Hurricane Irma, Fires, Neo-Nazis & The Loss Of Too Many People
Crazy weather, fires blazing their way through forests and over roads, neo Nazi controversy and contentious budget battles.
Welcome to New Tampa!
While those stories all sound like incidents happening around the country you might catch while watching CNN, they were, in fact, local news stories in New Tampa in 2017.
(Spoiler alert: Most of the good news is in our cover story.)
Hurricane Irma might have been the biggest story of the year, especially when you consider the number of people who fled or hunkered down in shelters in anticipation of the Category 5 storm that approached Florida in mid-September. Some storm models had the hurricane slicing right through Tampa Palms.
Windows were boarded as plywood become a hot, then scarce, commodity. Water flew off the shelves at every area store, days before the storm actually blasted through the area Sept. 20-21.
As it turned out, Irma was more bark than bite when she finally showed up in New Tampa. We’re thankful the biggest story of the year wasn’t bigger.
Fires!
On the other end of the weather scale, dry conditions and a lack of rain in May led to three brush fires that burned more than 200 acres in Flatwoods Park, and led to the temporary closure of I-75 due to smoky conditions that spread as far as Lakeland. Thankfully the fire was contained before any damage could be done to nearby homes and businesses.
Another fire, this one intentionally set in February by an arsonist at the Daarus Salaam Mosque on Morris Bridge Rd., failed to do its intended damage, thanks to alarm sprinklers, but still left members without a place to worship for a few weeks. Cypress Pointe Community Church opened its doors to its neighbors until the mosque was suitable for worship.
At our press time, no one had been arrested for setting the fire.
New Tampa Neo-Nazis?
Yes, you read that right.
In what had to be the craziest story of the year, self-proclaimed neo Nazi Devon Arthurs shot both of his roommates to death because, he claimed, they had disrespected his recent conversion to Islam.
He then held three hostages at the Green Planet Smoke Shop on Amberly Dr. before surrendering to police, who he led back to the Hamptons in Tampa Palms apartment where his dead roommates were.
A third roommate, Brandon Russell, was there when police arrived. In his bedroom were Nazi and white supremacist propaganda and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for killing 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Russell admitted to being a member of Atomwaffen, an active neo-Nazi hate group, and had enough explosives to make a bomb stored in the apartment’s garage. He was arrested on federal explosives charges.
Taken Too Soon…
New Tampa also experienced its share of sadness.
In April, the body of local teen Hailey Acierno was found in Flatwoods Park, two miles from her Arbor Greene home, after a 10-day search that rallied help from all over the New Tampa area.
Hailey may be gone, but her spirit continues to live on. Her parents, Chris and Lisa, have created Hailey’s Voice of Hope to help other families deal with mental illness, as they say their daughter did.
In September, former Wharton football standout Joel Miller passed away unexpectedly, shocking many in the Wildcats community.
A running back, Miller ran for more than 2,500 yards his last two seasons at Wharton, and as a senior won Hillsborough County’s Golden Helmet Award.
And in November, Doug Wall, co-founder of the New Tampa Players (NTP) community theater group, passed away after battling pancreatic cancer.
The Live Oak resident championed a cultural center in New Tampa for two decades, in the hopes it could provide a home for the NTP and a center for local artists, but never got to quite see it come to fruition.
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