker said. Bobby Junior was older, so he didn’t play on the same team with his brothers. But he was a standout on the Leesburg High School baseball team.

“You see a lot of kids who would rather buddy with someone other than their brother, but not the Stones,” Chastain said. “They looked out for each other, and that’s what I liked about them. I was an only kid, and they seemed like brothers to me.”

As children the Stones traveled the country with their parents, who worked as migrant farm laborers before settling in Florida. During those years the brothers and sisters attended many different schools from Arkansas to Michigan to Florida.

It was during that rootless childhood that the Stones found the solid rock of stability in one another, family members say. Their parents’ divorce when the siblings were in their teens sealed the bond.

“I don’t think Robert and Richard could have been closer if they were twins,” their mother said.

It was a closeness, a tightness, that extended to a few select friends such as Chastain and Jamie Fell. It was a bond so intense that its force was felt even from the grave.

“If I was to grow up again, I would pick the same friends because they were the best friends I ever had,” Chastain said. “They were always there for me, and I was always there for them.”

The future seemed so bright.

“They were happy and very close,” the Stones’ mother, JoAnn Cord, remembered. “One thing, though: Robert used to wake up nearly every night until the time he was 10 years old with nightmares. I’d go in there and he’d be staring off into the wall, crying.

“I know this sounds strange,” she said, “but I think back and wonder if he somehow knew what was in his future.”

Richard …

Richard Stone was a skinny teen-ager when he joined the Army at 17.

“Mama, I’m going to make you proud,” her youngest son said. “I’m going to make sergeant.”

His mother told him, “Richard, I’m already proud of you.”

Richard adored his mother. While a soldier he had “Mom” tattooed in small letters over a red heart on his chest.

Marla Scalf, who dated Richard, remembers one night in a bar when Robert and another patron exchanged words. “He said something about Robert’s mama. Well, Richard got up right behind the guy and said, ‘That’s my mama your talking abouttoo.’ “

As a specialist four in the 403rd Transportation Co. at Fort Bragg, N.C., Richard drove a truck. The Army said nothing but good things about him after his death.

Capt. Nicholas J. Anderson, Richard’s commander, wrote his mother: “He was part of our family here in the unit. He was a positive, refreshing, selfless person who would immediately win the respect and admiration of anyone he came in contact with.”

Family, friends and military reports recall that Stone was happy as a soldier. They saw the skinny teen transform into a 6-foot-1-inch, 194-pound man. The little boy who once locked himself in a closet and cried because he thought that his front teeth were too big suddenly had lots of girlfriends.

“I finally grew into my teeth,” he told Latonya one night before a date.

But investigators believe that an incident shortly before his death troubled him. While on leave Richard was arrested in Daytona Beach on a charge of indecent exposure. He was changing out of his military garb into shorts in the back of a pickup truck as it sped down the highway.

A police car happened by and pulled the truck over with the undressed Richard in the back. Richard laughed off the incident at the time.

“Me and Jamie and Robert went to pick him up from jail,” said Scalf, 20. “He was just laughing about it.”

The Army report on the suicide showed that he faced a potential demotion for the incident.

Army psychiatrist Harold Tarpley wrote: “To the possible demotion the soldier reportedly stated, ‘I can’t handle being a private again.’ “

On the morning of June 30, 1986, about 11 hours after he was supposed to have reported back to Fort Bragg, Richard called another girlfriend, Leigh Cooper. He told her goodbye and that he wasn’t going back to Fort Bragg. He wrote a note on a memo board hanging on the wall in Robert’s apartment: “I couldn’t handle all the pressure anymore! I love all of y’all.”

Then he shot himself in the head with a .22-caliber pistol. He was alive when they took him to the Leesburg Regional Medical Center emergency room. Richard lived one more day and died July 1. An autopsy revealed no alcohol or drugs.

At services in a Leesburg funeral home, dozens remembered the former star baseball player, known for his quick, mischievous smile. Friends and family still remember Richard in much the same way that the Army does in its report on his suicide. Under the heading “General Personality and Lifestyle,” it states: “He was noted to be intelligent, self-assured, happy-go-lucky and goal oriented.”

Richard was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Dade City with military honors.

One of the many mourners at the funeral was a thin, good-looking 18-year-old whose straight dark hair hid a long scar on his scalp

Jamie …

Jamie Fell hadn’t been out of the hospital long when Richard committed suicide. Fell was recovering from a near-fatal pickup accident in which he was thrown 80 feet and landed on his head. He was in intensive care for three weeks.

Richard had been there for Jamie during his recovery, taking weekend leaves from the Army to sit with him in the hospital. During the year or so before the accident, Robert, Richard and Jamie did everything together.

“Robert and Richard adopted Jamie as a younger brother,” said Jamie’s mother, Carolyn Harris. “There was a very, very close bond there, almost to the point that my older son felt left out.”

Harris said there were two Jamie Fells, the one before the accident and the one after.

“He suffered a severe head injury, and when he got out he still had an equilibrium problem,” she said. “He developed a drinking problem, and there was a coldness that came over him.”

He apparently was in pain but didn’t talk about that.

