‘It never leaves you
BROOKSVILLE –
Gloom and pain spread for miles along the rural highways of Hernando County.
On the night of Feb. 21, 1978, not even the toughest men could beat back the overpowering grief. Cattle ranchers and law enforcement officers alike cried. They didn’t care it was out in the open.
The manhunt for Coburn’s killers had an Old West feel to it. Bloodlust was in the air. There were those committed to shooting the suspects on sight.
Days later, law enforcement officers from across the Southeast attended Coburn’s funeral. The procession was 2 miles long. The church couldn’t contain everyone.
One of the men who prosecuted Lonnie Coburn’s killers made a bold analogy during a televised interview.
To the men and women who lived in Hernando County 34 years ago, Coburn’s murder felt to them what the Kennedy assassination felt to those in Dallas, he said.
It was hyperbolic to some, but for others it was a dead-on comparison. It seemed Hernando had lost its innocence the night Coburn was killed.
Tom Mylander was the lead detective in the case. He would become sheriff six years later.
“It probably brought Hernando County into the real world having something like that happen here,” he said. “It was a tremendous shock.”
Tampa had seen a lot of violence at the time. Hernando also was known as a place where cars and bodies were dumped. But for the most part, big crimes – particularly deputy slayings – happened in urban areas, not in the sticks.
Times have changed. Coburn’s death ushered in a new modern-type of sheriff’s office. Brooksville would no longer be the population epicenter of Hernando. A wave of northerners made Spring Hill their home. Dirt roads got paved. Rural became suburban. More and more people came to town without ever knowing Coburn or hearing his name.
In spite of the significance of that night, in the eyes of some, Coburn is too easily becoming a forgotten hero. No one believes so more than his mother, Frances Griffin.
Coburn’s name – along with three others – will be etched in stone on a memorial in front of the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office. Construction is expected to wrap up in a matter of weeks.
A ground-breaking ceremony took place last month. Griffin didn’t get an invitation.
She called the sheriff’s office and ripped into a captain, she said. He apologized, but she didn’t stop stewing. She called a local radio station and ranted on the air about the snub.
“I was wound up,” she said.
Coburn, 25, and his sergeant, Jeff Duvall, regularly kept watch over the Stop ‘n’ Go at U.S. 301 and State Road 50. They knew robberies were taking place in neighboring Sumter and they wanted to catch them in the act in case they sneaked across the county line.
Their stakeouts had come up empty. They weren’t watching the store the night of Feb. 21.
Coburn reported to work around 7 p.m. and relieved Duvall.
Freddie Lee Hall and Mack Ruffin Jr. had just kidnapped, raped and murdered a pregnant woman in Sumter. Karol Lea Hurst, of Wildwood, was shot in the head and left in the woods about 3 miles from Webster.
Hall and Ruffin stole her car – a 1975 Plymouth – and drove it to Ridge Manor.
A frightened woman entered the eastside substation and told Coburn there were two suspicious-looking men walking in and out of the corner store across the street.
Coburn, who had sprained his ankle the day before, got into his cruiser and drove across the street to the Stop ‘n’ Go. He came upon the Plymouth and called in the license plate. It hadn’t yet been reported stolen.
Based on the manner in which the woman had described the two men, Coburn carefully walked around the building wielding a shotgun. He came upon the suspects and ordered them to lay their hands on the car.
As he frisked one of the suspects the other lunged at him, pinned him and grabbed his handgun. Two shots were fired. One of the bullets traveled through Coburn’s side underneath his protective vest. It exited near his sternum. The second bullet also entered his body and damaged his left lung.
Authorities later identified Hall as the shooter.
Hall and Ruffin fled in the stolen car and Coburn crawled toward his cruiser, opened the door and grabbed the radio. He put his lips as close as he could to the microphone and whispered, “I’ve been shot.”
An onlooker called an ambulance. Deputies jumped into their cruisers and careened toward the store.
Duvall vividly remembers that night. It was 28 degrees. He was at his home off Mondon Hill Road relaxing in a bathrobe and slippers. When he got the call that Coburn was shot, he ditched the robe, put on his gun belt and made a beeline to the Stop ‘n’ Go. He still had on his slippers.
Deputy Nig Mills was the first deputy to respond. He was on limited duty because of cataract surgery and was working the radio at the nearby substation. He sprinted over and saw Coburn lying in a pool of his own blood.
By the time Duvall pulled up, the ambulance had already left. Mills was weeping.
