The call came at 7:45 on a Wednesday night. Monica had phoned her grandmother to arrange a ride for the following day. Her grandmother said she needed to check with her grandfather and would call right back. When she did, fifteen minutes later, Monica didn’t answer.
And she never answered again. Monica was thirty-two, a hospitality worker in Tampa who lived with her grandparents. She’d been raised by them since birth; they were her legal guardians, and she was their whole world. That week, she was especially happy.
She suspected she might be pregnant and was excited about her future with her boyfriend, Derek. She was planning to celebrate her grandmother’s birthday the next day. So when she vanished, her disappearance didn’t sit right with anyone who knew her. She’d stepped out that evening with just her phone and wallet to walk to a friend’s house.
People in her neighborhood thought nothing of walking around at night. It was normal. She was comfortable in Tampa, sassy, full of life, not afraid of anything. The next day came, and Monica didn’t show up for her grandmother’s birthday.
That alone was strange. Her grandmother kept saying it wasn’t like her. But no one could file a missing person’s report for twenty-four hours. Then Derek texted Monica’s cousin Yuri.
“Have you heard from Monica? I’m worried. Haven’t talked to her since Wednesday. ”
Yuri called Monica’s flatmate.
The flatmate said she hadn’t seen her either. What was odd, she said, was that Monica’s door was closed and her light was on—had been like that for two days. Yuri told her husband the whole story. “Something doesn’t feel right.
”
She called the hospitals. One said they had a Jane Doe. But when Yuri gave a description, the voice on the line said, “No, no. This isn’t her.
”
Days passed, and the family kept hoping Monica had just gotten busy or gone off the grid. Then an emergency call changed everything. A city landscaping crew was preparing to mow an overgrown vacant lot not far from Monica’s home. They couldn’t see anything because the grass was so tall.
When they started clearing the area, they found her. She’d been walking innocently to her friend’s house and she’d been gunned down. There were shell casings in the street, twenty or thirty feet from where she was found, suggesting she’d been chased while being shot. Five shots fired.
Two missed. Three killed her. Her body had been lying in that tall grass for two days. Yuri had to tell Monica’s father.
Then she had to tell Monica’s mother, who had driven down from Georgia. The mother saw Yuri’s face and just started crying, punching the wall because she already knew. Yuri knew her grandparents wouldn’t survive this. They lived for Monica.
And they didn’t really recover—her grandfather deteriorated until he could barely walk. Her grandmother lost the love for life. She said she was ready to go home, ready to be reunited with Monica. Then police began investigating, and they made an unsettling discovery.
Three days before Monica was killed, a twenty-year-old college student named Benjamin Mitchell was waiting at a bus stop. He was excited to see his girlfriend. Someone took a shot at him. Then more.
He was killed. The shooting happened about a block from where Monica lived. The two victims were different in almost every way—age, race, gender. There was no pattern, no motive.
They were just people at the wrong place at the wrong time. Forensics later determined the same firearm was used in both murders. A community already on edge was told that a killer might be stalking people at night. Mothers didn’t want their children to go outside.
People were afraid to walk their dogs or go for a jog. The whole neighborhood was held captive. And then, on October 19th, 2017, twenty-year-old Anthony Naiboa, an autistic young man who worked packaging supplies to send to Puerto Rico for hurricane relief, got on the wrong bus. He realized his mistake, got off in Seminole Heights, and was making his way to catch another bus when he was shot dead—right across the street from where Benjamin Mitchell had been killed.
That’s when police knew for certain: they had a serial killer on their hands. The fear intensified. Ring doorbell cameras became a hot commodity. Street lights were checked.
Nobody was on the streets at night. People would walk each other to their cars. Yuri said she felt fear all the time, something she’d never experienced before just being outside alone. The mayor made a fiery public statement, telling the killer he wasn’t going to win and demanding authorities hunt him down.
Then there was a lull. No new murders for a month. People started to believe it was over. The media moved on, and life began inching back to normal.
On November 14th, at around 4:30 in the morning, the panicked calls started coming in. Four or five gunshots. A man lying dead in the middle of the street. Witnesses described seeing two men stand over the victim and shoot him again.
The victim was sixty-year-old Ronald Felton. He was a construction worker who had spent twenty-five years on the job. He was on his way to volunteer at a food bank to help prepare and distribute food to people in need. He’d turned when he heard a sound, saw light from someone’s phone, and was shot.
He fell backwards, and whoever did it stood over him and shot him again. He became the fourth victim. A witness gave a description: a Black male dressed in black. But the killer still evaded capture.
Then police got a break. A manager at a local McDonald’s approached an officer who was in the restaurant. A former employee had given her a bag and asked her to hold onto it, saying he was leaving town and needed to get money. “He gave me this gun and told me to get rid of it,” she said.
The employee was twenty-four-year-old Howell Donaldson III, whose dreams of being a basketball star had never materialized. He’d been fired from a job for absenteeism, was sofa surfing, and was working at McDonald’s. Police searched his car and found bloodstained clothing that matched surveillance footage of the killer. The gun in the bag was tested and matched the weapon used in all four shootings.
Donaldson denied everything during interrogation, claiming he wanted to talk to his attorney. But the evidence was overwhelming. In court, he was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. The victims’ families pushed for the death penalty.
After three years of legal wrangling and nearly six years since the first shooting, Donaldson changed his plea to guilty to avoid execution. He was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. There was never a clear motive. Those who studied the case believed it was about a young man who had set unrealistic expectations for himself and, when life didn’t go his way, took it out on the world around him.
In 2023, Donaldson was imprisoned for his thirty-seven-day killing spree. Four innocent people—Benjamin, Anthony, Monica, and Ronald—had been condemned to their last night out. Monica’s father said he’ll never stop loving his daughter. She was a great child with a great sense of humor and a whole future ahead of her.
She was a light in the darkness. That light was taken. And it can never be brought back.
