Three Slain in Tennesee Town
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The following appears courtesy of today's Associated Press news wire:
Three Slain in Tennesee Town
By VICKI BROWN
SMYRNA, Tenn. (AP) - The grieving family of William Troy Snell sat on
their
front porch recalling his short life of 18 years and searching for
answers.
``If it was a robbery and they gave them the money, why not just leave
everyone
alone? Why would someone do this?'' asked his mother, Billie Snell, her
face
stained with tears.
Her son was one of three fast-food workers found shot to death Wednesday
after
an apparent robbery at a Captain D's restaurant 20 miles southeast of
Nashville.
Snell's body was found in the driver's seat of a car outside a discount
store
behind Captain D's. Indications that the teen worked at the seafood
restaurant
led police inside.
They discovered two other bodies in a back room cooler: Scott Myers, 42,
of
Memphis, and another worker, who police did not identify pending
notification
of relatives.
Police suspect robbery as the motive, but Sgt. Scott Byers would not
give
details.
Mrs. Snell said her son started working at the restaurant three months
ago to
buy a new Mazda Protege - the car in which his body was found - and to
pay its
insurance.
His father, Kimothy Snell, said his son also was paying for summer
school,
retaking an English class he failed at La Vergne High School ``because
he knew
he'd messed up and he was determined to graduate next year.''
Myers' wife declined to comment when reached at her Memphis home.
Betty Marshall, a spokeswoman for Shoney's Inc., the parent company of
Captain
D's, called the shootings ``a terrible tragedy.''
``We're all in a state of shock,'' she said. ``Our hearts go out to the
families and to our co-workers.''
Marshall said the company is providing counseling for the victims'
families,
assistance with funeral arrangements and help with travel plans for
out-of-town
relatives.
The deaths renewed fears in Tennessee, where seven restaurant workers
were
murdered over three months in 1997. Paul Dennis Reid was convicted of
the
slayings, which included two workers at a Captain D's in suburban
Nashville.
``I was scared to death after the Paul Reid incidents,'' said Angie
Ryman, 21,
who works at a local McDonald's with her fiance. ``Today, we're going to
look
for other jobs.''
But others said violence can happen anywhere.
``That could happen at anybody's house, at anybody's job,'' said Abe
Hasan,
owner of the BP Oil station next door to the Captain D's.
On the Net:
http://www.captainds.com
AP-NY-07-13-00
------------------------------------------------
The following four news articles all appear courtesy of the 7/13/00
online
edition of The Nashville Tennessean newspaper:
Shoney's gives counsel to families, workers in wake of killings
By Stacey Hartmann / Staff Writer
Shoney's Inc. is once again dealing with the worst of times.
The homicide of three employees of the Smyrna Captain D's thrust the
Nashville-based restaurant company yesterday into the roles of counselor
to
family members and employees and an information provider to the public.
They are roles Shoney's has played before, in the February 1997 murders
of
Donelson Captain D's manager Steve Hampton, 25, and co-worker Sarah
Jackson,
16. In January of that year, Charles Thoet, 53, manager of the Dickerson
Road
Shoney's, also was slain.
"Our foremost concern is with the victims' families and with our store
employees," said Betty Marshall, senior vice president for corporate
communications for Shoney's, parent of the Captain D's chain.
Marshall and about a dozen other senior-level executives were at the
crime
scene yesterday to assist families, employees and the police.
"We really just drop everything we're doing and work on the crisis at
hand,"
Marshall said.
Shoney's doesn't have an official crisis team. Instead, it calls on a
variety
of people throughout the organization who are experienced with such
situations,
she said.
For the families, the company is providing counseling, assistance with
funeral
arrangements and help with travel plans for out-of-town relatives,
Marshall
said.
The company intends to communicate frequently with its employees on new
developments so they aren't surprised by newspapers and television
reports,
Marshall said.
"We know the public wants to know, but we still have to be very
respectful to
those families and our employees," Marshall said.
She said that although Shoney's is a large company, "we're a close-knit
family."
Marshall said, "We can't even imagine how the families may feel, but
we've lost
three family members also."
Stacey Hartmann covers retail and restaurant business news for The
Tennessean.
------------------------------------------
Thursday, 7/13/2000
Triple slaying shocks Smyrna; police discover two bodies in restaurant,
another
in car
By Leon Alligood and Leon M. Tucker / Staff Writers
SMYRNA -- William Troy Snell's car shouldn't have been where it was,
parked in
the shadows behind the shopping center.
By 2:30 a.m. yesterday, when someone alerted Smyrna police of a
"suspicious
vehicle" between the rear loading doors of Kroger's and Big Kmart, the
18-year-old's purple Mazda Protege should have been parked in the
driveway of
his family's home about five miles away.
