For Fallen Stop Sign, Vandals Face Life

TAMPA, Fla. —  It was a clear, dark February night when the fates collided in front of Tim’s Cafe at a rural intersection where a stop sign lay face-down by the side of the road.

One of the vehicles involved was an eight-ton Mack truck loaded with phosphate. The other was a white Camaro carrying three 18-year-old friends on a one-way ride to eternity. Chances are, police said, they never knew what hit them.

Tow trucks and sheriff’s deputies were still on the scene a few hours later when a fourth young man named Thomas Miller pulled up. He and a friend had just finished working the graveyard shift at a welding shop and were heading to Tim’s for breakfast.

Miller got out of his car to see the wreckage better and, he recalled later, he stood right next to the fallen stop sign.

Now, 16 months after that fatal crash, Miller and two friends stand convicted on three counts of manslaughter, guilty of causing three deaths by pulling that stop sign out of the ground days earlier.

Although Miller, 20, and his housemates, Nissa Baillie, 21, and her boyfriend, Christopher Cole, 20, admitted taking about 20 road signs during a late-night spree sometime before the fatal crash, they denied tampering with the stop sign in front of Tim’s Cafe.

But a jury did not believe them.

On June 19 Miller, Baillie and Cole could be sentenced to life in prison in what is believed to be the first case in the United States in which the vandalism of a traffic sign has led to a multiple manslaughter conviction.

What has become known as the “stop sign case” has had a wrenching effect on the families of the six young people involved, while sparking a passionate community debate on the nexus of crime and punishment.

On one side is Assistant State Atty. Leland Baldwin, who prosecuted the three young people. “I have heard people ask: ‘How dare you charge them with manslaughter? This was a prank. It was an unintentional crime,’ ” she said. “But this was not a prank. These were not young kids. These were young adults. So give me a break.”

On the other side is Joseph Registrato, chief assistant to the Hillsborough County public defender, which represented Cole and Baillie.

“It’s one thing to take a car when you’re drunk and recklessly kill somebody,” Registrato said. “That law is well-understood. But in this case, they may have committed criminal mischief and then later three people died. But others had gone through that intersection and didn’t die. So there is a serious question about whether the [fallen] stop sign caused the deaths.

“From that they could get life in prison? It’s hard to follow the ball here.”

Road Sign Theft Called a Commonplace Prank

About this there is no debate: The chain of events that led up to that horrific crash in front of Tim’s Cafe makes up a cautionary tale of sobering complexity.

Joe Episcopo figures at least half the population of America at one time or another has stolen a road sign to hang on a bedroom wall, to win a scavenger hunt or just for kicks.

In fact, says Episcopo, a lawyer who represents Miller, road sign theft is so common that, when potential jurors in the case against his client were asked if they had ever taken a sign, half the pool raised a hand and three of those who answered yes ended up being seated on the six-member panel. “Everybody has somebody in their family who takes signs,” he said.

Indeed, vandalism and theft of road signs is a problem all across the country. After the trial here in the Hillsborough County courthouse was broadcast by Court TV, public officials from as far away as Washington state have been speaking out about the expense and danger resulting from defaced or stolen road signs.

In Iowa, a county engineer has announced plans to use the Tampa case as a springboard for a national education campaign on the issue.

Dave Krug, Hillsborough County public works department engineer, estimated that 25% of all road signs ever put up in the Tampa area are damaged by vandals, knocked down or stolen. Most road sign vandalism, however, does not result in triple fatalities, attract national media attention and provoke heart-wrenching community anguish over wasted lives.

Moreover, most road sign vandalism does not give rise to the sea of regrets among thousands of people--including at least 11 people who testified in the trial here--who noticed the downed stop sign during the 24 hours preceding the crash and failed to report it.

“Well, what did you do?” Baldwin asked of one witness who noticed that the stop sign was down.

“We just went back to work, got busy,” the witness replied.

Three Target Signs ‘for a Rush’

Miller, Baillie and Cole lived together in a rented $300-a-month mobile home on a country road less than three miles from the intersection of Keysville and Lithia-Pinecrest roads in eastern Hillsborough County where the fatal crash occurred just before midnight on Feb. 7, 1996.

According to interviews they gave to a local television station and Cole’s testimony at trial, the three had been shopping at a nearby Wal-Mart, had drunk a couple of beers and were headed home when one of the three suggested that they take a few road signs. Cole told a television reporter that they began taking signs “for a rush.”

