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Details of beating emerge

Witnesses testify about the scene where a delivery man was beaten with a bat.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published March 14, 2007

BROOKSVILLE - Something awful happened to 21-year-old Russell Sanford late one night last March in a dark Spring Hill cul-de-sac. He was beaten with a bat so badly one deputy said it looked like he had a second head growing from the left side of his face.

Jurors heard about his potentially life-threatening injuries and about the crime scene from more than a dozen witnesses who took the stand on the second day of the attempted murder trial of Benjamin Jablon.

Two people from Spring Hill were arrested for the crime against Sanford - Jablon, now 20, and Devin Politis, now 18 - and both of them were charged with attempted murder, armed robbery, aggravated battery and grand theft auto. Politis pleaded guilty last month, got 15 years in state prison and is expected to testify against Jablon today.

For Jablon, almost a year later and now in the courtroom of Circuit Judge Jack Springstead, the question isn't so much what happened to Sanford but rather who did it to him.

To answer that question is the job of the jurors this week.

On Tuesday, Jablon's attorneys, Robert Attridge and CC Conde of New Port Richey, gave them some things to think about.

All of this started on March 28, 2006, according to authorities, when a call was made at 9:57 p.m. from Politis' cell phone and two extra-large pizzas and two 2-liter Pepsis were ordered from the Pizza Hut on U.S. 19. The address on the ticket was at the cul-de-sac with no street lights on Crescent Road. Sanford went out on the delivery in his gray 2004 Mitsubishi Lancer.

He was hit in the driveway in the dark on the left side of his head.

After he came to, his car was gone, he couldn't see really well, and he was bloody and sweaty, but he staggered over a mile to Village Pizza on Deltona Boulevard. He was fading in and out.

This is where the people who were at Village Pizza that night picked up the story Tuesday in court.

One customer was getting out of his car in the parking lot and heard a cry for help from across the street .

He saw the bloodied and battered Sanford.

He sat him up against the wall by the door. One of the Village Pizza delivery men called 911.

"There was blood all over," the first deputy to respond said Tuesday in court.

Sanford was flown to Tampa. His injuries: a fractured skull, a collapsed lung, bleeding in his brain.

Investigators later that night found blood on the grass and the driveway and the concrete walkway in front of the house where the attack had happened. They also found a Pizza Hut receipt. Some of the garden stones in front of the house had been turned over and put up against a trash can to make what could have been a hiding place.

They knocked on doors at the cul-de-sac.

But the neighbors saw and heard nothing.

"My dogs didn't even bark," one said.

Here's what investigators didn't do, though, according to testimony on Tuesday during cross-examination by Jablon's attorneys:

They didn't look for a blood trail down Crescent Road and on the most likely path Sanford would have taken to get to Village Pizza. They didn't find a machete that belonged to Politis in the ground by a tree in a next door neighbor's yard. The neighbor found that the next day.

Some other things that emerged in testimony:

Sanford's cigarettes that were on the shotgun seat that night were still in his car when it was found the next day. But they weren't crushed. Maybe, Jablon's attorneys seemed to suggest, this wasn't a two-man job.

An anonymous tip led investigators to the names Politis and Jablon. A detective got in touch with Jablon. He was read his rights and agreed to talk. Then he took two detectives to the single-wide mobile home where Politis was staying, and that's where detectives found some of the best physical evidence of the case - two Pizza Hut boxes, a smashed cell phone, Politis' jeans with blood on them.

One of those detectives in his investigation talked to some other teens who were in the area of the attack that night. "People of interest," he said Tuesday. The detective is now a bailiff at the courthouse.

One of those boys lived at an address that was the address on another order that was called into the same Pizza Hut at exactly the same time. Attridge asked the ex-detective if he knew that. The ex-detective said he did not.

The last witness of the day was a young man named Jason Westfall who was letting Politis sleep at his single-wide mobile home at the time. Westfall said Politis arrived around midnight the night of March 28, 2006, and started listening to the police scanner on hernandoliving.com and then went outside and smashed his cell phone.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified March 13, 2007, 23:20:05]