Tom Wallace began life's journey in the light of acceptance, the shade of a permanent roof. As the UF graduate grew older, all that he knew began to sink away - into paranoia, homelessness and death.
By TOM ZUCCO
Published May 25, 2003
ST. PETERSBURG - It was just before 10 o'clock on the morning of Thursday, May 8, when Donna Sutherland walked from her office to the spigot on the side of the building and bent down to rinse out her coffeemaker.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," came the voice from behind her.
She wheeled around. It was Tom.
"The city is injecting salmonella into the water system," he said. "I know. I was sick for two days because of it."
Sutherland knew there was no sense arguing with the man standing behind her. Everyone who worked at Sutherland Service & Machine, DaBo Fire Protection and the other small businesses at the end of 22nd Street N knew that.
This was Tom Wallace. The same blue-eyed, stick-thin homeless man who claimed the FBI had snipers on the roof of Home Depot to pick off the people who wandered the railroad tracks below. Who said the CIA was hunting him because he knew too much. Who complained that he didn't have a wife and children because the government wouldn't allow it.
He also said he was a marine biologist with a college degree.
No one bought that one, either.
Twice since January the police came out to 22nd Street because Wallace, 52, had become increasingly hostile. He even taunted Misha, a dog so friendly that the manager of Banana's Music gave her the run of the store. But because Wallace hadn't broken any laws, he was not detained.
On May 8, a few hours after Wallace warned Sutherland about the water, the police came again. This time, he had threatened one of the employees at RXP Products with a makeshift spear.
They cornered Wallace inside the empty, rusting water tank next to the railroad tracks at the end of 22nd Street. That was where he called home.
When he wouldn't come out of the tank, one of the officers crawled inside. Seconds later, two officers fired nine times.
Tom Wallace became the third mentally ill person to die during an arrest in the past three months in the Tampa Bay area.
He was different from the other shadowy figures who drifted in and out of the end of 22nd Street. His hair was neatly trimmed, he was usually clean-shaven, and although his clothes were old and worn, they were almost always laundered. To look at him, most people said, you'd never know he was homeless.
That wasn't all. He picked through garbage bins but never took anything. He got regular Social Security disability checks but never cashed them. He was offered food nearly every day but never took it.
And unlike the drunks and drug addicts who came and went, Wallace carefully guarded his slice of 22nd Street, which included a dense thicket where he rested and an abandoned, two-story water tank where he slept. He built fences from tree branches. He put pebbles in soda cans and hung them in strategic locations as a warning system.
He didn't have an address. But this was his neighborhood.
In truth, Thomas Albert Wallace was a lot of things.
And a marine biologist was one of them.
He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Florida and a master's degree in fisheries biology from Texas A&M University. He worked for the National Marine Fishery Service in Galveston, Texas.
He grew up in St. Petersburg and moved to St. Louis while he was in high school. He was an Eagle Scout and an accomplished swimmer who lettered on his high school swim team.
But in the late '70s and early '80s, he began to imagine people were after him. The FBI, the CIA, the Mafia.
"We didn't know the extent of his illness," said Wallace's sister, Judy Haas-Misztal, of Sierra Vista, Ariz. "The stories he would tell . . . stories that just weren't real. Like that his blood type was totally foreign, not like any other type ever recorded."
At one point, Judy and Tom got into an argument over some outlandish claim Tom had made. He pushed her to the ground.
"I wasn't hurt," Haas-Misztal said. "But something clicked in my mind. I called the police, and Tom was charged with assault and taken to jail.
"I saw this as an opportunity for Tom to get into the system. So he could get help."
Wallace was admitted to a mental facility in Rock Island, Ill., sometime in the 1980s, his sister said. But he was released a short time later when officials there decided he wasn't a threat to himself or others.
"He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic," Haas-Misztal said. "He might have been afraid of medication."
In fact, everyone who knew Tom Wallace agreed on one thing: He never smoked, drank or took drugs of any kind.
Eventually, Wallace settled in Florida.
"I remember meeting him about eight years ago at the Don CeSar," Haas-Misztal said. "We had a really nice day walking the beach and picking up shells."
Her voice trailed off.
"I wish he could've gotten help. He lived in his own world, and I wouldn't say he was suffering. But he didn't want to be homeless."
For about a year and a half, before he permanently took to the streets, Wallace lived with his cousin Bob Burmaster in St. Petersburg.
"He really was a good guy," Burmaster said. "But he had a problem with people taking things from him. Not physical things. Ideas. And it got to the point where it seemed to him like everyone was against him. He didn't even cash his disability checks because he thought the government was after him and . . . that would give away where he was.
"In many ways, he was very bright. He knew things. But it was always the worries and the problems he had. There were times I just couldn't get through to him. And he wouldn't let anybody help."
Burmaster wouldn't see his cousin again for nearly two years, when a detective came to his door with a photo of a man who had been shot on 22nd Street.
In the last months of his life, Wallace withdrew even deeper. He stopped waving at people who knew him and might have thrown rocks at children in the neighborhood.
And then there was the time he laid a shirt, a baseball cap and some pants on the ground and had a bitter argument with the empty clothes.
"I will not tolerate this!" he screamed at the pile.
So Donna Sutherland had reason to be a little startled at the spigot the morning of May 8.
