Compassion drives a professor and psychologist with an interest in criminology.
By TIM GRANT
Published September 3, 2004
LUTZ - When a drunken man threatened to leap from the Cass Street railroad bridge, city police asked Philip Quinn to help save his life.
Quinn, the man's psychologist, made headlines when he talked to the man for half an hour as he screamed, cursed and cried from his perch 60 feet above water.
Ultimately, Quinn encouraged him to come down by promising to buy him a drink.
"He has a fondness for Chivas," Quinn wrote in his clinical notes on the incident nearly 30 years ago.
After rescue workers strapped the man into an ambulance, Quinn directed the driver to a bar in downtown Tampa. Quinn went inside the bar, ordered a tall glass of Chivas Regal on the rocks and headed back to the ambulance.
"The bartender said, "Hey, you can't take that drink outside. It's against the law,' " Quinn said. So he told the bartender, "Tonight, I am the law."
Quinn's heroic deed that night in 1977 was a hint of the maverick tendencies that define his multifaceted life.
As a Jesuit priest, Quinn refused to wear the white collar except on formal occasions. He privately encouraged women to use birth control although it was not condoned by the Catholic Church.
"I felt like a Jew in the Arab army," Quinn said. "I belonged to something that was in conflict with what I believed."
Quinn, 72, left 23 years of Jesuit life behind in 1973 and eventually married a former nun who is still his wife. Today, he runs a private psychology practice on Fletcher Avenue and is an associate professor of criminology at the University of Tampa.
He has spent the past 28 years training future cops, lawyers, and investigators of all kinds to understand the workings of the criminal mind and the causes of crime.
"When we look at the serial killer, we can sometimes find the same characteristics in the Wall Street criminal," Quinn said. "They have no conscience. No feeling for people. People are dispensable.
"The corporate criminal can be more violent than your violent criminals. Someone polluting the environment will kill far more people than your run-of-the-mill serial killer."
Quinn's interest in criminology was at odds with his calling to the priesthood.
It began innocently enough during the first two years of his Jesuit training. He and a fellow trainee had left the seminary one afternoon for a dental appointment in Cincinnati. They missed their bus back to the seminary in Milford and had to wait two hours for the next one.
"We spotted a building with bars on the windows and discovered it was the county jail," Quinn said. "We took a tour and somehow something got to me as we walked through there. It was a slice of life I'd never seen. That started my interest in the field of the criminal mind.
"And the thing is when we got back to (the seminary) we couldn't tell anyone where we'd been. Everything had to be by permission. What we had done was out of order."
Since then, the Chicago native has walked through hundreds of jails and interviewed countless inmates. While he has long since overcome the shock and moving sadness of that first experience, Quinn never lost his compassion for less fortunate people.
"Phil is a man of peace. He fights for the underdog," said his wife Jo Ann, 55, who has a doctorate in education and works as an assistant principal at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic School on N Central Avenue.
The couple met at Christ the King Catholic Church on Dale Mabry Highway shortly after Quinn arrived here from Chicago in 1971 to start a clinical program for Catholic clergy. Jo Ann had left the convent three years earlier, married, divorced and had a child. She worked as a bookkeeper for the parish and school.
Quinn left the priesthood in 1973. He and Jo Ann were married a year later. The couple have three daughters, Lainie, 34; Megan, 28; and Colleen, 23.
They've lived in Lutz's Shady Pines neighborhood for 26 years. In the late 1980s, Quinn was a leading opponent of the ill-fated East West Expressway that was slated to run through the rural town. It was arguably the hottest political issue in Lutz's history.
Quinn and his wife continue to be active members at their place of worship, St. Mary's Catholic Church.
"I have not lost any affection for working with people in the church," Quinn said. "I feel I'm more effective today than I was as a priest. Marriage has given me another dimension in terms of working with people."
