I sat at the kitchen table with Estelle and May and we ate a quiet dinner of grilled grouper and rice. I tucked May in at 9:30. I told her very gently that the next morning was going to be a day she would remember for the rest of her life. I told her that whatever happened, I needed her to be brave for 90 seconds. I told her that after those 90 seconds, the entire United States Department of Justice was going to be on our street.
She kissed my forehead. Grandpa, I can be brave for 90 seconds. I sat in her doorway for a long time after she fell asleep. The hallway light caught the side of her tennis racket propped against the dresser and a photograph on the wall of her mother holding her at 6 months old in a yellow sun hat on a Sarasota beach. I thought about Annalie.
I thought about Beck, 200 miles offshore, asleep in a steel bunk. I thought about every elderly Floridian I had not yet been able to save. Then I went to the kitchen, made a fresh pot of coffee, and sat at the table with my service weapon broken down on a soft cloth, cleaning each component the way my father had taught me to clean a rifle in 1976. Theron Aley walked across his front lawn to mine on the Sunday afternoon before the assault. He was 76 years old in khaki shorts and a worn fishing shirt with a Manila accordion file the size of a small briefcase under his arm.
He had retired in 2019 from the federal bench in Tampa after 22 years as a US magistrate judge. He had heard by quiet arrangement with Camille Mortonson that I was the FBI's victim of record on the Sentinel case. He had been waiting 2 years for somebody to ask the right question. He set the accordion file on my patio table. Hayes, I have been keeping a file on Sentinel Estate Protection Services since 2022.
I would like you to look at it. There are six deaths. I asked him to repeat himself. Six deaths, three at Bayou Pines Estates, two at a community called Hammock Cove in Sarasota County, one at Cypress Lakes in Dotto County, all elderly, all occurred during or within 24 hours of a sentinel detention. Four of them were ruled natural causes by the same Manatee County medical examiner.
A man named Dr. Garner Vorhees, who was Spencer Vorhees's older brother. The fifth was ruled accidental in Dodto. The sixth was an aspiration pneumonia in a man who had been toast by a sentinel guard 6 hours before he died. No criminal charges were filed in any of them. I let that sit for a long moment.
Theron, have you taken this to anyone? Hayes, I have been sitting on this file for 2 years. I tried twice in 2022. I called the Manatee County Sheriff's Office. They told me Sentinel was a licensed private service and they had no jurisdiction.
I called the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They opened a file and never returned my calls. I drafted a letter to the FBI in November of 2022. I did not send it because at the time I did not know if the bureau would treat it seriously, and I was afraid that if my name went on a letter that died in a drawer, my own family might be the next victim. I was waiting for somebody who could not be intimidated.
I read the bureau briefing on you last week. I decided you were the man. I opened the accordion file. The first folder was about a man named Wilburn Hendris, age 74, a retired Loheed Martin engineer. He died of cardiac arrest in 2022 after being detained by three sentinel guards for an unleashed Yorkie.