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Letter to the editor

Man, 61, is found dead in a driveway by his boss

The employer was concerned about his missing driver.

By JONATHAN ABEL
Published June 14, 2007

CLEARWATER - Workdays began before dawn for Martin Weeks, a truck driver for a Palm Harbor food pantry.

Every morning he made the circuit of local supermarkets and restaurants, picking up donated food and shuttling it to the FEAST food pantry on Nebraska Avenue.

But 8 a.m. rolled by Wednesday and no one had heard from Weeks. So his boss, Walter Anderson, drove out to the Silk Oak Mobile Home Park off U.S. 19, where Weeks had lived for the last few weeks.

Anderson expected to learn that Weeks had engine trouble.

Instead, he said he found Weeks dead in the driveway.

The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office said an autopsy would determine how the 61-year-old died. A sheriff's spokeswoman said Wednesday evening that she could not say whether investigators had any suspects in Weeks' death.

While Weeks was well-liked and dependable at work, he was going through a turbulent time in his marriage, according to court records.

On May 19, his wife, Linda, was arrested and charged with domestic battery and aggravated assault. She punched her husband in the face, according to an arrest affidavit, and leveled a shotgun at his chest, saying: "If this thing was loaded, I'd blow your f------ head off."

Linda Weeks, 59, of Palm Harbor told the arresting deputy she was irate because her husband was having an affair. When she was released from jail a couple of days later, she promptly took out a domestic violence injunction against her husband, alleging six years of degradation and abuse at his hands.

In her petition, she wrote that he told her she was stupid. He didn't like the way she cut up potatoes or forgot the salt and pepper shakers. He threw plates and food at her and ordered her around mercilessly, she wrote. And when he got drunk, he would sometimes tell her at the point of a pistol or shotgun that he was going to kill her, then himself.

But those accusations were all in the past, Linda Weeks said Wednesday. She said she and her husband were patching up their marriage, even planning to rescind the injunction this week so they could move back in together.

What about her assault and battery arrest?

She said the deputy's report was wrong.

And the complaint she wrote about a history of problems?

Their marriage was good, she said, until she found out that her husband was having an affair with a woman who she said was the source of trouble in their marriage.

Wednesday evening, Linda Weeks was trying to call Australia, where her husband grew up so that she could tell his three grown children and 99-year-old mother that he had been killed.

Weeks said the detectives had spent much of the day interviewing her, but she had nothing to do with her husband's death.

"When they told me my husband was dead, I damn near died," she said. "I loved him more than anything in the damn world."

Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Jonathan Abel can be reached at jabel@sptimes.com or 727 445-4157.

[Last modified June 13, 2007, 21:39:36]