Transcription of Episode Four: ‘Something Out of a Nightmare’

“Breaking news in Tampa. A body found tonight in the same Seminole Heights neighborhood where two murders took place last week.”

This is day 11.

It’s 8:01 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017. Estelle Faria is headed to her home in Seminole Heights. She’s in her car, driving down 15th Street North when she sees something lying on the side of the road – a body. She doesn’t see anyone else around, no one running or standing nearby. She keeps driving. Estelle goes home – about a one or two-minute drive from where she sees the body – and changes her clothes. Then, she heads back to the scene.

When she gets there, it’s 8:05 p.m. Her eyes weren’t deceiving her – there’s a body on the sidewalk. She can tell it’s a boy and someone young. He’s wearing a blue sleeveless shirt, running shorts and sneakers. She believes he’s about 16 years old. She’s only a few years off. She doesn’t go near the body, not until law enforcement get there. 

Police arrive about three minutes after Estelle returns to the scene. But they’ve been searching the neighborhood for the past few minutes – before Estelle drove past a body on the side of the road. Turns out, they heard the gunshots while patrolling the neighborhood.

This was the first time since Benjamin Mitchell’s death that they knew the killer was nearby. They have the body, now they need to find the person who pulled the trigger.

The neighborhood is basically put on lockdown. Police officers take over, scouring Seminole Heights on the ground and sending choppers up in the sky. They also send out a K9 team to search the area. They take the K9, named Sniper, east of the shooting scene, hoping he’ll pick up a scent. But Sniper doesn’t find anything. Law enforcement doesn’t either. No tracks, no video showing the suspect, nothing. 

What they do realize is the body is in front of a house they’re familiar with. It’s where Benjamin Mitchell lived. It’s where his aunt and uncle still live. They weren’t home at the time, they’d all gone out to dinner just minutes before the shooting. 

Here’s Angelique Dupree again, Benjamin’s cousin we talked to in Episode Two: “We were just standing in that driveway. Just standing in that driveway. We rode from her house to downtown to eat. By the time we sat down, all of our phones were going off.”

Around 8 p.m., Casimar Naiboa is getting worried. His son Anthony should be home by now. He was taking the bus from work. As time goes by, he continues to worry. He sees something on television about another body being found. Casimar goes up to the scene.

“All these lights. I told police my son is missing. You’re hoping they’re going to tell you, no it’s not him.”

That was the voice of Casimar Naiboa, Anthony’s father. He’d be worried if any of his kids didn’t come home on time and he couldn’t find them, but it’s a little different with Anthony. He has autism. Anthony’s high-functioning and pretty independent but Casimar still worries about him, mostly that someone could take advantage of Anthony one day. 

At this moment that worry is taking a backseat because his biggest fear is the body lying in the road is Anthony’s.

Casimar talks to a couple of officers. They tell him the body found is someone black. Casimar’s family is Puerto Rican. His skin is a caramel color, but Anthony’s is a little darker. He tells police that. They take a report from him and his girlfriend, Maria Rodriguez.

Casimar doesn’t know it at the time, but that body is his son’s. What’s worse, he’s already dead. He was shot once in the head and pronounced dead on the scene.

Although he doesn’t know whose body police found, Casimar knows something isn’t right. He goes home to wait for updates.

Casimar: “We keep waiting. We’re really feeling something. Another car came in, different uniforms. They didn’t need to say anything, just sorry.”

Just after midnight, the Naiboa family is told Anthony is dead. He was just 20 years old.

—

It’s more than a year later now and just four days before Christmas. It’s the second one Anthony’s family will go through without him. We’re at his father’s home. There’s a Christmas tree set up and lights. Under it is a Christmas gift for Anthony wrapped in bright blue paper. In the corner of the living room is a bookcase. There are no books in it. It’s a memorial to Anthony. There are pictures of him: Anthony at graduation, Anthony with his family. Stuffed animals, mostly foxes, which Anthony loved. Sometimes they put his favorite foods or drinks on it, just to feel like he’s still there.

We talk to Casimar Naiboa in the dining area of his home. Casimar has short black hair and a goatee – so long it’s braided right now. He has an accent – a sign of his Puerto Rican heritage. He’s committed to keeping his son’s memory alive. No matter how tough the question or how painful the memory, he’ll talk about it. He’ll do whatever it takes to make sure Anthony isn’t forgotten.