“He told me about this battle between the old person and the new person.” she said. “He said, ‘My life ended on the highway. This is all gravy.’ “

Jamie’s mental health continued to deteriorate, his mother said, and the suicide of his best friend compounded the pain. After the death, he put together an album of photos of Richard.

Jamie began dating Latonya Stone, the youngest of the Stone siblings and the closest in age to Richard.

“I was going through a really hard time, and he was going through a hard time. But he helped me so much,” Latonya said. “I couldn’t believe he did it. He did it because Richard did it.”

On June 28, 1987, two days short of a year after Richard shot himself, Jamie killed himself with a .35-caliber rifle in his bedroom. He had been drinking. It was about 9 p.m.

He left a note saying he loved his mother, sister and brother and Robert Stone. The name Robert Stone was underlined.

On the day of Jamie’s funeral, Robert found a note on his washing machine that stated, “Robert, you are my brother. I love you, Jamie.”

Robert …

The suicides of his brother and his close friend pushed Robert Wayne Stone, the middle Stone brother, over that edge he had walked most of his adult life.

When Richard killed himself, Robert directed his anger toward the Army. Shortly after the death Robert was stopped for speeding and held on gun charges on his way to Fort Bragg. He had put on Richard’s Army fatigues, grabbed a sawed-off shotgun and jumped into the car with Bobby Junior to take care of whoever might be responsible for Richard’s suicide. Charges were dropped.

After Richard’s funeral, Robert tossed the pistol his brother had used to kill himself into a lake, said Bob Fell, Jamie’s brother.

He talked about suicide at the time. But then he seemed to get over it. He continued with his plans and got married later that year to Dena Ann Schumann, a 17-year-old Leesburg girl he had been dating since she was 15. Dena and Robert had a son.

After Richard died, Robert had seemed to transfer all of his brotherly devotion to Jamie.

Jamie, in a sense, became Richard, said Jamie’s mother, Carolyn Harris. Jamie and Richard had similar personalities and tended to keep feelings inside, she said, a foil to Robert’s outgoing and sometimes aggressive manner.

When Jamie killed himself, Robert came to the scene and nearly had to be restrained by police. He screamed, banged the walls, and yelled, “No, no.”

“The most pained person other than myself was Robert,” Harris said.

Not long after Jamie’s death, Dena and Robert moved into a house with Jamie’s mother, brother and half-sister.

“I fell in love with Robert when I met him, even with the rough edges,” Harris said. “I felt he had a lot of love to give.”

Even before Richard’s death, Robert was a drinker. He liked to play pool, drink beer and party with friends. But the drinking turned nasty after Jamie’s death. He piled up driving-under-the-influence-of-alcohol charges. He began fighting with his wife. One time he came to Harris with tears streaming down his face, and said, ” ‘I’m just an alcoholic, and I’m going to lose my wife and kid.’ “

Jamie’s brother, Bob, said, “When he was drunk and wild-eyed, even his best friends didn’t cross him.”

The couple sometimes lived without heat or with the phone cut off. After a while, Dena said, she never even saw Robert’s paycheck and didn’t know what he did with the money.

Robert and Dena divorced after about a year but continued to see each other off and on.

“We had problems mostly due to alcohol,” said Dena Stone, now 19. “I tried to get him help, but he always said that nobody could help him.”

On the night of March 23, 1988, Robert stopped by his sister’s house in Fruitland Park. He put his arms around Patty Bowen and said, ” ‘I love you, Sissy.’ “

“I thought he was going to raise hell with the in-laws,” she said. “But I didn’t know he was going to do what he did.”

Using a borrowed shotgun and pistol, Robert stormed into Dena’s parents house and held the frightened family at gunpoint. Dena talked Robert into going for a ride to Patty’s house nearby. One minute Robert was calm; the next he was out of control, Dena said. She grabbed her boy and ran inside, urging Patty to lock the door.

“He’s got guns,” Dena said.

Robert banged on the door and screamed to be let in. Patty yelled at her out-of-control brother: “You’re scaring the hell out of me, and we got our kids in here.”

The police sirens drew nearer.

“I heard a shot,” she said. “That night was really a nightmare to have to listen to my brother blow his head off.”

Robert was blind drunk when he killed himself. His blood-alcohol level was .29 percent. That was almost three times the legal definition of intoxication in Florida of .10 percent.

But some have no doubt that it was a planned suicide. Earlier that night Robert called his boss at the company where he worked as a telephone-cable splicer. He asked about his last check and then said, “I’m going to meet my brother.”

His sister is sure now that he wasn’t talking about Bobby Junior.

Bobby Junior …

Bobby Junior was the oldest by several years, and his relationship with his two brothers was fatherly as well as brotherly. He coached them in baseball and watched after them when their parents weren’t around.

But Bobby Junior had a life apart from his brothers. While Richard, Jamie and Robert were getting close, he moved out of state.

After graduating from Leesburg High School in 1977, he worked at the Minute Maid plant where his parents worked. Then his father found him summer work in Michigan. He married while in Michigan and lived there and in Texas before separating from his wife several years later.

