By BILLY TOWNSEND
The Tampa Tribune

LAKELAND - The shoulder-to-shoulder line of Central Florida SWAT officers, organized in closely linked teams of 10 or 11, stretched for hundreds of feet and slowly crept north toward Interstate 4.

Carrying MP5 submachine guns and other assault weapons, the officers hacked through vines and poked at every possible hiding place Friday in a dense patch of brush and woods that had become ground zero of the search for a man who killed a deputy.

Just after 9:30 a.m., one of the teams happened upon a large fallen oak tree. Dug in beneath it they found the man accused of ambushing and killing Deputy Matt Williams and his K-9 partner Diogi on Thursday.

“They were pretty much on top of him before they could see him,” Sheriff Grady Judd said.

In a flash, what probably was the most intensive manhunt in Polk County history reached its climax.

One officer, who hasn’t been identified, ordered the suspect to show his hands, Judd said. The suspect showed just one hand.

Then someone saw a gun in the other, and nine of 10 members of the team opened fire, killing the man in place with “numerous” shots, Judd said. It was less than 100 yards from where Williams and Diogi were killed.

The suspect had his right hand on Williams’ 45-caliber semiautomatic service handgun, investigators said.

About a half-mile away, at the command post near Kathleen High School, police radios began to crackle, and the news spread fast.

At one point Judd was heard on the radio saying, “Search is over. Suspect Signal Seven.” That’s police language for dead.

A cheer went up.

Within moments, Judd arrived to tell reporters, announcing, “God will be the judge and jury this time.”

2 Days, 2 Names

But who is the man upon whom the verdict was rendered?

The sheriff’s office provided a second possible identity for him in as many days.

Judd said detectives are certain that a man arrested in Polk County in 1999 under the name Angilo Freeland, 27, is the same man killed under the tree Friday.

They do not know if that’s the name on his birth certificate or the one he used most often. Angilo Freeland has ties to several Lakeland addresses, investigators said. None seems current.

A different name, Eswardo O. Ramclaim, was provided Thursday night - with warnings that it probably was bogus. It was the name the man gave Deputy Douglas Speirs when he stopped him for speeding at 10th Street and Wabash Avenue in north Lakeland.

Freeland was arrested in 1999 by the Florida Highway Patrol on charges that he had no driver’s license, fled from officers and had a concealed weapon.

The charges echo the circumstances of Thursday’s 11:45 a.m. traffic stop, from which Freeland bolted into a nearby wooded area.

By late afternoon Friday, crime scene technicians were working closely over Freeland’s body, which was to be sent to the medical examiner’s office. Judd said he expects a better identification to emerge.

In the meantime, Judd said, detectives are developing a picture of who Freeland was. They found no drugs in the rental car he was driving, but they think he has ties to a drug ring.

And Judd said two cell phones he dropped and a “book of associates” detectives found are providing a number of leads.

The Ambush

Judd provided more details Friday about what might have happened in the woods when Speirs, Williams and Diogi went in after Freeland as other deputies ringed the area.

It appears Williams and Diogi tracked Freeland almost too successfully and that the dense vegetation worked to their disadvantage.

“They had run him into an area so thick that he couldn’t move,” Judd said.

With nowhere left to run, Freeland holed up behind a tree in much the same fashion that he did Friday morning. And then he struck in what Judd called “an ambush.” Judd said Williams and Diogi were too good at their jobs to have been overcome by anything other than an ambush.

Detectives think Freeland used a 9 mm Taurus handgun to kill Williams and his dog. That gun also was found on Freeland after he was killed. Detectives still are not saying where Williams was hit, but they have said he was struck with several shots and likely died instantly.

Speirs was wounded in the leg shortly afterward in an exchange of fire, and the shooter fled.

Speirs was treated at a Lakeland hospital Thursday but not admitted. It wasn’t immediately clear which weapon Freeland used on Speirs or when he took Williams’ weapon.

However he did it, Freeland managed to kill a seasoned deputy and his highly trained K-9, take his gun and ammunition, wound another deputy and successfully elude capture in a fairly confined space for almost 24 hours.

It shows a capability of cool, tactical thinking, sheriff’s officials said.

“It makes you wonder,” said Gary Hester, sheriff’s office chief of staff, when asked whether detectives think Freeland might have received formal military training of some kind.

Hester said there is no evidence of that. But he said one source in the investigation says Freeland might have trained informally at a Lakeland gun range.

A Violent, Vital Confrontation

Judd said Friday that the key to getting Freeland was how quickly deputies and police officers sealed off both the wooded area and the wider swath of north Lakeland that remained locked down throughout the manhunt.

It helped that deputies were on scene backing up the search for Freeland when the shooting started.