Anthony was born in New York City. Casimar’s entire family – his mother, siblings, cousins – has lived there for at least 40 years. Casimar, his wife and kids lived in Manhattan and later moved to Far Rockaway in Queens. When Anthony was a toddler, his parents noticed he wasn’t developing at the same rate as his older siblings had. 

Casimar: “We noticed Anthony wasn’t communicating, we knew more or less, something wasn’t right. We checked him up and they diagnosed him with autism.”

It wasn’t easy for Anthony to find someone to play with as a kid. Other children didn’t understand him. He wasn’t very verbal. He’d walk off by himself sometimes. He sort of lived in his own world. Casimar says Anthony was lucky though. He had four siblings so there was always someone to play with him. 

Anthony and his siblings were close. You get a glimpse of their relationship in a video on his YouTube page. It starts out with Anthony, holding the camera up to a shot of his face. He’s in a bedroom and the door is closed.

“Hi. I’m Anthony and I’m about to launch my first prank on my brother,” he says in the video.

He shows off a water balloon. He’s going to throw it at his brother. The video cuts to a scene outside of an apricot-colored house. There’s a trampoline in the back and what looks like a stack of plastic bins. A couple of young kids are dancing to music. These are Anthony’s siblings, Karen and Taino. They’re moving from side to side, waving their arms around, giggling the entire time.

Anthony walks out with the ballon. Taino stops dancing and starts to run, but Karen holds him in place. Anthony steps up and hits his brother with the ballon. The kids can’t stop laughing. It’s such a wholesome moment – one they probably remember fondly now that Anthony’s gone.

Anthony loved to have a good time. But he has his sad moments when he wondered what made him different from other people.

Casimar: “Hardest question Anthony asked me, he said ‘Papa?’ I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘Why did I come out like this?'”

When Anthony was 10 years old, the Naiboa family packed up and moved to Tampa, Florida. They felt like their kids would get a better education there. 

Because he had autism, Anthony was put in a class for students who need special instruction. He didn’t like it. Anthony was bored staying in the same class all day. He also felt like he wasn’t being challenged. Anthony told his father he was so far ahead in the class, he was actually helping the teacher with other students.

Another thing he hated was walking in a line with the other students to lunch. He wanted to go by himself. Anthony wanted to be independent. 

When Anthony was in middle school, Casimar talked to his teacher. They made a plan for Anthony. He’d get to go to other classrooms for different subjects and they’d make sure his school work was more challenging. He could also walk to the lunchroom alone.

It worked for Anthony in middle school. But when he got to high school, he was back to square one. Once again, he was in the same room all day and he wasn’t being challenged by his work.

Casimar: “The teacher called me and he was like Anthony don’t want to work. He’s mad he says that’s easy for him.”

Casimar proposed the same plan Anthony had been on in middle school. He told them to let Anthony attend other classes and give him more challenging course work. Unlike their middle school experience, Casimar says the teachers were more skeptical. He felt like they didn’t think Anthony could do it. 

Casimar: “Going back, the teacher was like, negative. The other teachers where he was coming from, the other classrooms. They were like, he might be scared that he’s going to look different and sit back in the back, not answering nothing.”

Casimar didn’t think Anthony would completely open up to everyone in the classroom, although he didn’t think he’d be a wallflower either. But it didn’t matter. The most important thing to Casimar was that Anthony was learning. 

A few weeks after teachers agreed to allow Anthony to go to other classes, Casimar went to visit the school to see how Anthony was adjusting to his new schedule. The classrooms have windows on the doors, allowing Casimar to peek in to check on Anthony.

Casimar: “The teacher say something, I look into the window to the glass and Anthony was raising his hand.”

By the next year, Anthony was in all general classes – no more ESE instruction. But some of the courses weren’t worth full credits, so he wouldn’t have enough to graduate with a regular diploma. But Anthony wanted that. 

If Anthony wanted it, Casimar wanted to make sure he could get it.

Unfortunately, the prognosis wasn’t good. Anthony could end up in school for a few more years. He could be 21 years old by the time he was done. Anthony thought about it. He could still go to Hillsborough Community College without a regular diploma. But he wanted that diploma, so he decided to go for it.

Around this time, Anthony’s parents got a divorce. He split his time between his parents, but mostly lived with his mom. She’d moved to a different school zone, so he had to switch schools. There were a lot of changes, but it didn’t distract Anthony from his goal of getting his diploma. 