“He was one tough ‘ol cracker,” Duvall said of Mills. “He wasn’t the crying type. I knew it was bad.”
Mills could barely speak.
“They shot Lonnie,” he said.
Coburn was pronounced dead at the hospital.
His killers were captured in Pasco County near a packaging plant. Law enforcement didn’t gun them down, which surprised and upset some people at the time.
Ruffin was sentenced to death, but it later was reduced to life in prison.
Hall remains on death row and is among the inmates who have been housed there the longest. Hall’s longer-than-expected lifespan is a source of bitterness for Griffin and Duvall.
“I try not to think about it,” Griffin said, “but I do resent it.”
She always assumed she would outlive Hall. Now she believes the opposite.
The same goes for Duvall. He wrote a letter to Gov. Rick Scott last year calling Hall’s extended stay on death row “an ongoing miscarriage of justice.” He never got a response.
“I don’t think they give a damn to tell you the truth,” Duvall said of the governor’s office.
Florida has been slow to execute those convicted of killing law enforcement officers. Several media reports during the past decade have brought the issue to the public’s attention, but the trend remains.
If Hall, now 61, were executed tomorrow, the average stay for a convicted police officer killer on death row would be roughly 21 years.
The average for the rest is about 12 years, according to those media reports.
Duvall was a few years older than Coburn, but the two grew up and played baseball together. They remained close. Coburn was a firefighter for a year before he became a deputy. Duvall tried to talk him out of it. Coburn’s mother did too.
“Lonnie was very determined,” Griffin said.
Duvall and Griffin remain friends to this day. There aren’t enough people doing enough to keep Coburn’s memory alive, they said.
“I want Lonnie’s story to be told,” said Griffin.
A plaque with a photo of Coburn hangs in the lobby of the sheriff’s office. His name will be one of four on the memorial. Otherwise, there is little trace of Coburn’s memory.
A small stretch of S.R. 50 near where Coburn was killed was named after him. It is a rural route not frequently used. Both commercial and residential development remains slow in Ridge Manor.
The Deputy Lonnie Coburn Memorial Highway is dwarfed by the 17-mile stretch of highway named after Deputy John Mecklenburg, who was killed on duty during a high-speed chase in July 2011. Legislators agreed to memorialize Mecklenburg by naming U.S. 41 from S.R. 50 to State Road 52 after him.
That disparity hasn’t been overlooked by Griffin. Neither has a former sheriff’s gross oversight.
Hernando County Sheriff Melvin Kelly was the one who delivered the news about Coburn to his men. He said over the radio, “Car 16 is signal 7.”
Coburn was car 16. Signal 7 means dead person.
Griffin said Kelly’s response beyond that was minimal. He never once came to her to tell her he was sorry about her son.
Mylander, on the other hand, made the effort.
“He came over and sat with me and comforted me,” she said. “I just thought the world of him.”
Mylander, in turn, thought highly of Griffin’s son. He remembered the young deputy being an aviation enthusiast. Coburn loved it so much he lived on the property of the Hernando County Airport. He led a major drug bust a year earlier after a suspicious plane landed near his home. It contained a large volume of marijuana. Coburn’s name and face wound up on the news.
“He got out there like he wanted to set the world on fire,” Mylander said of Coburn’s approach to his job.
Col. Mike Maurer, who is second-in-command at the sheriff’s office, said no one working for the agency in February 1978 remains on the payroll.
A lot has changed since then, from the modernity of the sheriff’s office to the population of Hernando.
Regardless of the changes, Maurer said Coburn’s death still remains on the minds of many deputies – particularly the veterans.
“When we were coming up, our sergeants and captains would always talk about Lonnie Coburn as a way to remind us to be safe,” Maurer said. “You always stayed on your toes when you worked in Ridge Manor.”
Duvall will always remember Coburn, but he wishes the memories of his friend’s death to fade. They sometimes bog him down.
“He was a good kid,” Duvall said. “He was a good man. He was a good deputy. For him to be killed by two people like that really angers me.”
He had a few of his friends die in the line of duty. He mourns all of them, but Coburn’s death is the one that crushed him the most. He has always been open about his anguish.
“It never leaves you,” he said.
Duvall was working a home invasion in the days after Coburn’s death. While sitting on a couch, he interviewed the woman whose home had just been burglarized. His emotions were catching up to him. He could feel it. Tears started streaming down his face.
“Are you going to be OK?” he remembered the woman asking him.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be OK again,” he told her.
