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A breakup shatters calm

A failed relationship was just one development leading to Gary Lee Wilson Jr.'s crash into a SunTrust bank.

By STEVE THOMPSON
Published January 14, 2006

	[Times photos: Lance Aram Rothstein]
	Police and rescue workers tend to Gary Lee Wilson Jr. on Friday after he slit his throat and drove his pickup into the Suntrust bank branch on U.S. 19 in New Port Richey.
	Kelly Webster had an argument with her boyfriend before he slammed his pickup into the SunTrust bank, where it struck Webster's mother and grandmother.
	With the battered pickup between them, a employee of the SunTrust bank talks with emergency workers at the branch Friday on U.S. 19 in New Port Richey.
	Rescue workers tend to one of the two relatives of Kelly Webster injured Friday after Gary Lee Wilson Jr. drove his pickup into the SunTrust bank.

NEW PORT RICHEY - He drove a pickup through the front of a bank, police say, and two women were badly hurt. Bystanders tackled him as he ran.

Now the 27-year-old lay on the pavement, bleeding where he had cut his own throat. "Why did you do it?" the bystanders wanted to know. His answer, one recalled later, was simple.

"I was in love."

But how Gary Lee Wilson Jr. could come to such a point surely was more complicated. The story probably begins before his 10-month relationship with Kelly Webster, whose mother and grandmother had their legs broken in the crash. Maybe before prison, or before juvenile boot camp, or even before he used a gun to hold up another boy for a can of Pepsi and some Skittles candy.

Friday's part of the story began with an argument between Wilson and Webster, his 23-year-old girlfriend. She said he never did get along with her mother. Now he was calling her mother names, Webster said. She was not going to put up with that.

So Webster broke up with him Friday morning from her cell phone. He was driving her pickup. So her grandmother was bringing her and her mother to his parents' house to get it from him. Her mother also planned to confront Wilson about the name-calling, Webster recalled later.

On the way, the three women stopped to cash checks at the SunTrust branch on U.S. 19 just south of Main Street. Then Webster was on the phone with him again. They argued, and Wilson said he was going to kill himself, Webster recalled.

"I'm slowly dying," he said. She says he told her he'd cut his arm and his throat.

He asked Webster where she was. She told him.

"You're inside the bank?" she says he asked.

"Yeah," she replied.

Moments later, Webster had just received her money, she said, when she heard what sounded like an explosion.

She turned and saw her pickup inside the bank. Her grandmother, 63-year-old Linda Hodges, lay on the floor, her leg mangled. Shocked as Webster was, she recalled, she momentarily forgot to look for her mother. Then Webster saw her. She was nearly buried in debris and trying to get up.

"You can't get up," Webster says she yelled. "Stay there, stay there!"

By this time, police say, Wilson had already run out of the bank. Bystanders tackled him in a neighboring parking lot.

Webster says her mother, 42-year-old Renee Webster, later told her she saw Wilson sitting in the truck outside the bank as she was getting ready to walk out.

Webster says Wilson probably saw her mother, too, and that could be why he chose to ram into the bank when he did. Webster thinks she and her mother were his targets, she says.

Nobody else had been in the bank's front lobby at that moment. Anyone who had, police say, almost certainly would have been hurt.

Jamie Booher, a 27-year-old heating and cooling worker, was cashing a check inside just before 9:30 a.m. He said he got a split-second warning.

"I could see in the teller's face that something was going to happen," he said. "She was facing the truck as it revved. Her eyes bugged out."

Booher's co-worker, C.J. Mury, also 27, was waiting outside. He "heard an engine rev up," he said. "And I saw the truck run through the front of the bank at what seemed like 45 to 50 miles per hour."

Mury was one of those who tackled Wilson as he fled.

The two injured women and Wilson were taken by helicopter to Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, where for a time all three shared a room, Webster said. Wilson, who faces three counts of attempted murder, was tied down and guarded.

Wilson's history, more than a failed relationship, might best explain what brought him to the bank Friday.

He once told a psychologist that he began drinking alcohol at 11, according to court records. He said he started using drugs like marijuana, cocaine, mushrooms, and Valium at 14, a 1994 psychologist's report says.

The report says that around that age, Wilson was hospitalized because he had said he wanted to kill himself.

Along with a younger brother, he lived with his father, a construction worker, and his mother, who was a full-time homemaker, the report says.

The couple told a counselor they could not keep Wilson under control, the court records say. He was a frequent runaway, who rarely attended school. And when he did he was a major discipline problem, the records say.

His first arrest was at 14, for battery, the records say. Then, in 1993, he attacked a jogger by spraying mace in her face. He was placed in a youth camp, then in an adolescent recovery program, from which he twice escaped.

When a bed was not available at juvenile boot camp in 1994, the records say, Wilson was released. It was then that he went on a crime spree that would keep him in prison for much of the next decade.

In the span of a few days, Wilson, along with friends, committed seven felonies. He tried to steal an 81-year-old woman's purse, dragging her across the ground when she wouldn't give it up. He robbed a 12-year-old boy of Pepsi and candy at gunpoint. He robbed several other kids, stole a car, and burglarized a house.

Sentenced as an adult, Wilson stayed in prison until 2001. He went back after violating probation in 2003 and was released again in August 2004.

It wasn't long after that when he met Webster. In a sheriff's report from May, he is accused of grabbing one of Webster's friends by the throat and dragging the woman across the ground by her hair.

On Friday, Webster said Wilson never hit her. But she knew he had problems.

"Everybody's like, "Oh, he was on drugs,' " Webster said, trying to explain her now ex-boyfriend's actions earlier.

"He was not on nothing. That's just the way he is."

Staff writer Garrett Therolf contributed to this report.

[Last modified January 14, 2006, 01:39:15]