Gunman gets 8 years for attack

A drug addict is sentenced for opening fire on a rehab clinic while he was undergoing detoxification.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 4, 2000

NEW PORT RICHEY -- In October 1998, Bob Ward huddled behind a locked door while a drug-frenzied gunman tried to kick his way inside. As he and two co-workers hid in the dark break room of the PAR rehab clinic, they held hands and prayed.

"We were pretty sure he was going to get in," Ward said of gunman John Robert Miller, who had already riddled the building with bullets. "We were pretty sure we were gone."

On Friday, Ward watched a judge sentence 28-year-old Miller to eight years in state prison for the Oct. 21, 1998, incident, in which Miller shot open a window of the Ridge Road clinic with a .380 semiautomatic and climbed inside.

No one was hurt, but clinic employees haven't forgotten the terror they felt before SWAT officers arrived to capture Miller, a former patient who was demanding methadone.

Ward thought the sentence was light.

"What's to prevent him from doing it again?" Ward said. "He put a lot of bullets into that clinic. How none of us were hit was just by the grace of God."

A jury convicted Miller last month of armed burglary, shooting into a building and discharging a firearm in public, charges which could have brought him life in prison, a sentence that prosecutor Katie Hardgrave asked Circuit Judge William Webb to impose Friday.

Pleading passionately on his client's behalf, defense attorney Michael Tewell argued that Miller, a longtime drug addict, had been in the throes of narcotic withdrawal and a rapid detoxification program when the shooting happened.

"It goes without saying, those poor folks went through hell," Tewell said of the PAR employees. But Miller, who is from Hudson, had no prior history of violent crime, Tewell said, and drugs triggered "a psychotic break with reality."

Judge Webb noted that Miller, though he recently expressed remorse for his crimes, had been slow to do it. Miller wore a blank, empty expression through the court session, even as Webb imposed the sentence.

"They're still not giving him the help he needs," said Miller's wife, Kelly, 25, outside the courtroom.

Ward, recalling how he and co-workers holed up in the clinic's break room, said he doesn't know how long Miller was kicking at the door to get in. It might have lasted a minute or two, he said, but it felt much longer.

"In the length of psychological time, it was a forever moment," Ward said. "You can see it in the movies, where time stretches, and it does."

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