'You don't hesitate on something like that'

Hank Arrington drew on his upbringing in making the decision that his son should turn himself in to police.

By AMY HERDY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 22, 2001

TAMPA -- Hank Arrington hardly knew his father. The two first met and began visiting when he was 14, but a year later his father died. After that, it was the nurturing of his grandmother, Rubye Arrington, a high school music teacher, that would influence him most.

"She was an inspiration for me in a lot of things," Arrington recalled of the woman he knew as "Nana," who died two years ago at 95. "I didn't want to disappoint her. I toed the line out of respect, if nothing else."

A week ago, faced with the awful possibility that his 17-year-old son, Tobaris, had taken part in a brutal crime, Arrington drew on this strength to make the decision, along with his wife, that their son should turn himself in to police. Had he refused, Arrington was prepared to call the police and turn in his son.

"You don't hesitate on something like that," he said Friday.

Like his father, Arrington, 48, has spent time away from his children. A tour bus driver for 26 years, he was in Nashville last Saturday when Tobaris called to tell him he had taken part in the carjacking, kidnapping and shooting of a 20-year-old University of South Florida student.

The news, Arrington said, broke the heart of Tobaris' mother, Margaret Arrington. "She couldn't handle the fact she had knowledge of something like this," he said. "She wasn't going to stand by and be a part of all that, by no means."

After talking with his son and wife throughout the day Saturday, Arrington said, Tobaris finally agreed to meet with police. His mother drove him to the downtown headquarters as his father, hurrying back to Tampa, talked to him on a cellular phone along the way.

"I told him to do the right thing," he said. "He agreed."

Police interviewed Tobaris, but let him return home while they sorted through his story. Thursday, Arrington was at police headquarters when detectives charged Tobaris with kidnapping, carjacking, attempted murder and arson. Mrs. Arrington, racked with grief, sat in a car nearby.

Police said Tobaris and another man took Chau at gunpoint in her pink 1998 Acura Integra, stole $40 from her purse, shot her and left her for dead in an alley behind an elementary school. She struggled to reach a house where she could summon help. Her burned car was found several blocks away.

Later Thursday, Arrington would tell a St. Petersburg Times reporter he was trying to persuade one of his stepsons to also tell the police what he knew about the crime. Within hours, Mr. Arrington had returned to the department with Mrs. Arrington and the stepson, who was questioned by police and released without being charged.

As for Tobaris, Arrington can make no sense of what has happened.

"He lived a normal life," he said of his youngest child, who had previously worked jobs at Busch Gardens and Burger King. "Damn sure didn't live in an environment of robbing and stealing."

Arrington, raised by a single mother in New Jersey, moved to Tampa to live with his grandmother after the eighth grade, which allowed for visits with his father, a judge in Miami. For now, Arrington is racked with regret over the long weeks and months spent on the road driving the tour bus.

"I missed a lot, and I think he missed a lot," he said of his son, "but it's nobody's fault but my own. I was just trying to make a living the best way I knew how.

"I'm not another Ward Cleaver," Arrington said. "But had we covered up what he'd done, we'd be just as guilty."

For now, Tobaris Arrington remains in juvenile detention. His father realizes he will probably be charged as an adult, and fears he will die before his son is released from prison.

Meanwhile, Charlie Chau, the victim's father, said he has no sympathy for anyone involved in the attack.

"People like that are no good for society," he said.

But there is another side to his son, Arrington said, a child who reserved a special smile for his great-grandmother, the boy he used to wrestle with in the living room.

The joy of those memories has been eclipsed, he said, by the pain of seeing his son in shackles and the knowledge he cannot help.

"I wish I could erase it all and my son would be home," he said, "but I can't."

- Times staff writer Dong-Phuong Nguyen and researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report.

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