Deputy's Killer Seen As 'Time Bomb'

By VALERIE KALFRIN The Tampa Tribune

Published: Sep 21, 2007

TAMPA - Hillsborough County sheriff's Detective Danny Johnson waited in the dark, a telephone pressed to his ear.

He saw lights clicking off inside 1707 Village Court in Brandon. Finally, Michael Phillips answered.

It was shortly after 3 a.m. on Aug. 15. About two hours earlier, Phillips' ex-girlfriend had directed authorities to the house after Phillips phoned her and said he "shot a cop three times," the sheriff's office said.

It remains a mystery what was going through the mind of the 24-year-old convicted felon when he fired a .45-caliber handgun at Sgt. Ron Harrison's patrol car on Lumsden Road about 1 a.m. that day, killing the veteran deputy.

However, Phillips' last hours - partying before the shooting, his tense interaction with Johnson before a sniper's bullet killed him - emerge in 300 pages of investigative reports released Thursday by the sheriff's office, which had presented its findings to the state attorney's office. In a letter dated Sept. 12, State Attorney Mark Ober announced that the shooting of Phillips by Deputies Shawn Dugan and Robert Carr was justified.

Johnson, quoted in a transcribed interview with investigators, recalled his initial conversation with Phillips was "all over the place." The man wanted Johnson to "strip down" and "twirl around" in front of the house before talking with him. Johnson refused.

Phillips brought up the heist movie "Heat" and its shootout with police, Johnson said. "Are you wearing a vest?" he remembered Phillips asking.

"And I said, yeah, I'm … I'm wearing a vest," Johnson replied, according to a transcript. "And he goes, 'well, good because one of us is gonna die tonight.'"

He Had A Court Case Pending

First arrested at age 12 on charges of armed burglary and grand larceny, Phillips repeatedly landed behind bars and often fought with inmates. He had a court case pending at the time of his death, records show.

At one point, Phillips was kicked out of a parenting class in a Hillsborough County jail for being disruptive, records show. The documents released Thursday include a page from the workbook where Phillips drew a black bar through an illustration of a sheriff deputy's star.

Eight months before Harrison's shooting, Phillips was held in Falkenburg Road Jail. Detention Deputy Benjamin Mills told investigators about a conversation in which Phillips told him the Holocaust was fabricated propaganda and never happened. Phillips often used racial slurs in reference to black inmates, Mills said.

Phillips' mother, Regina Van Amburg, told investigators she was frightened of Phillips and for the safety of her 4-year-old son. Days before the shooting, Van Amburg contacted her stepfather, a DeLand police detective, after finding two guns hidden under a sofa in her house, she told investigators.

"She made it very clear that since Saturday … he, being Michael, has, uh, expressed his desire to have suicide by cop and said … he's going out with a 'bang,'" Hillsborough County sheriff's Detective Allan O'Keefe said in the released documents.

Eric Jordan, 24, a friend of Phillips, called him "a time bomb" in the documents. Jordan recalled how he had picked up Phillips about 4 p.m. Aug. 14.

The night spun out of control after that. Here's how investigators say it unfolded:

The friends bought a bottle of Grey Goose vodka and drank until about 8 p.m. Then they visited a woman at a Gibsonton mobile home park and took turns having sex with her until Jordan returned Phillips to the Village Court house about 11:30 p.m., Jordan told investigators. Phillips indicated he was going to bed, Jordan said.

Van Amburg recalled she fell asleep about 9:30 p.m. She remembered Phillips waking her, perhaps around midnight, to ask to borrow one of her vehicles. She refused.

Meanwhile, Harrison logged on to his computer in his cruiser about 12:44 a.m. after advising a DUI checkpoint was secure.

The 55-year-old recently had told his sister he was considering retirement.

He was driving east on Lumsden, turning north on Kings Avenue beside at least one other car, when shots rang out, witnesses said. One woman said she then saw a white or light-gray truck swerving wildly out of O'Brien's Pub parking lot.

