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But there was more than just gators

By TIMES STAFF WRITERS
Published December 31, 2006

When it came to weird and wondrous news stories, Hernando County did not disappoint in 2006.

From the alligator that decided to join the show at Weeki Wachee Springs to the 8-year-old who drove off in his mom's car, that good ol' Sunshine State wackiness was very evident here:

As a demonstration of how not to be elected to the School Board, candidate Richard McDermott bested the competition: He was evicted for falling behind on the rent, arrested on accusations of passing bad checks, briefly stripped of his driver's license for missing child support payments, and fired from his teaching job for taking field trip money home.

An overly brief note to bus drivers in November left 126 fourth-graders from J.D. Floyd Elementary School stranded in Tampa until 7:30 p.m. on a not-so-fun field trip, prompting local restaurants to send a curbside dinner.

Ronnie McLean, a maybe fake Floridian, ran for the County Commission while still holding elected office - in New York. He denied it and said God would sort it out. But the voters got to it first. He lost, placing third in a three-way Democratic primary.

An alligator decided May 27 that the Weeki Wachee mermaids looked pretty. Or tasty. Or pretty tasty. At any rate, a 9-footer literally stopped the show before it was caught. In August, an 8-footer was caught sunning on the Parrott Middle School basketball court.

In September, Craig Joseph Daniels of New Port Richey plowed his truck into a gas pump, escaped the fiery wreck and hid out atop a seven-story utility pole for five hours while threatening to jump to his death. He told police he didn't want to talk. But they did. And eventually he climbed down.

In October, Hernando County Fire Rescue responders said they found High Point volunteer firefighters trying to upend an overturned car - with the driver still inside. Don't do that. Never do that. The High Point Volunteer Fire Department denied it and said members were stabilizing the car, not flipping it.

El Ranchito, the small Mexican restaurant at Spring Hill Drive and Kass Circle, was selling more than just tortilla chips. In January, the Sheriff's Office accused four men of using the restaurant to sell 100 pounds of marijuana, putting some of it in bags along with the food. "I've eaten in that restaurant a couple of times," Sheriff Richard Nugent said, "and based on what the undercovers found back there in the kitchen, I wouldn't eat there again."

Patrick Plowman thought he could outrun the Florida Highway Patrol one day in March while riding his motorcycle on Interstate 75. He went from 95 mph to 150 mph, and the trooper following him stopped the chase. But little did he know, he was being tracked by an FHP airplane. Plowman was arrested at work in Hernando.

In August, the Hernando County Sheriff's Office destroyed 144 video slot machines it seized from a Spring Hill game room. The machines were taken to the county landfill and run over by an 80,000-pound tractor with studded steel wheels, then mixed in among the other rubbish of life in Hernando.

For some reason, 3,600 of Brooksville's utility bills vanished in the mail on their trip from McHenry, Ill., where the bills are tabulated. Duplicates were sent out, but the missing bills caused a stir at a City Council meeting in September. The council decided not to charge late fees that month.

In the weeks before Halloween, people in a Spring Hill neighborhood near Spring Hill Drive and Mariner Boulevard started finding decapitated animals in Dumpsters and on the side of the road. The menagerie included chickens, quail and pygmy goats.

Kobie Stires, a barefoot and deaf 8-year-old, took his mom's car for a 2-mile joyride, winding along Brooksville's streets on the last day of August. He brought the car back in one piece, albeit damaged, earning his first traffic ticket. The ticket was dismissed a month later.

Ron Baker, director of Brooksville's Human Resources Department, was arrested in August for allegedly giving 23 Xanax pills to a co-worker having a medical emergency. Baker went to counseling, and the case was closed.

At the end of July, Richard Anderson retired as Brooksville's city manager. At the beginning of September, he was rehired in the same position. It was all part of a plan to allow him to stay on past the retirement date set by the DROP benefits program.

Colleen Kasperek, a public defender in Brooksville, went to England in April to see two Ricky Martin concerts. Though she has since quit her job at the courthouse, she has not quit being a superfan of the dreamy People magazine pop star.

A case in point on the potential perils of looking for love on the Web: Joshua Ray Collier met Sandra Snell of northwest Hernando online, then set up a first meeting in January, then started rubbing her mother's shoulders, then pulled a 6-inch knife on the whole family, then punched her father, then ran off and was arrested a short time later. The upshot? No second date and not quite three years in prison.

Tommy Lee, a colorful career criminal whom even Circuit Judge Stephen Rushing called "a very engaging person," was sentenced in March to more than 33 years in prison for a long list of offenses. But before that, among other accomplishments, he (1) compared himself to Jesus Christ in the courtroom because he had done some suffering and now he was going to do more, (2) testified in his own defense and gave a phenomenally entertaining, truly riveting account of the high-speed car chase in which he allegedly pointed a pistol at a deputy, and (3) tried to bust out of the county jail by sweet talking a female guard into helping him with an escape plot that included a hacksaw and a sub sandwich.

Nine lucky locals won big-bucks lottery games from late December 2005 to early October 2006 in a spurt of good fortune here that had the Florida Lottery folks baffled up in Tallahassee.

Anthony Penta's cell phone almost got him killed this month when employees at a SunTrust Bank in Spring Hill thought it was a gun. They called 911. And when Penta walked out of the bank, sheriff's deputies ordered him to the ground at gunpoint. "The bank put me in danger," Penta said.

[Last modified December 30, 2006, 20:56:38]