Over a period of a couple of hours and a distance of about five miles, they unbolted and pulled up railroad signs, street name signs, a “Dead End” sign, a “Do Not Enter” sign and--from neighboring Polk County--at least one stop sign, tossing all of them in the back of their pickup truck.

Was it fun? Cole was asked. “I suppose so, yeah,” he replied. “Yeah, it was fun at the time.”

Night of Bowling Ends in Collision

Kevin Farr, who worked in his family’s data processing business, had been bowling with his father, Les, and his two older brothers on the evening of his death. He rolled a 218 in his final league game and, as he left the bowling alley, he shouted at one of his brothers: “Tell Mom I’ll be home between 11 o’clock and 12. I don’t want her to worry.”

From the bowling alley Farr drove to the house of Brian Hernandez, his best and oldest friend, and the pair then picked up Randall White. No one seems to know where they were going.

June Farr said that the death of the youngest of her four children has condemned her to live day by day. “And day by day takes on a whole new meaning after something like this,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more like a few minutes at a time.”

The case against Miller, Cole and Baillie was circumstantial. There were no fingerprints on the stop sign and no eyewitnesses who put them at the scene. But the fallen stop sign was well within the general area of the thefts to which the three had confessed and prosecutors presented expert testimony that the stop sign appeared to have been pulled from the ground, not run over by a vehicle.

The defense also had its own expert witness, a mechanical engineer who testified that the stop sign had been struck by a “lateral force.”

Defendants Say They Panicked Next Day

Perhaps the most damning evidence against Cole, Miller and Baillie came from their own statements to police. Ron Bradish, a Sheriff’s Department traffic homicide investigator, testified that Cole and Miller admitted that--during their stealing spree--they sometimes would pull signs from the ground and, if a car came by, leave them to pick up later.

The day after the fatal crash, the three defendants admitted to police, they panicked. They gathered up most of the stolen signs from inside and outside their mobile home and tossed them off a bridge into nearby Alafia Creek. According to Bradish, Cole said that they got rid of the signs “so no one would think they took the stop sign down at the crash.”

Held without bail, Cole, Miller and Baillie are to be sentenced next week after the judge hears from lawyers on both sides, as well as from relatives of the convicted and those who died.

While she will not lobby for life sentences, Baldwin says, she will insist on long terms. “I hope this case will be a deterrent, or, at least, somewhat thought-provoking,” she said. “Perhaps this is one of the types of cases that have to be tried every generation to remind high school kids and others that vandalism has consequences. And this does have an effect. Just days ago some kids in Leon County [Tallahassee] had a stop sign in a scavenger hunt and the media [publicity] stopped them.”

Again, Registrato demurs. “This case is useless as a deterrent,” he said. “Send these three children to prison for life and the kids in Hillsborough County where it happened won’t have a clue about it the next day.”

Episcopo and Registrato said they have prepared their clients for the worst. Sentencing guidelines call for 28 years to life and Judge Bob Anderson Mitcham has been known to use the suggested maximum as a starting point. Last year he put a man convicted of wounding two Tampa police officers in prison for seven consecutive life terms, ignoring guidelines that called for 14 to 24 years.

For June Farr, the sentencing decision seems straightforward. “My child got the maximum penalty and he had no choice in the matter,” she said. “They knew exactly what was going to happen. They just didn’t know who the victims would be. This was not a prank. Pranks don’t kill.”

To those who would find life in prison too harsh a price to pay for yanking out a stop sign, Farr responds: “They didn’t have to go pick out a coffin.”

Registrato said he would argue that Miller, Cole and Baillie could better atone for their sins and better serve society by doing “a couple of years hard time in Florida State Prison and then be required for the next 18 years to go to high schools twice a month and tell about the consequences of criminal mischief.”

Bill Miller, Thomas Miller’s father, clings to hope that his son will win a retrial and be found not guilty. He acknowledged that his son, who has a juvenile record for theft, has lied to him before. But this time, Miller said, “Tommy says he didn’t take that sign and I believe it with all my heart. We know when he’s lying.”

Whatever the outcome, said Miller, 69, a retired postal worker, he knows that the lives of his family, as well as the other five families involved, are forever changed.

“I was in court every day,” he said, “sitting in the front row on one side, across from the families of the dead boys. We didn’t speak but I felt for them. . . . They lost their children. I understand.

“Now they have to understand that I’ve lost mine. Win or lose, this is a tragedy for both sides.”