Casimar remembers the day Anthony told him the big news.

Casimar: “And he told me, ‘Papa, I’m graduating.’ I said, ‘I know that, next year.’ ‘No, this year.’ ‘This year, with a regular diploma?’ ‘Yep.’ Yeah, I was happy.”

You can see the pride in Casimar’s face and hear it in his voice. His daughter Karen, who’s a year younger than Anthony, also graduated from high school that year. And he has another son who just graduated from Tampa Tech last year. He’s also proud of them, but they didn’t have the same obstacles and hurdles to face as Anthony. 

Casimar knows a lot of autistic kids are bright and can finish high school, but he also knows it can be harder for them. He says Anthony didn’t take the easy way. It’s a running theme in Anthony’s life, doing whatever it takes to reach his goals.

When Anthony decided to delay college and get a job instead, he did it the same way he got through high school – with perseverance. There were a lot of roadblocks. Anthony had a hard time in interviews. He wouldn’t make eye contact. He’d be looking up at the ceiling and laughing to himself. It’s normal for someone with autism, but Casimar says some employers didn’t understand it.

So Anthony kept applying at places – about 20 in total – before he got his first job. He was a parking attendant. He was excited to start earning his own money and get more responsibility. 

A week after he started, Casimar went to Anthony’s job to check up on him, and his son was taking charge. 

Casimar: “He was telling people like you park here, you park here.”

Anthony took his job seriously. He even moved back to his father’s house full-time because it was closer to work. One of the things Casimar lovingly remembers about his son is how much he hated to be late. Anthony would sometimes leave hours before he had to be at work just to be sure he got there on time.

He got laid off a year into the job. Anthony was one of the newer hires, so when it was time to make cuts, he ended up on the chopping block. It was stressful for him. He was sad. He started sleeping all of the time. Casimar tried to lift his spirits. He told him everyone’s been fired before, but you just have to bounce back from it. The pep talks didn’t really work.

The only thing that could bring Anthony out of his funk was music.

He liked to produce tracks on the computer, mostly hip-hop beats. It took him a while on his laptop, which was more equipped for homework than producing music, but he made it work.

James Firefox is what Anthony went by in the music world. He had a lot of fans. His SoundCloud account has almost 600 followers. Some of them have left comments on his tracks, praising his producing skills.

For each track, he’d include a description of which artists he could imagine rapping to the beats, like J. Cole, Drake and Travis Scott. Maybe he hoped one day they’d hear his music. Maybe invite him to the studio to record a few tracks. 

It’s a big dream – one Anthony didn’t get to achieve. 

After a while, Anthony got another job – this time at a warehouse working to bring supplies to Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico. He’d bring in palettes of food from trucks, which were then separated and shipped to the island. It was the first job where he was interacting with his co-workers and he loved it. He’d go up to his boss every day and give her a hug, something she told Casimar she misses now. 

When he got his first paycheck, Anthony didn’t save it up to get a better computer to produce beats on or go spend it on box season sets of his favorite shows like “Family Guy” or “Rick and Morty.” He used it to take his father’s girlfriend, Maria, out to dinner.

“He was happy about his paycheck. He wanted to take me out, I said ‘No, save your money.’ We went to a Chinese buffet. To this day it’s still in my heart. He thanked me a lot for everything I did. I told him I loved him as if he was my own child.”

That was Maria Rodriguez. She only knew Anthony for about a year, but they were close. Maria is technically Casimar’s girlfriend, but they refer to each other as husband and wife. She called him her “sunshine.” The loss of that light has hit her hard. 

Maria: “We both clicked immediately. He would call me before he called his dad.”

The night Anthony was murdered, he called Maria. It was 7:24 p.m. He told her he was taking a different bus home. 

We need to clear something up here: A lot of early reports said he’d gotten on the wrong bus, but Casimar says that’s not true. It wasn’t his usual bus, but it was the only one available that night that had a stop near their neighborhood. Anthony knew where it was going.

When Anthony was late getting home, Maria tried to call him a few more times. No answer. 

A few hours later, they found out why. 

That night, the family didn’t sleep. They were in a real-life nightmare, trying to come to terms with Anthony’s death. After a few hours in the house, Casimar and Maria left. There was something they needed to see.