The wounded Harrison activated his emergency lights, then clipped a motorist's vehicle, went out of control and crashed his patrol car into a tree on Kings Avenue. Reports said a gunshot wound to the chest perforated his lungs.

He was pronounced dead at Brandon Regional Hospital about 1:39 a.m.

Ballistic tests from FDLE later matched spent shell casings to Phillips' firearm, reports state.

The next thing Van Amburg knew, Phillips woke her, saying "he was going to jail and he wasn't coming back this time," she said. "I didn't get outta bed. I just … he always lies to me, so I didn't believe him. And then he said, 'Mom, no, for real. I'm not lying.' So I said, well, Mike, then go turn yourself in."

Van Amburg said she tried to go back to sleep, but Phillips told her the house was surrounded. She thought he was joking. The phone rang. It was 1:29 a.m. A sheriff's dispatcher was on the line, asking whether Phillips was there and ordering Van Amburg out of the house.

Van Amburg said at that point she did not know where he had gone. As she made her way to the front door, she saw all the patrol cars and wondered, "What the hell did he do?"

Deputy Performs Rescues

Cpl. James St. Pearre, who was outside, said Van Amburg came to the door with her hands up but refused to exit. She kept yelling, "What are y'all doing here?" he said.

St. Pearre made sure he was covered by other deputies from gunfire, then grabbed Van Amburg and pulled her behind a patrol car. She was upset about her 4-year-old son, who was still inside the house.

"If he knows I talked to you, he'll … kill me," St. Pearre recalled her saying of Phillips.

Some time later, the toddler came to the door "screaming for Mommy," St. Pearre said. He tried to coax the boy toward him, but the child froze.

Again, St. Pearre asked colleagues to cover him and dashed out to snatch the child out of harm's way.

About 2:30 a.m., crisis negotiators working with the phone company blocked all outgoing calls from the house except for dialing 911. Johnson called Phillips about 3:08 a.m. When no one answered, he kept calling. Phillips answered about 11 minutes later.

After their first conversation, Phillips broke contact until about 3:29 a.m., the records show. He told Johnson to move a tactical officer away from his mother's vehicle or he would start shooting. He began a countdown of six.

Three minutes later, Phillips fired multiple shots. "I just shot up some cars," he told Johnson, then hung up.

About a minute later, Johnson reached him on the phone. Phillips asked whether Johnson knew "what 8814 means. And when I asked him what did it mean, he went off about, 'Hail,Hitler,'" Johnson said. "Then he told me that he wanted to die."

The numbers 88, according to the Anti-Defamation League's Web site, are code for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, and refer to the Nazi greeting "Heil Hitler." The number 14, according to the site, refers to the "14 Words" of the Aryan Nation's battle cry of "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

More shots were fired about 3:38 a.m. When Johnson reached Phillips on the phone, Phillips said, "Well, you guys got me. … You shot me."

He was so calm, "I thought he was messing with me," Johnson told investigators.

Phillips was not mortally wounded at that point. About 3:40 a.m., Johnson began playing a tape-recorded message from Van Amburg, begging Phillips to surrender.

"She was quite hysterical and pleading with him, uh, but it didn't seem to have any effect on him," Deputy Brendan Fitzgerald said of the recording.

As he spoke with Johnson, Phillips never talked about shooting Harrison, Johnson said. "He kinda skirted around the issue and really would never acknowledge it," Johnson told investigators.

Instead, Phillips threatened to shoot other deputies from his upstairs windows.

"I got him in my sights, Danny," Phillips said over the phone. "Y'all need to quit trying to come in my house."

Shortly before 4 a.m., Dugan fired the fatal shot, striking Phillips in the chest.

"I centered my reticle [cross hairs] center mass on his chest and fired one shot," Dugan told investigators.

Reporters Keith Morelli and Mike Wells contributed to this report. Valerie Kalfrin can be reached at vkalfrin@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7800.