"Well, thanks, Tom," she said. "Thanks for the warning."
Sutherland went back to her office, and Wallace wandered off down 22nd to do what he always did: pace back and forth in the empty lot at the end of the street. Follow the path in the weeds he had made. Like a guard dog at the end of its leash.
"He liked me," Sutherland said. "But if you were an authority figure, he was against you. And he just kept getting worse and worse and worse."
Donna's husband, Russ Sutherland, is a former St. Petersburg police officer. He and Donna have owned Sutherland's Service for 23 years. They've seen their share of homeless people.
"It's just a damn shame," Russ Sutherland said. "He wasn't a thief. He wasn't a drunk or a drug addict. He was just mentally ill.
"He told me once that if the police came into his home under the water tank, all heck would break loose."
Donald Turnbaugh read about Tom Wallace the day after the shooting. A Baltimore police officer for five years, Turnbaugh spent 35 years as an inspector with U.S. Customs Service.
But rather than retire, he helped form the Pinellas chapter of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, a group of mental health professionals who offer free crisis intervention training to law enforcement officers in the Tampa Bay area.
So far, more than 350 officers have been though the 40-hour course, including about 25 from the St. Petersburg Police Department.
The officers who shot Wallace, Charlie Barnes, 54, and Wes Callahan, 42, had completed the department's eight-hour training course, "Police Conduct with the Mentally Ill."
And they're veteran officers, with a combined 45 years of experience on the force. Their evaluations always have been positive, and their personnel files are loaded with letters of commendation.
According to witnesses, they were both visibly shaken after the incident.
"I'm not judging this situation," said Turnbaugh, 63, "because I wasn't there and don't know all the details. I'm sure the officers did the best they could. But this is a guy (Wallace) who is inside a water tank with only one way in or out. I wonder, "What's the hurry?' Living in a water tank is not normal behavior. This is probably a guy who is mentally ill, so he has to be dealt with differently than the average person."
For the most part, Turnbaugh said, officers are trained to deal with criminals, and normal police training is to take charge of a situation.
"But sometimes, if you think the person is mentally ill, you need to step back. Talk slower, more clearly. Be more calm. Oftentimes, what works is to say, "I can see you're having a problem today. I'm here to help you.' The softer approach seems to carry a lot of meaning to people who are mentally ill."
Of course, Turnbaugh said, these people shouldn't be on the streets in the first place, but a third or more of the homeless have a diagnosed mental illness.
"And the cops are stuck with them," he said.
At least seven Tampa Bay area residents with a history of mental illness have died during encounters with law enforcement officers in recent years.
In February, a man described as manic-depressive died during an arrest by Clearwater police. A month later, a mentally ill man who had stopped taking his medication was fatally shot by Tampa police.
Tom Wallace was the third this year.
Cutting back the Brazilian pepper trees that grew down by the water tank was one of Ed Cain's regular duties at RXP Products.
He had seen Wallace dozens of times before and never had a problem with him. May 8 was different.
Wallace emerged from the brush with a 4-inch knife taped to a pole, brought the spear to within inches of Cain's head and ordered him to leave.
Cain brushed the spear away with his machete and told Wallace to back off. He had brush to cut, and it would take only a few minutes.
"But he told me I worked for the St. Pete Seven, whoever that is," Cain said. "I showed him my uniform and told him I'd worked for RXP for 17 years. But he kept poking that spear at me. . . . Then he said he'd stuck somebody else and would have no problem running me through."
Cain, 44, had heard enough. He told Wallace that he was calling the police.
Within minutes, three St. Petersburg police officers - Callahan, Barnes and Tim Opat - were at the end of 22nd Street.
They asked Cain to show them where Wallace was living. He led them down the narrow path, into the brush, under the trees and to the tank. At that point, Cain said, the officers drew their guns.
(Barnes and Callahan are on administrative leave pending a Police Department investigation, and neither they nor Opat returned calls for comment. Other police officials declined to comment.)
Cain said the officers opened the small hatch to the tank, shined their flashlights inside and yelled that they were police officers and that Wallace had to come out.
According to a report released Tuesday by the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office, Callahan crawled inside the tank when there was no response.
Almost immediately, he saw Wallace coming at him with the spear, and Barnes saw Wallace approaching Callahan, the report states; both officers fired: Barnes, three times; Callahan, six.
Hit twice in the chest and once in his right hand, Tom Wallace died inside the tank.
The State Attorney's Office concluded that Wallace was shot by Barnes, Callahan or both in the legal performance of their duties and that the shooting was a justifiable homicide.
Burmaster paid a funeral home $690 to cremate Wallace's body, and his ashes were put in a cardboard box.
In an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times, Joyce Perkins, an accountant at RXP Products who placed the call to the police on May 8, wrote:
"I needed to tell you this.
"Tom was a shy, paranoid human being. He kept himself clean and picked up any litter left around "his territory.' He kept watch and informed me of any illegal dumping at the dead-end street near his "home.' . . .
"I wish it to be known that by at least one person, he will be missed. I didn't fear him nor did I trust him, for that was the nature of his illness. He was progressively getting more sick, which brought on his death.
"In my heart, I feel Tom has gone to a better place. This life was no longer good for him."
