Monday, January 28, 2013

Two Men Last Seen With Collier County Police Officer “Still Missing!”



The mysterious case of two missing men (Terrance Williams, 27, and Felipe Santos, 23) in Naples, Florida after their uncanny encounter with a Collier County police officer is finally gaining national attention. 
 
Terrance Williams went missing on 12 January 2004. At the time of his disappearance, Terrance was working a new job at Pizza Hut in Bonita Springs. The night before his disappearance, Terrance and some of his co-workers got together around midnight to party at a Bonita Springs home. The group drank beer and socialized until the sun came up, according to Christina Bermingham, 25, who was at the party. Terrance left about 6 a.m., she said, and he seemed fine. “Everything was pretty normal,” she said. “We just had a party and the dude disappeared.” Terrance didn’t show up for his day shift, and he never even picked up his paycheck, which had been ready that day.  
 
What is known about the day of his disappearance is that Williams ran into Cpl. Steven Calkins, a nearly 17-year Collier Sheriff’s Office veteran at the time. Three witnesses told Sheriff’s Office investigators they saw Calkins wave over Williams near Naples Memorial Gardens, a North Naples cemetery, between 9 and 10 a.m. Cpl. Steve Calkins, himself, told investigators he picked Terrance up on Jan. 12 and gave him a ride to a Circle K on U.S. 41, and Terrance told him he was late for work. At the time, Williams was driving a 1983 two-door white Cadillac that was registered to someone else and had expired plates. Shortly after noon, Calkins said, they met at the cemetery along 111th Avenue North when he spotted Williams having car trouble. But Calkins didn’t call in the traffic stop as required; instead, Calkins said he gave Williams a ride to a Circle K near Wiggins Pass Road on U.S. 41 because Williams said he was late for work and looked nice and “clean-cut.”
 
According to one witness, Jesusa Ybarra, 52, a Circle K clerk, both Calkins and Williams were there that morning: “Calkins used the bathroom and Williams filled up a small tank of gas and walked down Wiggins Pass Road—alone.” Jesusa claimed that she Williams was a regular customer there; she said that he regularly went there to buy cigarettes before heading to work at Pizza Hut. Calkins then called a friend in dispatch, asking him to run information on an abandoned vehicle, even though he later said he had already met Terrance by then.


Telephone call (1/12/04-12:49 p.m.):


Caller: (Cpl. Steven Calkins)
Dispatcher: (Dave Jolicouer)
Dispatcher: “What are you doin’ sucka?”

Calkins: “Well I got a “Homie” Cadillac on the side of the road here, signal 11, signal 52 nobody around. I’m at the cemetery here at the corner of Vanderbilt and 111th.”

Dispatcher: “Oh yeah, you be doin’ some prayin’? Been prayin’ to the heavenly father?” Calkins: “Maybe he’s out there in the cemetery. He’ll come back and his car will be towed.”
A half-hour later, Calkins contacted dispatch with Williams’ full name, date of birth and asked the dispatcher to run a search, even though Calkins later told investigators he only knew Williams’ first name. Calkins called with a fake birth date Williams had used before and possibly when he got in trouble in order to fool police. 
Calkins: “4-1-75. Black/male. (singing)...,”

Dispatch: 1-16-04. “I hate to bother you at home on your day off, but this woman’s been bothering us all day. You towed a car from Vanderbilt and a hundred ... Do you remember it?”

Calkins: “Uhhh, no.”

Dispatcher: “Do you remember ... she said it was near the cemetery.”

Calkins: “Cemetery?”
Calkins assures the dispatcher there was no one with the vehicle.
Dispatcher: “Uh, well, somebody’s at the cemetery telling the mother that you picked up the driver and he’s been missing since Monday.”

Calkins: “Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
Seven days later, Calkins wrote an incident report. He later told sheriff’s officials he wrote it “to cover his butt.” After dropping Terrance off, Calkins said he returned to the Cadillac and found there wasn’t proper registration in the car. He said that he felt duped, so he called Circle K and asked for Terrance from his cell phone. Calkins said that the clerk told him she didn’t know any Terrance. Records show that Calkins never made that call, and no one at the Circle K at Wiggins Pass Road remembered the call or Calkins.

On 28 January 2004, Terrance’s mother, Marcia Roberts (seen above), lodged a misconduct complaint against Calkins and an internal investigation followed. Eight pages in the Sheriff’s Office internal probe outline Calkins’ lies and inconsistencies about what happened, and Calkins was fired in August 2004 because of the incident.

Felipe Santos was last seen by his brothers getting into Calkins’ squad car in October 2003. Calkins said he dropped him at Circle K on Immokalee Road. Asked during a recent interview with the Daily News to explain, Calkins said: “Coincidence extreme and that’s all it is.“It was just bad luck. It was bad luck ... I didn’t think anything of it.” That coincidence helped the families tap lawyers for their cases. Linda Ramirez, the St. Petersburg lawyer for the Santos family, said it struck her that Calkins said he took both men and dropped them at a Circle K instead of at the sheriff’s substation or jail. “It would just seem to me you’re not likely to find two people who have gone missing under similar circumstances without there being some kind of connection,” she said.



