For seven weeks in the fall of 2017, people in Seminole Heights, a neighborhood of Tampa, Florida, were afraid to walk their own streets. Four people were shot dead there between October 9 and November 14, each in the early morning, each apparently at random. Police received more than 5,000 tips. The killings stopped only when the man who committed them handed a bag with a gun in it to someone at work.
Benjamin Edward Mitchell, 22, was a musician and a community college student. He was shot at a bus stop on October 9, 2017. His mother is Brenda Samuel and his sister Nakeshia Brown.
Monica Caridad Hoffa, 32, worked as a waitress. She was killed on October 11, and a city employee found her body two days later. Her father, Kenny Hoffa, described her as "like a ray of sunshine with a playful spirit."
Anthony Naiboa, 20, was autistic. He had just started a new job, and on October 19 he took the wrong bus home from it. He was shot while walking in Seminole Heights. His father is Casimar Naiboa.
Ronald Felton, 60, did not own a car. He got around by bus or bicycle. For more than ten years he had volunteered at the food pantry of New Season Apostolic Ministries on North Nebraska Avenue, which fed about 200 families twice a week, and he usually came early to get it ready. At about 5 a.m. on November 14, 2017, as he walked there, he was shot from behind while crossing the street near Nebraska Avenue and Caracas Street.
"He left a legacy of hard work," a deacon at the church, Isaiah Osborne, said a few days later. The church renamed its food bank the Ronnie Felton Food Pantry and put up a plaque in memory of "The Superman of Service." His twin brother, Reginald Felton, said: "It was real hard, but I got to face it now. He's gone. I can't bring him back."
On the afternoon of November 28, 2017, at the McDonald's in Ybor City where he worked as a crew leader, Howell Donaldson handed a bag to a co-worker and asked her to hold it while he ran an errand. She looked inside, saw a loaded handgun and told her manager, who alerted a Tampa police officer eating in the restaurant. When Donaldson came back, police were waiting.
According to the arrest report as reported at the time, Donaldson told investigators he had bought a .40-caliber Glock and 20 rounds on October 3 and picked the gun up on October 7, two days before the first killing. Casings from that gun matched all four scenes. Location data from his phone placed him near the first three shootings at the times they happened, and investigators tied a hooded sweatshirt with blood on it to surveillance video of a man walking near the scene before Felton was killed. He consented to searches of his car, phone and gun, admitted the gun was his, and then asked for a lawyer. He later told investigators he had left the gun at work to keep it away from his little brother.
Police Chief Brian Dugan said Donaldson had been "friendly and nice to the cops, but he didn't give us anything." Mayor Bob Buckhorn recalled his words when the killings began: "Fifty-one days ago I said this was a struggle between good and evil. Well, tonight goodness has won."
Donaldson was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, on January 26, 1993, and grew up in Tampa, where family and friends called him Trai. His parents run a hair academy in the city. He played basketball at Tampa Catholic High School and then at Alonso High School, where he was a varsity guard, and graduated in 2011. That fall he enrolled at St. John's University in New York. He was a walk-on with the men's basketball team in 2011-12 but never played in a game, and he graduated in January 2017 with a degree in sports management.
Back in Tampa he worked from February to May 2017 in a support role at Ultimate Medical Academy, which said he was fired for absenteeism and had passed a background check. Apart from traffic tickets and a sealed 2014 arrest in Manhattan, reported by the Associated Press, he had no known criminal record. He did not live or work in Seminole Heights. Former classmates and a neighbor described him as quiet, polite and well liked.
No motive has ever been made public.
Donaldson was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty. In January 2018 Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren announced that he would seek the death penalty, and the victims' families agreed with that decision.
The case then moved slowly. There were years of hearings, the COVID-19 pandemic and an appeal, and a trial was eventually set for August 2023. Weeks before that, Donaldson and his lawyers offered to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences. State Attorney Suzy Lopez, who had succeeded Warren, put the offer to the families, who she said were exhausted. Most supported it, and she said her office would not have accepted it without them.
On May 1, 2023, Donaldson pleaded guilty to all four murders and was sentenced to four consecutive life terms without parole. He had maintained his innocence until that day. "There is no question this is and always will be a death penalty case," Lopez said, but the plea was entered "with the blessing of the victims' family members."
The families did not all feel the same. Brenda Samuel said she could finally sleep. Kenny Hoffa said he could forgive the killer, and that "it is a small comfort to know" he "will never hurt another innocent person again." Nakeshia Brown said she was not ready to forgive and would not say his name. Casimar Naiboa did not accept the plea. Brian Dugan, the former police chief, who had become his friend, spoke for him.
Donaldson is serving his sentences in the Florida prison system. No later change in his status was found as of October 2026.