14 DAY TRIAL // A 47-year-old man from Orlando was shot and killed on the I-4 after reporting that he was being followed.
According to WTSP, police believe that Fred William Turner Jr., who was originally believed to be a victim of road rage was mistaken for someone else.
He pulled up to 50th Street and Columbus Drive on Saturday and called 911 to report that a man with a semi-automatic firearm was following him.
"The caller stated that the vehicle following him had earlier pulled up next to his vehicle and someone displayed what appeared to be a semiautomatic weapon to him," Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Debbie Carter describes.
He was still on the phone with the operator when he was shot at the intersection of the I-4 with the I-75.
"The caller stayed on the phone with 911 operators and the dispatchers heard multiple gunshots," Carter says.
"We're going to have to reconstruct [exactly what happened] from the 911 tapes. [...] We know that we have the shooting apparently on the tape," Sheriff David Gee adds.
The Orlando Sentinel reported that the man following Turner in a Ford Taurus opened fire without provocation.
"At some point, for unknown reasons, the occupant, or occupants, of one vehicle fired multiple shots at the other vehicle," Carter said.
The shooter turned himself in yesterday, and he was booked into the Hillsborough County jail on first-degree murder charges.
48-year-old Jerome Edward Hayes of St. Cloud told police that he believed the victim to be a man he had a violent confrontation with inside a bar moments before the shooting.
He saw Turner walking out of an adult video store nearby and mistook him for the person he was looking for.
"He did nothing wrong. [...] He was a wonderful man," Lillian Schlesak of Clearwater said of the victim.