Author: John Cotey

Wade Angel walked his wife to the garage around 5 a.m. the morning of August 9, kissing Lynn goodbye as she slid into the driver’s seat.

He returned to his computer, where he has spent almost every free moment the past three years in his Wesley Chapel home, and checked his email. One had just popped in, from the State Attorney’s office.

Just one line: “Mr. Angel, we have good news, Christopher Ponce has been arrested.”

He started yelling for Lynn. Even above the din of her car engine, she could hear him, and hopped out of the car, meeting him at the garage door.

He told her what the email said. They started crying, and held each other’s shaking bodies in their arms.

“Three years of bottled-up emotion,’’ Wade says. “One minute we were crying, the next minute we were laughing and jumping up and down, and the next minute we’d be crying again.”

Christopher Ponce, accused of killing 20-year-old William Brooks Angel in 2012 while driving drunk, was arrested in Spain on Aug. 9 after a manhunt lasting more than three years.

Ponce was driving the wrong way in the northbound lanes of I-275 near downtown Tampa when he hit William Angel’s 2000 Ford Mustang, also seriously injuring passengers Jay Davis and Robert Newberry.

On May 9, 2013, Ponce slipped off an electronic monitoring bracelet he had been wearing while awaiting trial for DUI manslaughter. He has been on the run ever since.

In 2014, CNN’s “The Hunt”, hosted by John Walsh of “America’s Most Wanted” fame, profiled the case.

Wade has spent the last three years hunting his son’s killer. Until this year, he had been doing it on a full-time basis, leaving his job building and customizing wheelchairs at Shriners Hospital for Children in Tampa, to set up a website — FindChrisPonce.com —dedicated to the search and asking for tips.

He received many, but they all proved fruitless. New York City police interviewed someone in a bar there based on a tip. In Chicago, police visited a house they were told Ponce might be, and the same for a house in California.

Wade, however, never lost his drive.

“If William were here, he would say, ‘Dad, let it go,’” Wade says. “But, I made a promise. I did this for him, not for me. I wasn’t going to stop.”

He scoured the internet for 15 hours a day, and blogged often about Ponce. Wade was in constant touch with U.S. Marshalls and FBI agents, hopeful they were closing in on the fugitive.

For these last three years, the search consumed him. He says Lynn became concerned.

“But, she understood that the day we went to the funeral home to see my son’s body, I promised him that I was going to make sure that justice was done,’’ Wade said. “I thought by that I meant I was saying I would stay on top of the attorneys and get a proper trial and a lifelong sentence. But then, (Ponce) takes off. So, before I can get justice (for William), I have to find him.”

Although he continues to devote every free hour to the hunt, Wade finally returned to work in January, but not before posting this on Jan. 15, 2016: “I truly feel that this is the year we get him.”

And now, it is.

According to Wade, a reporter for Ideal, a newspaper in Granada, Spain, who broke the story, told him that Ponce had been acting suspiciously in a bus station in nearby Almeria, in southeast of Spain near the Mediterranean Sea, when police asked for his identification.

Ponce supplied a forged Mexican passport, and the name on his bus pass was not his. After fingerprinting him, Spanish police discovered he was listed in an Interpol fugitive database.

Ponce currently is awaiting extradition. The Ideal reporter told him Ponce is currently being held in one of the area’s tougher prisons. That made Wade happy.

He is not surprised at all that Ponce was caught in Spain. He received a tip through the website shortly after starting it in 2013, that Ponce was headed for Spain. So, he began tracking Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses, which are the numerical labels assigned to any device on a computer network that uses Internet Protocol, to see if anyone was checking his site from Spain.

Every month he would download all the IP addresses in a spreadsheet and email them to U.S. Marshalls.

Someone was definitely checking his website from Spain. Once in a McDonald’s, but usually on public wifi from bus stations.

Wade says, “When he was arrested in Spain, I said ‘I knew it!,’” adding that Ponce and his family are too narcissistic to resist the chance to see their names in print and wonder what people were saying about them. That’s one of the reasons, he says, that he started the website, hoping to catch Ponce electronically.

He would try to raise Ponce’s ire — “to get his dander up” Wade says — by posting negative things, hoping to bait him into commenting or trying to contact him.

“Since Christopher is a drunk and an addict, I thought maybe one time he would be drunk and high and he’d make a mistake,’’ Wade says.

Ponce may not have been directly captured because of any leads from Wade’s site, but because he was captured in a bus station, where so many IP address hits had come from, he could have been on his way to use the station’s public wifi.

Either way, it doesn’t matter, Wade says. Ponce will have plenty of time to read the site dedicated to putting him away for life from prison, where he will end up.

Wade’s last website update read, in part: “CHRISTOPHER PONCE HAS BEEN ARRESTED IN SPAIN!!!!!!!! That’s right, the POS is finally in jail.”

Wade promises it won’t be his last post, however.

“The website is still up, and I will continue to write,’’ Wade says. “I will take him (Ponce) through the extradition and then take him through the trial. I’m not done yet. The day he is sentenced, that will be my last post.”

You can follow Wade’s journey at FindChrisPonce.com, or on Facebook at Facebook.com/findchrisponce.