Killer's family searches for answers

By ABBIE VANSICKLE, Times Staff Writer
Published August 18, 2007

BRANDON - The mother cracks open the door, hesitates. She knows the things being said about her son.

She doesn't know why Michael A. Phillips, 24, shot and killed Hillsborough sheriff's Sgt. Ronald Harrison on Wednesday, she says.

"He's not a cold-blooded killer," says Regina Van Amburg, her eyes red from crying. "I don't know what provoked him, but he's not a cold-blooded killer."

Phillips, a man with 23 arrests on his record, died a few hours after Harrison, fatally shot by SWAT team snipers after he barricaded himself inside the suburban home he shared with his mother.

As his mother spoke, two young boys raced around her feet. They pointed toy guns at each other, made gun noises.

One boy is Phillips' son. He's 3.

Phillips never really wanted kids until he had one, Van Amburg says with the trace of a smile.

She remembers being there for the boy's birth, watching her son become a father.

"It was the happiest day of his life," she says.

He had the boy's name tattooed on his abdomen alongside guns, a symbol of fierce fatherly protection, not some thuggish mark, she says.

Her son was not a bad person, and he didn't kill because of skin color, she says.

"It had nothing to do with race," she says.

Phillips' grandparents from Tennessee arrive at the house. They walk past the memorial of stuffed animals, flowers and notes at the door.

In the dining room, family and friends gather to look at photographs. The memorial service is coming soon. They don't want to tell the public much about it.

They want to remember him as the person they knew. His grandma, the woman he called "Nanny," shows a reporter some photos of happier days.

In one, Phillips plays with his son in the pool. In another, he holds the child on his lap.

There's a third, taken years before. In that one, Phillips is a boy. He wears a big straw hat and carries a fishing pole. A tiny white shoe is hooked on the end, and he's smiling big.

"I was always accused of him being my favorite," says Patti Rockburn, Phillips' grandma.

She kisses the fishing pole photograph.

Phillips' grandpa, Harold "Pop" Eads, 64, can't stop the questions from coming to his mind, questions he can't answer.

"God, if you just had any idea of what caused it, of what snapped," he says. "It's just hard for me to understand. It's not normal. It's more than I can accept."

At this, Rockburn begins to cry. "I feel so bad for that policeman and his family," she says.

Eads agrees. The family members all wish it could have been different, that they could change the past.

"I guess the thing that happened Tuesday night - we didn't know that Michael," Eads says.

Abbie VanSickle can be reached at 226-3373 or vansickle@sptimes.com.

[Last modified August 18, 2007, 01:27:17]