Judd singled out the Lakeland Police Department for praise. He cited the agency’s quick arrival at Interstate 4, cutting Freeland’s access to the north.

He said two Lakeland police officers who exchanged gunfire with Freeland just after the deputies were shot might have staved off a worse crisis. They forced him back into the woods and away from an elderly couple’s home at 1446 Wabash Ave., the very northern end of the road.

“He would have got in there and hurt that couple and got himself a car,” Hester said.

On Friday, Paul Prebor, 76, the owner of the home, casually retold his brush with death and showed off bullet marks - one coming, one going - in the eaves of his outdoor laundry room and shed near the rear of his house.

Nearby, sheriff’s administrators picked up spent canisters of tear gas that still gave off enough odor to make eyes water. Officers had used them Thursday, thinking Freeland might have run from the gunfire into the house as Prebor and his wife fled.

The Prebors live several hundred yards north of the site of the traffic stop and even closer to the spot where Freeland was killed.

Paul Prebor said he didn’t hear the shooting of the deputies, but he quickly noticed the commotion that followed and came out to see what was going on. He saw officers with guns drawn telling him to go back inside, where his wife was, and lock his doors.

After a few moments informing neighbors, Prebor was preparing to go inside when Lakeland policeofficers Jeff Birdwell, a detective, and Jose Bosque pulled up.

They got out, Prebor said, and one asked a strange question: “Does that black man in your backyard have any reason to be there?”

‘He Was Tall’

Rather than answer, Prebor, who was facing away from his backyard, said he instinctively turned. He saw Freeland, gun drawn, run into the covered opening of the shed, step in front of a barbecue grill and open fire at him and the officers. They were standing about 75 yards away, near the street.

Prebor said he thinks Freeland fired twice and that the officers quickly fired twice in return. Lakeland police spokesman Jack Gillen, who identified the officers, said both got off rounds, but he did not know how many.

All the shots, from both sides, missed. Freeland bolted back into the Prebors’ backyard. Prebor rushed to retrieve his wife, who was in the kitchen behind an open window, and take her across the street to a neighbor’s home.

Prebor said he saw Freeland for about three seconds.

“It happened so fast, I didn’t have time to be scared. I’m not that emotional about things,” he said.

His impression of Freeland? “I thought he was tall.”

That’s accurate. Freeland’s Polk arrest record lists him at 6-foot-2. At least one of his bullets struck the inside eave of the shed on its way out, splintering wood and perhaps altering the path of the bullet.

Though officers weren’t able to nab or kill Freeland there, they managed to push him away from the area where he might most easily have found hostages and likely back into the brush, sheriff’s officials said.

“We felt confident that he hadn’t gotten out of there,” Hester said. “We felt he was pinned down.”

They were confident enough that Thursday night the SWAT leaders from the various agencies on scene began to plan the meticulous search of the woods that would find Freeland on Friday morning.

They would find and kill him within sight of Prebor’s home.

Editor Dave Nicholson contributed to this report. Reporter Billy Townsend can be reached at (863) 284-1409 or   wtownsend@tampatrib.com.

UNFOLDING EVENTS

Thursday

11:45 a.m.: Deputy Douglas Speirs pulls over a driver for speeding at 10th Street and Wabash Avenue. The driver runs into dense woods northwest of the traffic stop scene. Backup deputies arrive to surround the area. After several minutes, Speirs, Deputy Vernon Matthew “Matt” Williams and his dog partner, Diogi, go into the woods.

12:30 p.m.: The driver fires at the deputies, killing Williams and Diogi. Speirs is wounded in the leg. The shooter flees.

About 1 p.m.: As deputies and police begin swarming the area, the man is seen in the backyard of a home at 1446 N. Wabash. He exchanges fire with two Lakeland police officers. No one is hit. The man disappears again.

4 p.m.: Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd announces Williams and Diogi are dead. A massive manhunt spreads across much of north Lakeland.

About 7 p.m.: Students from nearby Kathleen High School are taken by bus, under armed guard, to a north Lakeland church, where parents finally are allowed to pick them up.

9 p.m.: Judd gives his final briefing of the night and warns, “We’re prepared for a gunfight if he wants a gunfight.”

Friday

9:35 a.m.: A patrol of SWAT officers walking shoulder to shoulder near the scene of the shootings happens upon the driver, who had buried himself beneath a fallen tree overgrown with brush. The man raises only one hand. The officers, seeing a gun, open fire, killing the man. Moments later a cheer is heard at the law enforcement command center near Kathleen High.

9:50 a.m.: Judd announces suspect is dead. He was carrying a .45-caliber handgun thought to be Williams’ service weapon.

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