At this time, Police Chief Brian Dugan is standing at the scene of Anthony’s murder. Every day during the investigation, he’d start out by going to the crime scenes. He’d go in order. So that morning, he started with Benjamin Mitchell, then Monica Hoffa, then Anthony Naiboa.

Here’s Chief Dugan: “So I was standing there, where Anthony had just laid on the sidewalk just hours earlier, and a man and woman came down the sidewalk and I started talking to them and introduced myself as the chief of police. He said yes. The man says ‘I know who you are I saw you on TV last night.’ He said ‘that was my son that was murdered.’ I was speechless. He wanted to know where his son was killed. I pointed to the ground and I showed him – we do the best we can of cleaning up crime screens, but the sand that was on the sidewalk between the cracks had the bloodstains in them, so I showed him the blood-stained sand where his son just laid hours earlier.”

Casimar remembers this moment. It’s still so vivid in his mind that when we ask about it, it’s like he’s transported back to Oct. 20. He turns his head and looks down at the floor as if he’s looking down at the blood-stained cement once again, probably the moment he really accepted for the first time that his son was gone. He starts crying as he recalls the worst day of his life.

Casimar: “I look at my son’s blood. I look at my son’s blood. Lying on the floor. All of this blood. Something out of a nightmare, looking at his blood. My kid’s blood on the floor. Touching it”

That moment changed both of their lives. Casimar realized his son was never coming home. And Chief Dugan started looking at the investigation in a whole new light. 

Chief Dugan: “It’s an emotional moment for me. It is something I take with me. I still think about it like it was yesterday. That’s when it really became personal for me.”

The family came back to the scene later and picked up Anthony’s glasses. They’re now sitting on the bookshelf memorializing him. It’s one way they’re keeping his legacy alive. They’ve also started a foundation. So far, it’s helped buy some students computers. In the future, the family wants to help kids with autism. Casimar is also working with the friends Anthony made through his love of music to find more ways to honor him.

Casimar carries a lot of guilt with him now. He knows Anthony’s death isn’t his fault, but he can’t stop wondering if he did all he could. 

Casimar: “You ask yourself, sometimes I blame myself. When he called me I looked for him. I wish I could push the time back.”

It feels like that’s almost what we’ve been doing for hours, allowing Casimar to go back in time and reminisce about Anthony. We can’t blame him for wanting to talk about his son. Anthony seems like a great kid. He was determined, talented, funny and kind. 

In the days after our interview, Casimar sends us a few texts. Photos of Anthony, alone and with his family. One showing him in his cap and gown on graduation day, a medal dangling from his neck. 

He sends us a video of Anthony and Maria dancing at a club in Ybor City. Anthony loved to dance. He and Maria are both wearing wide smiles as they move from side to side, Anthony spinning her around a few times. This is back when he was a parking attendant, so he’s still wearing his uniform – a neon shirt with reflective stripes on it. Anthony would get off work at 2 a.m. and Casimar would convince the club to let them in after closing so Anthony could dance for a few minutes. They loved those special nights. 

Casimar also sends us a memory. A few days before Anthony died, Casimar was away from home working and Anthony called. He asked when Casimar was coming home. He told Anthony he’d be back that Sunday. Anthony told his father he loved and missed him. It was the first time Anthony had ever said that to him. 

Casimar: “He always smiled. People who knew him always smiled. Easy-going. Anthony never argued. I never saw him argue. Sometimes he got mad because they pick on him,  they make jokes. In the beginning, he was getting mad but at the end, he wasn’t getting mad no more. I never saw him cursing. Beautiful kid, beautiful kid. Anthony is a good kid. Anybody’s friend, a good kid. He didn’t deserve to die in the street like that for no reason. Anthony had dreams.”

Day 12: The stakes rise. Crime Stoppers of Tampa Bay team up with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to offer a $25,000 reward for any information that leads to an arrest of the killer.

But it’ll be 39 more days with another murder in between before police find the suspect. 

Maybe because it’s someone no one ever suspected.

51 Days of Terror is hosted by me, Amanda Ciavarri. It’s written and executive produced by Brianti Downing. Kelly Hatton is our associate producer. Editing by Dallas Cotton. Heather Monahan is our digital producer. Tim Price is our digital editor.

Thank you to everyone who talked to us about the investigation, especially the victims. We’re honored to tell their stories.