After beating, he's walked into our hearts

People have seen him for years in Hernando County. But his beating opened our eyes.

By CHANDRA BROADWATER, Times Staff Writer
Published September 30, 2007

John Kelly at Weeki Wachee Springs in 2003. His brother, George, moved him to Weeki Wachee after a car accident about eight years ago.
	[Family photo]

ADVERTISEMENT John Kelly's high school yearbook picture. [Family photo]

WEEKI WACHEE - Back in New York, people treated John Kelly like he was a nuisance.

Here in Hernando County, George Kelly thought residents felt the same about his eccentric, mentally challenged brother, who walked everywhere he went.

There was no way to know, until the night of Sept. 19, just what people really thought about the man whom residents have come to know simply as "the walker."

On that night two weeks ago, 48-year-old John Kelly headed back to his rusty silver trailer in Weeki Wachee, placing one quick foot in front of the other in the darkness along Cortez Boulevard. He didn't know that four people were waiting to rob and beat him, leaving him bloody and unconscious in a roadside ditch.

But now an entire community roots for a man they only know because they've passed him in their cars. People have poured out their hearts for the man with a big gray beard who wore an orange and yellow reflector vest and a black backpack as he trekked all over the county.

"It's funny. I was just telling my other brother how things have changed," George Kelly said as he smoked a cigarette outside his Weeki Wachee home last week. "John used to be our brother, our special little brother. Now everyone knows us as his."

The youngest of three boys, John Kelly grew up on Long Island and spent most of his life there. He was a chubby kid, much different looking from the lithe body he has now. Ten years younger than his older twin brothers, he lived mostly under the supervision of his mother. Their father died of a heart attack when John was about 9.

Describing him as a cross between movie characters like Forrest Gump and the "Rain Man," George Kelly said his brother can be brilliant one moment, and completely helpless the next.

"He could tell you how long it takes to ride a bicycle to the moon," George said. "But then he won't know how to make change at the store."

The family's worst fear was that John might be declared incompetent by some state agency and locked away in an institution.

"We always told him, 'Just blend in, don't stick out, or else you'll end up in the looney bin,' " his brother said. "It was our way of protecting him."

As John got older, George and his twin, Charles, occasionally made appearances in the school yard to keep away the bullies. Once, someone beat up John so badly that he lost some hearing in his left ear.

"Here we were, 25-year-olds roughing up 15-year-olds to let them know John had family," George said.

After John graduated from high school - "on the special bus, if you will," George said - he got a job working for a mom-and-pop business. They let him sweep the floors and take care of the place. They looked out for him when his mother died in 1996, on Christmas Eve, and his brothers helped him move into his own tiny apartment.

But a couple of years later, he was hit by a car as he rode his bicycle to work. The car crushed his legs. After the accident, he got up and said he had to get to work. He tried to make his way down the sidewalk with one of his feet dragging backward behind him.

"The ambulance guy couldn't believe it," George said. "But you know, that same thing is what got him to the fire station last week. He's strong. I would have just laid down and died."

A move to Hernando

After the car accident, which happened about eight years ago, George moved John to Weeki Wachee to live with him. For a year, he and his wife helped nurse John back to health. But soon it became clear that he needed his own place and some privacy.

Stubborn, John liked to do things his way. With mounds of new clothes to wear, he often preferred putting on rags.

"There might only be the ankles left of a pair of socks and he'd say, 'There's still life left in those, Bud.' That's what he calls me, Bud. He'd refuse to give them up, and only did at your expense. If I offered him six new pairs in exchange for throwing six old pairs away, then he'd go for it."

Other times, John might only agree to get a haircut if enticed with dinner at a place like Carrabba's.

George eventually signed over to his brother the old trailer he owned just up the road. He continued to pay most of the utilities, and John managed most everything else on his Social Security checks.

Doctors had told John to exercise as much as he could to strengthen his weak legs. With that in mind, he started walking.

"He didn't work, and you can only watch so much TV," George said. "And it's not like we would keep him chained to the house. I think he took to walking so much because it gave him something to do."

Spring Hill residents Steve and Kerrie Theis moved to the county just before John. The ice cream shop owners, who had a fundraiser for him this weekend, often wondered what his story was.

Once, Steve called the Hernando Sheriff's Office after passing John on the road. That was before highway crews started giving him the orange and yellow reflective vests he has worn in recent years. George said that each time one starts looking a little tattered, they give him a new one.

"We were worried that someone might hit him," Kerrie said. "For the last nine years we've been watching him walk all over the place. Knowing the story that he had been hurt before, it was really good to see his pace get faster. We could see him getting better."

The story most people knew entailed John having to walk so much to keep the circulation up in his legs. Otherwise, he told people, doctors would have to cut them off.

"I'm not sure if that came from John or not," George said with a chuckle. "But maybe that's how it all went down in his mind, even though it's not true."

Over the years, John has had a few run-ins with cars along the busy Hernando roadways he usually walked. The first accident wasn't too far from George's house. A woman clipped him with her car and sent him flying into a ditch. Another time, a car ran over the shopping cart full of groceries he pushed on Cortez Boulevard, narrowly missing him.

In both instances, he was uninjured, George said. But always worried about his brother, George sometimes went searching for him at night when John didn't answer his phone and was out walking and talking to himself - as usual.

George never expected to get the news he got when deputies knocked at his door late that Wednesday night, Sept. 19. Beaten in the head with wooden sticks, robbed of his black backpack and $100, somehow his brother had staggered for help at a nearby fire station. He was in a Tampa hospital, with maybe only a half-hour to live.

Little by little, John continues to make progress at St. Joseph's Hospital. Over the weekend, doctors were expected to begin the first of many facial reconstructive surgeries. Most of the bones in his face were shattered, his teeth knocked out and the back of his skull bashed in. He can't close one eye and can't open the other.

Aware, but can't talk

While John cannot talk, George said he knows his brother is aware that family members, who have come in from all over the country, are with him. But the extent of brain damage from the beating still isn't clear. As they look ahead, the Kellys only count on a long, expensive road to recovery.

"But he can squeeze your hand now," George said. "And it looks like he can move his left arm, which we thought was paralyzed before."

Sheriff's deputies have arrested three suspects, two of whom have been charged with attempted murder and armed robbery. Michael Raymond Vann, 23, and Jamie Lynn Tyson and Anthony Steven Hawkins, both 17, were arrested Monday and Tuesday. A fourth person, unnamed and listed in police reports as a co-defendant, had not been apprehended.

They decided to rob John after seeing him withdraw a large sum of money from an ATM, according to authorities. They waited for him to walk by in the night, as they had seen him do many times before. One of them told deputies that he had watched John walk since he was a little boy.

What gets George the most is the severity of his brother's injuries.

"They could have had whatever they wanted with one punch," he said. "Not even that."

Along with daily visits to the hospital, the exhausted older brother has been busy keeping track of newspaper clippings and the overflow of cards that have been arriving in Weeki Wachee and at the hospital.

"It's like he's Santa Claus," he said, smiling. "They come addressed to 'The Walker at St. Joseph's Hospital.' It's unbelievable. When he gets better, John is going to eat this up. He's going to love that so many people are thinking about him."

The support from the community has been overwhelming, George said. He never knew that so many people had such a special place in their hearts for his brother, the person he assumed most people thought of as the village idiot.

He had to laugh when hospital staffers pointed at him as he walked to John's room the other day, saying, "There's the walker's brother."

"Maybe we've been wrong," George said. "Apparently he's done all right."

Chandra Broadwater can be reached at cbroadwater@sptimes.com or 352 848-1432.

[Last modified September 29, 2007, 20:47:06]