Not all heroes wear capes. Or want to be called heroes.
Back in 1988, then-Orlando Mayor Bill Frederick was hailed as a crime-fighting superhero when he chased down a man he saw stabbing a woman, pulled out a city-issued gun and fired a “warning shot” to apprehend the suspect. It was front-page news for the Orlando Sentinel but also made national headlines.
Here’s the Sentinel’s story by reporter Robin Benedict about the gun-firing mayor from May 13, 1988:
One minute Orlando Mayor Bill Frederick was paying for his breakfast at Ronnie’s Restaurant. The next he was firing a warning shot to capture a man he had seen stab a woman outside.
“I’m not a hero,” Frederick said. “I was scared.”
The 53-year-old mayor wiped beads of sweat from his forehead, shrugged his shoulders and steadied his voice as he described for reporters his actions Thursday morning outside the popular breakfast spot at Colonial Plaza. Frederick told how he chased a man who had swung a screwdriver at him, fired the warning shot to stop the suspect, and then held his foot on him until police arrived.
The man would have escaped if the mayor had not darted to his Buick and grabbed his police department-issued handgun from the glove compartment, Frederick said.
“He ran like a horse after this guy,” said Anita Schwartz, 51, a waitress at Ronnie’s.
The mayor, who said he was a member of a Navy pistol team in the late 1950s, said he knew what he was doing because he is experienced with firearms. Last month, he completed a 4-hour firearms safety course with the Orlando Police Department. He said he has applied for a concealed weapons permit under Florida’s new gun law but said he has no intention of carrying a gun on his person regularly.
Police credited the mayor’s quick-thinking for the arrest of Richard Russell Bohannan, 32, of Altamonte Springs.
Bohannan, of 465 Forest Way Circle is being held in the Orange County Jail without bond on charges of attempted murder, aggravated battery and burglary to an occupied vehicle with battery. He will appear before a judge today.
The Orlando Sentinel’s front-page story from May 1988 of Mayor Bill Frederick’s saga chasing down a suspect in a stabbing and firing his city-issued gun. He was given the rifle at an event later that day. (Orlando Sentinel File)
Officers said he and the victim, Joanne Turner Bohannan, of 2704 Bon Air Drive in west Orange, are in the process of getting a divorce. Mrs. Bohannan, 23, was treated at Orlando Regional Medical Center for stab wounds to both ears and her right arm.
Richard Bohannan has a criminal record back to 1977, when he was sentenced to three years’ probation in Pinellas County on charges of aggravated assault and throwing a deadly missile in an occupied dwelling. In 1983 he was charged with aggravated assault stemming from a Volusia County case in which he was accused of ramming the car of a woman identified as his ex-wife. That charge was reduced, and he pleaded guilty in 1984 to charges of driving with a suspended license and criminal mischief. He was sentenced to two years of community control, a form of probation.
Frederick is seeking a third term as mayor this fall with no serious opposition.
Former Orlando Mayor Bill Frederick shows off the mementoes in his home from his reign as mayor and his other careers on Monday, March 14, 2005. (Orlando Sentinel File)
“He was popular before but now I guess he could even run for mayor of Carmel, Calif.,” said Ed Byrd, past chairman of the Orange County Democratic Committee. “Clint Eastwood, eat your heart out!”
Later in the evening, at a party that accompanied the opening of Church Street Exchange retail complex in downtown Orlando, Frederick was presented with a Montana-style cowboy “duster,” a western rifle, and a peaked Stetson hat by Orlando businessman Bob Snow.
“I think you’ll agree with me,” said Snow to assembled revelers at the retail center’s party, “that what the mayor did was great.” Frederick smiled as Snow then led the crowd in cheers and a toast to the mayor.
Police, Frederick and several witnesses gave this account of the Thursday morning incident:
Two cars had stopped in the parking lot in front of Ronnie’s shortly before 9 a.m. and a man and woman were talking in the front seat of one of them. Officers said Bohannan apparently had confronted his wife as she headed to work at a hair salon next door to the restaurant, on East Colonial Drive.
After a few minutes, the woman jumped out of the car and the man pulled her back inside.
“He started beating on her,” said Resty Acevedo, 51, the host at the restaurant. “A lot of people saw it but nobody did anything.”
Frederick and Ray Bassett, a member of the Orange County School Board, had just finished breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and rolls at Ronnie’s about 9 a.m. They were paying their bill when someone yelled through the front door to call police.
Former Orlando Mayor Bill Frederick drives his WW II amphibious jeep in Lake Ivanhoe, Orlando, on Monday, March 4t, 2002. He self-published a book on his hobby. (Orlando Sentinel File)
Thinking there was a fender-bender in the parking lot, Frederick and Bassett walked outside, heard screams and looked across the parking lot where a man was stabbing a woman in the front seat of a car.
As they approached, two men were pulling the man off the woman and dragging him out of the car.
“He kept saying he’d kill her. I grabbed hold of one foot and and another guy took the other foot and we pulled him out of the car,” said Phil Feeney, 42, an environmental engineer who had just eaten breakfast at the restaurant. Chip Ross, manager of Picture Perfect Hair, said the couple had recently separated and that Mrs. Bohannan told him that her husband threatened to kill her and hurt their young son several times.
As soon as Feeney and another man dragged the suspect from the car, he jumped up and began swinging and slashing his weapon, a Phillips-head screwdriver, at a crowd of people that had gathered in the parking lot. “He took a swing at me with that screwdriver,” Frederick said.
Frederick said he helped pull the man from the car. Several witnesses said the mayor walked up as the man was being dragged from the car.
The man then backed up and fled. The mayor ran to his locked sedan that belongs to the police department and pulled out a 9mm semiautomatic Beretta from its holster. The police department routinely issues a firearm to the mayor. The mayor said he had never used the gun before.
After a few steps, a pickup truck drove up and the driver, Richard Jackson, 33, of Jacksonville, yelled at Frederick to get in.
The pair then drove southeast out of the parking lot across Primrose Drive to the 2800 block of East Amelia Street at a driveway to the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center. The mayor jumped out of the truck as the man was running next to a ditch.
Waving his gun, Frederick said he yelled at the suspect to stop, and when the man didn’t, the mayor fired into the air. The man stopped. Another man identified as Onda George, of Ocoee, had followed the mayor in a car and ran up, waving a gun, as the shot was fired.
Frederick said he ordered his prisoner to lie on the ground and mayor put a foot on his back until police arrived.
“I don’t want this to become a vigilante thing,” Frederick told reporters. I think I did what any reasonable person would have done if he would have witnessed this guy trying to kill his wife.” The mayor often is accompanied by a bodyguard but was not Thursday.
“If the man had not had the weapon, if he had not made an attack on me with it, I wouldn’t have done that,” the mayor said.
“I wouldn’t have even gone after him. It was the only way I could get him to stop and the only way I felt secure approaching him.”
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