A War Between Neighbors that Went Horribly Wrong
The night of September 3, 2012, a neighborhood in Titusville, Florida, was filled with screams and gunshots. William Woodward (then 44) dressed in full camo and, as if he were in the battlefield, he crawled and snuck into his neighbor’s house and shot two people to death and wounded a third one.
The victims were Gary Hambree (39), the house owner, and Roger Picior (44), who was temporarily living with Gary. Wounded was Bruce “Tim” Blake (50), who also lived in the neighborhood. They were having a barbecue when William attacked, and the rampage was vicious: there were 31 shots fired, each victim impacted several times, both from a distance and at point-blank in the head, execution style. Woodward would later explain to police that it was to “make sure there weren’t any survivors in the battlefield”. The only reason Blake survived, he added, was that he had ran out of bullets.
Woodward hadn’t always been at odds with his neighbors; in fact they all used to be friends, with William even paying rent for Blake when he was having money issues. But then, in mid July of 2012, a package was stolen.
William accused the daughter of Gary Hambree of taking a package that was in his lawn. Hambree denied it and it was the start of an escalating feud, in which Blake took Gary’s side. Over the following six weeks, there was a series of altercations, with the police been called multiple times. Five days before the shooting, everyone had been at court to request restraining orders against each other, but the judge had denied them. According to testimony giving in court, the night of the killings, Hambree and his friends had taunted William for hours, shining a floodlight onto his property, putting loud music and yelling insults at his house. The victims’ families testified that, in this ridiculous taunt war they’d been having, Woodward gave as good as he took.
William Woodward was a veteran from the Gulf War who had PTSD and a head injury that he claimed had left him mentally disabled and unable to control his actions well. When arrested, William not only showed no remorse for the murders, but felt he had acted in self defense. Later, he requested a special hearing in which his lawyers said he should get immunity from prosecution, citing the State your Ground law in Florida, which allows you to defend your life if you’re in fear of bodily injury.
At that hearing, Woodward’s defense lawyer said that his client had experienced a month of “domestic terrorism," in which his neighbors had threatened to burn his house and rape his 12 year old daughter. Woodward had installed surveillance cameras outside his house, and recorded all this. (The cameras also caught the night of the shootings). The prosecutor alleged that this wasn’t a shooting out of fear, but out of anger, and the judge agreed with him, saying that William was not in immediate risk when he had killed his neighbors and he had “preemptively struck” at them.
William Woodward was charged with two counts of first degree murder and one of attempted first degree murder, and he could have faced the death penalty. But in January of 2018, the jury at his trial dismissed those charges and instead found him guilty of second degree murder. In March 2018, he got two life sentences, with a minimum of 25 years, that he will serve concurrently.
Further reading:
Here’s a description of how the shooting went down and Woodward’s statement to police.
Here is a Facebook post by Jeanie Huppert, Gary Hambree’s mother, telling her version of the story.
And here’s a website by William Woodward’s family in support of him.