Snell should have been sleeping, resting from a seven-hour shift at
Captain
D's, which is located among a string of restaurants in front of the
shopping
center.
Instead, the La Vergne High School senior was dead, a victim of an
apparent
fast-food robbery that became a triple slaying, perhaps the worst case
in the
town's 131-year history and eerily reminiscent of Nashville's string of
fast-food murders in 1997. Police had made no arrests in the case last
night.
The gruesome discovery of Snell's body in his car led police to a nearby
Captain D's, where he had worked for several months.
At the seafood restaurant, which fronts Murfreesboro Pike, police found
two
more bodies in the store's walk-in cooler. One has been identified as
the
manager, Scott Myers, 42. The identity of the other victim, a male, was
not
released by authorities last night because next of kin had not been
located,
despite a statewide search by local and state authorities.
"That's about all I can release to you at this time," said Sgt. Scott
Byers,
spokesman for the Smyrna Police Department.
In fact investigators refused to comment about several basic aspects of
the
case. The unanswered questions include:
• How did the robber, or robbers, gain entry?
• Why was Snell's body found in his car behind the shopping center?
• How were the victims killed? Early reports that the victims were
shot were
neither confirmed nor denied by investigators.
• Who made the 911 call around 2:30 a.m. that tipped officers to the
crime --
a call that a suspicious car was parked behind the Big Kmart?
Authorities would not say last night how the victims were killed but
said
autopsies should be completed by noon today.
Snell was remembered yesterday by family and friends as a friendly young
man,
full of promise.
"He had been working there a while, not a year, but for some time," said
Heather Snell, the victim's older sister.
"He liked hanging out with his friends, and he was proud of his car. He
hadn't
had it too long," the distraught woman said.
John Ash, assistant principal at La Vergne High, called the killings "a
shame."
"Troy was a pleasant kid. He always spoke to you in the hall and was
never into
anything serious," said Ash, who also is principal of the current
session of
summer school where Snell was enrolled in two courses.
Ash added that counselors and psychologists from the school department
had been
at the school yesterday to meet with students and teachers.
"They'll be here as long as we need them," Ash said.
Justin Daingerfield, 17, who was attending summer school with Snell at
La
Vergne High, remembered Snell's generosity.
"He'd give you anything he had," the teen said.
"He always passed out food, whatever he brought to eat he shared. He was
a nice
guy."
For Daingerfield, the fast-food killings left him with an uncertain
feeling. He
had once worked at the same restaurant, on the same late evening shift.
"It could've been me because I closed every night. I'm glad I quit when
I did,"
he said.
"When I worked there, I closed a lot -- sometimes three or four times a
week,
and I never felt any danger," he said. "For friends to show up at
closing was
not uncommon."
As the unending traffic slowed along Smyrna's North Lowery Street, also
known
as Murfreesboro Pike, police spent the day combing the scene and
questioning
business owners.
Abe Hasan, owner of a 24-hour BP gas station next door to the Captain
D's,
received a call around 4 a.m. from investigators looking for answers.
Hasan
later gave police overnight surveillance-camera tapes from his business.
"It's shocking but what can you do," he said. "Things like this
happening are
in the back of your head all the time. All you can do is hope everything
will
be all right when you come to work. If you're going to get robbed,
you're going
to get robbed. You can't avoid bad people. But justice will prevail, and
they'll catch these guys."
Amanda Collins, 18, who knew Snell at high school, said she was upset
but not
surprised that multiple slayings occurred in the town.
"There are people out there who can cause things like this to happen.
They're
just mean," she said.
"I didn't know anything until my sister-in-law called and told me," said
Annie
Stacey, 73, who lives less than a block from where Snell was found. "I
said,
'Lord have mercy! It happened right under my nose.' People are so
devilish
nowadays they'll do anything."
Snell's car was parked just outside the the back door of a nail salon
where Don
Huynh works. Huynh said he didn't think anything of what had taken place
when
he arrived at work.
"It's getting so that it's scary to live in a small town," he said. "You
wouldn't think it would happen here, but I guess it can happen
anywhere."
Smyrna Police are asking anyone with information concerning the killings
to
call them at 459-6644.
Leon Alligood covers the Midstate for The Tennessean. Leon Tucker covers
Nashville for The Tennessean.
-----------------------------------------------
Thursday, 7/13/2000
Slayings similar to 1997 spree involving Paul Reid
By Kirk Loggins / Staff Writer
News of a murder-robbery at a Captain D's restaurant in Smyrna yesterday
reminded many Middle Tennesseans of three similar crimes, with a total
of seven
victims, at suburban fast-food eateries early in 1997.
