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Abduction brings out couple's worst fears
By KATHRYN WEXLER, Times Staff Writer
BRANDON -- Instead of giving orders and talking about cars at Ferman Chevrolet on Wednesday morning, manager Eddie Gomez was describing what it felt like to be a kidnap victim. "It was an out-of-body experience," Gomez told a clutch of reporters and photographers. A week ago, authorities say, a disgruntled former employee scaled a wall at Gomez's gated community of Cheval and kidnapped him at gunpoint. Jimm Underwood has been charged in the abduction, which ended later that day when Gomez unchained himself and escaped from a Largo storage unit by kicking out the metal door. "I taught the door a lesson," Gomez quipped in a brief moment of levity Wednesday. His wife, Cheryl, sat beside him at the news conference. She had been at home when the assailant forced them into their house and ransacked it, "terrorizing us," Mrs. Gomez said. "He told me if I didn't follow instructions . . . he would kill Eddie," Mrs. Gomez said. She recounted how the intruder ordered her to drive to a bank to withdraw money. She tried silently to communicate her anguish to the bank teller. "I just knew I felt helpless," Mrs. Gomez said. "I just knew that I couldn't tell them verbally that my husband was being held hostage. I just thought the bank teller would see the fear in my face and when I didn't think she was detecting that, I decided that I should write a note about what was going to happen to my husband if I didn't get the money." After reading the note, the teller notified law authorities. Mrs. Gomez was stopped as she drove from the bank empty-handed. Authorities helped her negotiate with the kidnapper by cell phone. She told him she couldn't withdraw the money but could get it later. During that time, Gomez was locked in the trunk of his company car, an Acura, heading for the Largo storage building. He was also thinking about how relieved he was that his wife had been in a separate car. Maybe, he figured, she would be spared by the masked abductor he still thought was a stranger. Mrs. Gomez, in turn, was fretting about the welfare of her husband of 20 years. "That was my greatest fear, that I would do something wrong and he would kill Eddie," she said. Authorities were able to track the car Underwood was driving and, after a brief chase, arrested him in the parking lot of the Pinellas Park Library.
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