Calkins has said he had nothing to do with the disappearance of Terrence Williams—or that of Filipe Santos. Calkins later filed an appeal, citing that Williams was seen at an East Naples gas station, though the investigators viewed video and didn’t see Terrance. The appeal was shot down by Sheriff Don Hunter (seen above). Hunter, now the police chief on Marco Island, said in 2012, that the Sheriff's Office and other assisting agencies exhausted “every possibility” in trying to find enough evidence to make an arrest or serve a search warrant. A forensic investigation of Calkins’ patrol car, as well as a tracking device placed on the vehicle, “turned up nothing,” Hunter told CNN. “We all believe that there are too many inconsistencies and too many coincidences in Calkins’ account of events,” said. “... The difficulty we had was proving it.”

Terrance’s first cousin, Felysha Jenkins, 29, sent a Feb. 13, 2004, mass e-mail to enlist her friends’ help:
“I am especially upset because I have seen two White females and a personal interest story involving a kitten, yes, a kitten, receive national attention which all arose from Florida. Surely, a black man deserves at least as much attention as granted to a 6-week-old cat!”
“We weren’t able to get the publicity that Terrance deserved. It was like, ‘Hey this happens all the time,’” said Jenkins, a doctorate student in psychology at North Carolina State University.
“I think it’s too late.”
She thinks the story failed to catch the attention of the news media because of the white and wealthy demographics in Collier County. "What's going on to pull people in? It's not going to be about a cop

involved with a young African-American who wasn’t a pillar in the community,” she said back in 2006.


Well, Felysha has finally gotten her answer. The disappearances of Santos and Williams regained national momentum in late January 2013 when actor Tyler Perry saw the cases profiled on an Investigation Discovery channel show called "Disappeared." He began posting about them on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. In January of 2013, six years after Felysha said it was already too late, national celebrity Tyler Perry offered a $100,000 reward for information in the cold-cases of the two missing Florida men. The matter has gained national attention since Tyler Perry held a news conference—accompanied by Rev. Al Sharpton and NAACP head Ben Jealous—to discuss the missing-person investigations of the two men.
“I am beyond outraged by this!” Perry wrote in a 2013 January 25 Facebook post. “Please help me give Terrance Williams and Felipe Santos something that many people don't think the poor or disenfranchised have... A VOICE!!”
In covering the story, journalist Janet Shan of the Hinterland Gazzette wrote, “I echo Tyler Perry’s sentiment that the media doesn’t pay too much attention to missing-persons cases involving blacks and Hispanics. Terrance Williams was black and Felipe Santos was an illegal immigrant from Mexico.” After Perry and others expressed their sentiments, several news outlets, such as CNN, began covering the story for the first time.

Commenting about the case, Dori J. Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education where one goal is reflecting diversity in coverage, said all media should set uniform standards for covering the missing. “Two male people of color missing; you’re talking about a story that never makes the news!” Maynard said in disgust.

Some are also outraged that Steven Calkins’ picture has not been released to the media, and can be found nowhere online. If he was the last person that they were seen with—and he is a suspect, I would suspect that making his picture public would be helpful.


Anyone with information in the missing persons cases of Santos and Williams is asked to call the Collier County Sheriff's Office at 239-252-9300 or Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers at 1-800-780-TIPS.

31 comments:

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    1. that officer needs to be put to death for gosh sakes he is a serial murderer god only knows how many people he has killed he needs to give this family justice he did it and he knows he did it is obvious prayers go out to this family

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    2. this cop is guilty he should be arrested they need to search every where to find these men appalling any other citizen would have been arrested

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    3. This is messed up, and I am in shock that its 2014 and I have just learned about all of this. I'm a white guy, who grew up in a family full of white cops....and I gotta tell you that, my own father, who was a chief just outside of Cincinnati for almost 9 years, watch this Disappeared TV show, and not 18 minutes in to the show knew that cop had likely murdered those two men. This guy is a predator - and if he's not stopped, he will continue to hunt young men of any other race than white. I don't get it....why this guy didn't get arrested is beyond me.....aside from that 'thin blue line"

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    4. I WISH I WAS RICH ID come to Florida and search til I found them both I think this is appalling CALKIN is a dangerous man I believe he's a racist sociopath!!!!

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  2. All fingers point to Officer Culkin!

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  3. This Calkins guy is Guilty! I am a retired police officer. Did the internal affairs check his cell phone records?

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  4. did the investigators check Calkins cell phone records? I watched this story on the show Disappeared and this guy is guilty. He had a hate on for immigrants without insurance and license and decided to take the law into his own hands. I hope the family of both sue the shit out of the police force! When Calkins had these guys in his car he was the last to see them.

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    1. JUSTICE NEEDS TO BE SERVED ON THIS NO GOOD PIECE OF TRASH CULKINS!!!!!

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  5. Jesusa Ybarra, 52, a Circle K clerk is she lying? the video tape at the store did not support her claim?

