Road rage leads to prison

A Safety Harbor man's deal brings a six-year sentence for a Bushnell driver's death.

By COLLEEN JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
Published August 30, 2007

TAMPA - Nearly two years after his road rage caused a man's violent death, Robert P. Bischoff owned up Wednesday to a lesson he said he learned too late.

"It's not a racetrack out there," he told the dead man's mother. "Me and him got into a road-rage incident, and it must stop. It must stop."

An Interstate 75 morning commute gone terribly wrong landed the Safety Harbor carpenter six years in prison and 10 years of probation.

The punishment could have been much worse. But the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office consented to the plea agreement because a witness placed some of the blame on Brian M. Mydelski, the 25-year-old man from Bushnell who died in the incident.

Prosecutor Kim Seace recounted the scene that played out Dec. 21, 2005, in southbound lanes through Brandon:

A witness saw both men jockeying aggressively for the same position in the fast lane. Bischoff drove a 2003 Dodge van; Mydelski drove a 1990 Ford Tempo.

At some point, Mydelski cut in front of Bischoff with little room to spare. In his rearview mirror, a second witness saw Bischoff drive onto the interstate's shoulder until his car became even with the Tempo.

Then Bischoff cut his van to the right. Both cars crossed three lanes of traffic. The second witness said it looked like Mydelski was "trying to get away," Seace said.

Mydelski accelerated in an attempt to get back in front of Bischoff a second time.

Bischoff accelerated, too. He hit the driver's side of the Tempo, which spun across the median and into the path of a Mack semitrailer truck.

The impact with the semitrailer threw Mydelski, who was not wearing a seat belt, into the road, killing him.

Bischoff kept driving.

He called the Florida Highway Patrol an hour later from his workplace in Lithia, after a co-worker asked him about the fresh scratches on his vehicle. He told investigators that he might have been in an accident.

That didn't sit well with Mydelski's mother, Linda Pitcher.

"You knew you had been in an accident and that you were the sole cause," she said. "My heart has been ripped from my chest."

Seace read a letter from John R. Horton, the semitrailer truck driver from Bradenton who was airlifted to a hospital because of injuries. He missed months of work and can no longer drive a truck, he wrote.

Bischoff, 42, pleaded guilty on Friday to charges of vehicular homicide and reckless driving with serious bodily injury.

This wasn't the first stain on his driving record. He has been cited twice for driving under the influence. He served a year of probation after a 2002 DUI conviction in Pinellas County.

Until Wednesday, Bischoff had been free on bail awaiting the disposition of his latest charges. The time he spent on the road opened his eyes to plenty of bad driving around him, he said.

He choked up as he spoke to Mydelski's family. Behind him the courtroom, Bischoff's family also cried.

"I did not mean any of this to happen," he said. "I'm sorry to your family, I truly am."

His apologies didn't soften Pitcher, who wished for a stiffer penalty. The sentence also included a three-year license revocation and aggressive-driving school.

Pitcher, who brings an urn with her firstborn son's ashes on trips so they can still travel together, is now planning a trip to Tallahassee.

She will lobby legislators for a road-rage law that would require harsher penalties and allow offenders to be held in jail pretrial if their actions had caused a death.

"You can't use your vehicle as a weapon," she said, "and expect to walk away."

Colleen Jenkins can be reached at cjenkins@sptimes.com or 813 226-3337.

[Last modified August 30, 2007, 00:28:49]