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| Suspect leaving the Lutz Walmart |
It's just the beginning of the year, but already there has been another shooting at a Walmart.
A man and his girlfriend were in a Walmart parking lot in Lutz, Florida, just north of Tampa Bay, when a man approached them. Shouting racist slurs, he shot the man in the cheek with a pellet gun.
From an article:
Pasco County deputies are searching for a suspect in what is being called a hate crime that occurred early Wednesday morning.
According to the sheriff's office, a man and his girlfriend were leaving the Walmart on Land O' Lakes Boulevard at about 3 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 2, when the suspect began harassing them in the parking lot because he believed the man was from the Middle East.
As the man and his girlfriend were approaching their car, the suspect came up to them and made racial slurs about the man being with a white woman, then shot the man in the face with a pellet gun in the cheek area at least twice, Pasco Sheriff's Office Spokesman Doug Tobin said.
"We are looking at it as a hate crime," Tobin said.
Sheriff Chris Nocco said the agency is dedicating all of its resources to finding the suspect.
"That will not be tolerated in Pasco County," Nocco said.
Walmart. Save money. Die faster.
UPDATE (1/3/13): Local Muslim leaders are offering a $1000 reward for anyone who helps catch the suspect.
UPDATE (1/4/13): The full video footage of the suspect and the shooting have been released.
A suspect has been arrested, named Daniel P. Quinnell:
The victim and his girlfriend were headed toward their car early Wednesday in the Walmart parking lot at 1575 Land O' Lakes Boulevard when a man approached them. He asked the victim if he was Muslim or from the Middle East. The victim said no. But the man shot him twice at close range with a gas-propelled pellet gun while saying "N - - - - - with a white girl."
The attacker fired more than 20 pellets, deputies said.
When deputies released surveillance video and still photographs of the attacker earlier this week, the sheriff's office received several tips, including one that the man was staying at a hotel near State Road 54 and Interstate 75 in Pasco.
Detectives identified the attacker as Daniel P. Quinnell. He was arrested at the hotel and faces aggravated battery charges.
Quinnell was being booked into the Land O' Lakes jail early Friday.
The opportunities for self defense or vengeance were plenty. He could have pulled out the .45-caliber Taurus pistol right then and put a bullet in his assailant. He could have done so when Daniel Quinnell craned his gun at point-blank range and squeezed the trigger for the first of 20 times. Or even before the attack, when deputies say Quinnell approached Mohammed and his girlfriend from behind, yelling racial epithets. Any of those instances would have been defensible in court.
But Mohammed, 24, kept his gun in the holster. Because his attacker used a pellet gun. Mohammed's was real.
"I don't know. I just couldn't do it," Mohammed said, recovering at his Tampa home two days after the attack. "I couldn't blow this guy away for something he could change later in life. I'm not going to decide this man's fate."
He also isn't either a Muslim or from the Middle East:
Cameron Mohammed isn't Muslim or Middle Eastern. His parents are from Trinidad. He was born and raised in Tampa. Raised Catholic. He has had a concealed weapons permit for five years.
Friday afternoon, in the living room of the family's West Tampa home, he described the shooting. He wore the same black hooded jacket he was wearing when he was shot and pointed out the blood spots dried between the fibers.
On Monday, he is scheduled to have the pellets — one embedded in his forehead over his left eyebrow, the other just under his jaw — removed. He can't look upward without a sharp pain over his left eye.
He is taking a couple of semesters off from school at Hillsborough Community College and has recently been working at a friend's auto body shop.
He said he has been dating his girlfriend for a year and a half. He said she told him that night that Quinnell was staring at her menacingly as they pulled into the parking lot to get some food.
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