He joined the Navy in 1985 and missed his youngest brother’s funeral because he was on a ship in the Mediterranean. He went absent without leave several months later and returned to the Leesburg area, settling in Fruitland Park.

Richard’s death shook Bobby Junior, as did his inability to be there, his sister Patty said. He served time in the brig for being AWOL. But before formal discharge papers could be signed he took off again without permission. Family members said the Navy was looking for him until his suicide.

Of the three brothers, Bobby Junior was the smart one. He was the only one to graduate from high school, although the other two passed their high school equivalency tests. He did well with computers and was a programmer in the Navy.

Although he had problems in his marriage and with the Navy, friends and family members figured Bobby Junior would have been the last person to kill himself.

“He always seemed so stuck on himself,” said Dena, Robert’s ex-wife. “I thought he liked himself too much to kill himself.”

Chastain, the Stones’ boyhood friend, said, “Some people didn’t like him because they thought he was cocky. But that is what I liked about him. When I was down I’d look at him and say, ‘Look how good he feels about himself. Maybe I can too.’ “

But like Robert, Bobby Junior began turning more and more to alcohol. On May 21, 1988, less than two months after he stood at the graves of his younger brothers, Bobby Junior shot himself in the head at his girlfriend’s house after an argument with her. His blood-alcohol content was .16 percent, an autopsy revealed.

His mother drove by that night to visit her son and saw the police cars.

“What happened?” she asked. She began running to the house.

“You don’t want to know,” an officer said.

She ran screaming out of control.

Unable to calm her, police handcuffed her and manacled her feet.

They buried Bobby Junior with his wallet, which held a telegram he had received while on the Navy ship in the Mediterranean. It stated: “Richard Stone shot himself. He is dead.”

Survivors . . .

Patty Bowen and other family members are left pained with questions. Explanations don’t come easy.

“It was a chain reaction that started with Richard,” she said. “That’s the only way I can explain it. I couldn’t say that if Richard hadn’t done it the others wouldn’t either. But people have problems and don’t kill themselves. If everybody killed themselves when they had a problem there wouldn’t be many people left in this world.”

Bowen, 28, has undergone therapy for a year now to help cope with the losses.

Bob Fell, Jamie’s older brother, points out many reasons contributing to the suicides, including mounting personal problems.

“It was an accumulation of everything,” said Fell, 22. “Me and my brother come from a broken homes, and the Stones did too. It seems like today there is more of a pressure to be the best of everything: to have the best truck, the best clothes.

“If you ain’t driving the fastest car and wearing the most gold around your neck, you just ain’t it,” he said.

Working-class children in small-town Leesburg have a tough time making it like the young folks they see on movies and television, Fell said.

“I admire the guy who can work his life away just to keep food on the table,” he said.”I just can’t do that. I get too bored.”

Bob, who like Richard served a hitch in the Army, said he thinks about the Stones and his brother and suicide every day. “Sometimes two or three times a day,” he said. “And it scares the hell out of me.”

After the last suicide David Chastain said he became seriously depressed and started drinking heavily. He finally packed his bags and moved to Tennessee for a four-month sabbatical to think things out. He has come back, though, to Colonial Street.

“There’s no way to explain it, even if you want to,” he said. “Now, after it’s happened and me being so close, I still can’t put it in words how I feel. I felt selfish in a way, hurt because I didn’t have no friends to talk to. I can’t turn and talk to that special person, because they’re gone.”

The Stones’ father, Bobby, lives in Dade City. He didn’t have much to say about his sons’ deaths.

“I had three sons, and now they are gone.”

His brother Earl said Bobby can’t talk about it. “He’s had a hard time with it.”

Latonya Wellman, 22, lives in Jacksonville, N.C. She is going through her second divorce and said she soon will return to Florida. She underwent therapy for a while but quit because she didn’t think it was helping.

“I used to think about committing suicide, but why should I do that? I enjoy life too much.”

Latonya tries to put the deaths of her brothers out of her mind but sometimes they haunt her sleep.

“My brothers were all there in my dreams. They were dead, but they were talking to me,” she said. “I felt so sorry for them. Richard put his hand on my face and said, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ “

JoAnn Cord lives in Marion County. She has

three photo albums, one for each son. The photos show mostly good times from school, in baseball uniforms, playing in the country at grandma’s, arm wrestling at the kitchen table, Richard and Robert riding a dirt bike on Colonial Street. She can take you through those albums, telling stories about each snapshot, laughing at a memory – like the time Bobby Junior washed the neighbor’s car but left the windows open.

But within each album she keeps sobering reminders that memories are all she has. Sealed carefully in plastic are three obituaries.

Dena Stone, Robert’s ex-wife, said she wishes only that she could have snapped the string of suicides by persuading Robert to get help.

She lives in Gainesville and is trying to support herself and her son.

“I’m trying to forget, but it’s not working because I was in love with that man.”

She is worried about her 2-year-old son. Dena said there is no doubt the toddler remembers his father and the terror-filled night he went away. It seems recently that the little boy has begun to take after his daddy in one respect.

Robert Stone Jr. wakes up often with nightmares, screaming.