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  6. I find the comment from the cop staying the code violations and stating "No One Around" to me that sounds an awful lot like "no one around to see me take this guy from his car" cop did it. Massive cover up to boot. If you are a person of color I'd advise you to stay away from that area. Serial killer on the lose...

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  7. This man did somethin to these two young men, and he will answer to god on this one...may god help and bless these family ...hate is a sin

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  8. The cops guilty. How did he know a homey drove the caddy and not a white old lady. I dont know one missing person, let alone two.

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  9. did they check his service weapon and shotgun to see if recently fired? No mention. Bet not.

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  10. Arrest him some say. For what? For coming into contact with two missing men? That is not evidence and certainly not a crime.

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    1. Arrest him for being the last person to be with them before they vanished... three months apart. You have a better chance of winning the lotto! He did it..why isn't anyone doing anything about this??? What kind of country do I live in??? The police all stick together like freekin super glue..I know... my x step dad is a retired cop.. im happy to be alive.

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  11. He should be arrested if these men were white and a african american wad last seen with them they would be guilty and would go to jail on the circumstantial evidence that they havenow. I am a african american ive never been to jail and make a good living for myself but you dont have to go through the system to know that its not fair to blacks and Latinos we can all say what we want but we dont get nearly as much recognition for being missing or for being a victim at all but if a black man shoots some one for drugs or sonething it makes headlines, if he himself is the Victim no one wants to hear that. I dont have a problem with anyones nationality but until there is equality for ALL races things like this will continue to happen.

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  12. Hes guilty as charged he killed a black man and a hispanic man he knew he would have no consequences to face. I am africain american and have never been in the system, but you can be on the outaide and know that its not fair. It took this long for this case to get national attention but if one of rhose men would have shot or robbed someone it would have been everywhere but when they are a vicrrim no one knows. I am not a racist but i do believe in justice and in equality not just for white people but for everyone, everyone has a right to know what happen to there loved ones nomatter what color. I hope obe day the family finds closure.

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  13. Coincidence, no evidence its obvious he is guilty of foul play contradictions of statements.. he is involved ... why haven't the fbi investigated this cop further. Im outraged

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  14. Why is it taking so long for someone in law enforcement to nail down Calkins...They say they don't have probable cause but the facts they do have are enough to investigate further...C'mon!!

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  15. Calkins burned them with the gas that he got from the circle k there will never be any evidence and witnesses even saw Williams filling a small tank while Calkins used the restroom, the thing is that Calkins learned to not have any witnessed and being a cop he knew to burn the evidence so they will never find them, I there are a lot of cops that cause missing people like any women that came up missing after a late night drive, the only reason an abandoned car is found on the side of the road is because they stopped because a cop was behind them!

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  16. The officer had something to do with these two men no doubt about it. His judgment day is coming low life pig.

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    1. Please dont insult pigs. No animals are as bad as this human being, may be burn in hell!!!

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  17. He is guilty as fuck!!! Cops are statistically proven to be shady when it involves one of their own just bc of publicity it causes and doubt on the police that citizens may have if it was to come out.they put ppl wit circumstantial evidence all the time, this guy had way more than most ppl who get convicted.im medically retire army, I got blown up and shot for my country and now 80% disabled bc of it, sad to know I fought for a great country so corrupt by law enforcement. Time for a civil stand against law enforcement even if it means _____. Look at the shit they get away with or just a slap on hand that most ppl get yes in prison for

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  18. He is guilty as fuck!!! Cops are statistically proven to be shady when it involves one of their own just bc of publicity it causes and doubt on the police that citizens may have if it was to come out.they put ppl wit circumstantial evidence all the time, this guy had way more than most ppl who get convicted.im medically retire army, I got blown up and shot for my country and now 80% disabled bc of it, sad to know I fought for a great country so corrupt by law enforcement. Time for a civil stand against law enforcement even if it means _____. Look at the shit they get away with or just a slap on hand that most ppl get yes in prison for

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  19. I agree he's guilty as the devil! Justice denied!

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  20. Steve Calkins is responsible, no doubt! Someone should track him down. And I bet the bodies of the 2 (or more?) men he murdered will be found close to where he was last seen with them. If he was innocent, why did the sheriffs dept fire him!?

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  21. This cop is so guilty its unbelievable! It's a bit ridiculous and it give white men a bad name not to mention what it does to the respect of cops, I'm ashamed that there is no justice for these families, it shouldn't have taken Tyler perry to offer 100000 to hear about this nationwide! There's no such thing as coincidences like this! It just says that cop is the biggest piece of shit and needs to be held accountable!!! Grow a pair and charge this "man"!! He's not God, he's obviously guilty and it's sickening he's not in jail! DO SOMETHING already!

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  22. And those two men are just the two we know about. God only knows how many more have suffered or lost their life at the hands of this Cop, Mr. Calkins. My only solace is that we all have to answer in the end. God is too just to let injustice reign. Mr. Calkins, you will answer for your crimes.

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  23. Calkins definitely had something to do with the disappearance of each of these men. And he is getting away with it. Getting away with murder, in my opinion, because I feel that is what happened. The pig will get his day when karma comes around and he has to answer to God for his actions. I see a one way ticket to hell in his future.

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