Those crimes were solved only after Paul Dennis Reid, a would-be country
singer
who had worked as a cook for the Shoney's restaurant chain, went to the
home of
his former boss in June 1997, asked for his job back, then pulled a
knife and a
gun.
Once police focused on Reid as a suspect, they found circumstantial
evidence
that tied him to the shooting deaths of two employees during a robbery
at a
Captain D's restaurant in Donelson in February 1997 and to the abduction
and
stabbing deaths of two young women who worked at a Baskin-Robbins ice
cream
store in Clarksville in April 1997.
Reid, now 42, also was charged with shooting three people to death while
robbing a McDonald's restaurant in Hermitage in March 1997. A fourth
worker,
who played dead after being stabbed, identified Reid as the robber.
Two of those crimes occurred around closing time, while the third
occurred
shortly before the restaurant was scheduled to open on a Sunday morning.
In two
of those crimes, the restaurant workers were herded into a cooler and
shot.
Reid, who spent most of the 1980s in prison in Texas for a series of
restaurant
robberies there, denied guilt in the Middle Tennessee fast-food murders.
He did not testify during his two trials here, in April 1999 and May, or
in his
trial in Clarksville in September.
In the three trials, the juries, which were brought in from other parts
of the
state, sentenced him to death for each of the seven murders.
He is now on death row in Riverbend prison in west Nashville. Like other
recent
arrivals on death row, he has to spend 23 hours a day in his cell.
Another similar crime in Middle Tennessee in recent years occurred in
Clarksville in 1994, when four employees were shot to death during a
robbery at
a Taco Bell restaurant.
Courtney Mathews, a Fort Campbell, Ky., soldier who worked part time at
the
Taco Bell, received four life prison sentences when he was convicted of
those
crimes.
Kirk Loggins covers courts for The Tennessean.
--------------------------------------------
Thursday, 7/13/2000
Past slayings leave families with deep wounds
By Kirk Loggins and Deborah Highland / Staff Writers
Gina Jackson stopped by the Captain D's yesterday morning on her way to
work,
and there she heard about the Smyrna killings.
"It just made it all come back," Jackson said yesterday afternoon. "It
might as
well have been Sarah all over again."
Sarah, Jackson's daughter, was one of two employees killed during a
robbery at
the Donelson Captain D's in February 1997. Sarah Jackson was 16, and her
boss,
manager Steve Hampton, was 25.
The homicides of two people at the Smyrna Captain D's early yesterday
morning
-- and the slaying of a third person nearby -- have reopened old wounds
for the
families of murder victims.
"It's been over three years, but it never leaves, it's always there,"
said Gina
Jackson, who works in the payroll office for Tristar Health System.
"Sometimes you put it in the back of your mind, but this is just awful.
This is
the same feelings all over again. You just sit there, and you're lost,
you
don't know what to do. You're laughing one minute, and you're crying the
next."
Jackson's feelings were echoed by Hampton's widow, Deanna Hampton.
"I've heard about it all day. Here we go again," Deanna Hampton said
yesterday.
"I think with this actually being a Captain D's, it's like it's in the
same
place."
When Deanna Hampton first heard yesterday's news about Smyrna, she
immediately
thought it was a copycat crime, similar to the spree of fast-food
murders
committed by drifter Paul Dennis Reid.
"People will do anything to get a name," she said.
Reid now is on death row, having received a total of seven death
sentences for
murders at three Midstate eateries in 1997: the Donelson Captain D's;
two
workers at a Clarksville Baskin-Robbins; and three employees at a
Hermitage
McDonald's.
Gina Jackson recalled that relatives of the four workers killed at Taco
Bell in
Clarksville in 1994 tried to reach her to console her after her daughter
was
killed in 1997. She said she'd like to do the same for the families of
the
victims of the Smyrna robbery.
Deanna Hampton said that when she hears about such violence, "the first
instinct I get is to pack up and leave. That's always my first gut
instinct, to
go and never come back."
But she's never done that. She works part time in a video rental shop
and
raises the couple's children -- ages 6, 9 and 11 -- with the help of
workers'
compensation and Social Security.
She said it's hard to give advice to the families of the victims in
Smyrna.
"Take it one day at a time because it is a long road. ... Honestly,
there's
nothing I can say because you can't do anything. Everybody handles stuff
in
their own way. I kept going until I couldn't go anymore, so I wouldn't
have to
stop and deal with it."
Kirk Loggins covers the courts for The Tennessean. Deborah Highland
covers the
Midstate for The Tennessean.