JUSTICE STORY: Retired librarian’s berserk shooting spree

For more than two decades, William Bryan Cruse spent 23 hours a day in his cell on Florida’s Death Row, pacing.

He landed there for committing the “Palm Bay Massacre,” on April 23, 1987. Six died, including two police officers, and 10 were injured by the retired librarian gone wild with a gun.

Chief among Cruse’s many beefs with humanity was the delusion that everyone thought he was a homosexual. But the trigger for his deadly rampage was just a couple of kids on bikes.

Around 6 p.m., two boys started yelling and zipping back and forth on his lawn. Cruse, 59, had just finished feeding dinner to his invalid wife, Melahat, who had Parkinson’s disease.

In a rage, he burst through his front door with a shotgun. His targets eluded him, but John Rich IV, 14, was not so lucky. Rich was shooting hoops outside his home across the street when over 50 shotgun pellets ripped into him. He survived.

Cruse then loaded his car with a pistol, shotgun, semi-automatic rifle, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and headed for a local shopping center. He shot and killed students Nobil Al-Hameli, 25, and Enud Al-Tawakuly, 18, at the entrance to the Publix grocery store. Homemaker Ruth Greene, 67, on a mission to buy lettuce for her pet guinea pig, received a fatal wound as she pulled her car into the parking lot.

Cruse then roared off to another shopping center and targeted a Winn-Dixie. He first fired seven shots into the windshield of a police car, killing Officer Ronald Grogan, 27.

A second officer, Gerald Johnson, 28, got a bullet wound in the leg as soon as he arrived. Johnson was crouching behind his car, reloading, when Cruse got him in the back.

“Where’s the cop? Get away from the cop. I want the cop to die,” a witness quoted the gunman as saying.

Bullets kept flying, wounding several shoppers trying to flee through the Winn-Dixie’s rear exit. One shot took the life of Lester Watson, 52, a married father of four.

Cruse found two women cowering in a bathroom. He released one, telling her to instruct police to turn out the store lights.

“You’re my hostage,” he told the other, Robin Brown, 21, a clerk in the frozen-food section.

Brown told the St. Petersburg Times that Cruse gave her an account of his sorrows, sick wife, loneliness, and alcoholism. During the day, he said he downed a six-pack of beer and a bottle of whiskey.

At one point, she asked if she could have a beer. “No,” he said. “Drinking’s bad. See what it did to me.”

After seven terrifying hours, Cruse let her go, saying he was going to kill himself.

Police bombarded the store with tear gas and stun grenades and grabbed him as he fled.

None of this surprised his neighbors. They had been living in fear of the crabby old man since he and his wife moved to Palm Bay from Lexington, Ky., in 1985.

In addition to shouting obscenities and making lewd gestures at the kids, neighbors described wildly erratic and dangerous behavior, like chasing children with guns. During one boy’s trumpet practice, Cruse stood under the budding musician’s window, revving a chainsaw.

Several neighbors filed complaints with the police, but no action was taken.

During the five-week trial that started in March 1989, his attorneys presented an insanity defense, portraying his client as pathetic, deeply disturbed, and alcohol crazed on the deadly night.

They said his problems were deeply rooted. His father was an alcoholic who had been in trouble with the law. Cruse was a small, skinny, quiet child but as a young adult, his strange ideas and behavior became impossible to ignore. Mental issues led to an early discharge from military service. When he became a librarian, he would hide in the stacks to avoid co-workers.

Always, he obsessed over the delusion that people were gossiping that he was a homosexual.

“I resent the fact that people want to test me to see if I’ve been looking at their crotch, like you two guys have been doing,” he said during a 2 ½-hour taped interview played in court.

“I drank too much,” he said at another point. “I was crazy, kinda out of my mind. I don’t remember a lot about it.”

Everyone, including prosecutors and defense attorneys, agreed that Cruse was severely mentally ill. But the prosecution maintained it was no excuse.

“Jury: Cruse guilty and knew it,” was how the Orlando Sentinel headline summed up the verdict on April 6, 1989.

“I am sorry all this has happened,” he sobbed later at his sentencing hearing. He got the death penalty.

“It won’t be fast enough for me,” Vy Johnson, the mother of one of the slain officers, told the Palm Beach Post. “The trial of William Cruse will go on forever, but our people will be forgotten.”

Off he went to the Florida State Prison in Starke, home of the state’s electric chair. His wife moved back to her native Turkey.

Year after year, appeal after appeal, he remained on Death Row, a cadaverous figure with an unkempt beard and long stringy hair, wandering his cell, speaking to no one.

He was still awaiting his execution on Nov. 29, 2009 — more than 22 years after his crime — when he died of natural causes. At 82, he had earned the dubious distinction of being the oldest person on Florida’s Death Row.

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