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Howell Donaldson Arrested in the Seminole Heights Killings After Leaving a Gun at His McDonald's Job

A co-worker's alarm over a bag with a loaded Glock in it ended 51 days of fear in a Tampa neighborhood where four people were shot dead.

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Illustration of police cars with lights flashing on a wet residential street of small houses under streetlights at night. Not the actual street.

For 51 days the people of Seminole Heights, a working-class Tampa neighborhood, had been afraid to walk their own streets. On the afternoon of Tuesday, November 28, 2017, the fear broke in an unlikely place. At the McDonald's in Ybor City, a 24-year-old crew member named Howell Emanuel Donaldson III handed a co-worker a bag with a loaded gun in it and asked her to hold on to it. She told her manager. The manager walked over to a Tampa police officer who happened to be sitting at a table in the restaurant. When Donaldson came back, police were waiting for him.

That night Police Chief Brian Dugan, with Mayor Bob Buckhorn beside him and the victims' relatives around them, announced that Donaldson would be charged with four counts of first-degree murder. "The gun is what we needed," Dugan said. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the federal ATF had already established that the cartridge casings at all four scenes came from one weapon, a .40-caliber Glock, and according to the arrest affidavit the gun in the McDonald's bag was it. Location data from Donaldson's phone, the affidavit said, matched the times of the first three shootings, and a search of his car turned up clothing with what appeared to be a bloodstain. Investigators now had the link to the figure in the surveillance video they had released weeks earlier.

The victims had nothing in common but the neighborhood and the hour. Benjamin Mitchell, 22, was shot at a bus stop on October 9. Monica Hoffa, 32, was killed two days later. Anthony Naiboa, 20, was shot on October 19 after he took the wrong bus home from his new job. Each of the October victims was at a bus stop or getting on or off a city bus. Ronald Felton, 60, was killed on November 14 as he walked to volunteer at a food pantry; at his memorial the man who supervised him there called him "the Superman of service." Police had received more than 5,000 tips.

Donaldson admitted the gun was his, Dugan said, but not the killings. "He was cooperative, but did not tell us why he was doing this." He told detectives he did not know Seminole Heights, then asked for a lawyer. "I don't think he wanted to get caught," the chief said; Donaldson seemed to think his co-worker would keep the bag without looking inside. Buckhorn went back to what he had said when the killings began. "You know, 51 days ago I said this was a struggle between good and evil, well now, goodness has won."

What this story covers. It draws on Fox News's report of November 29, 2017, written with the Associated Press, which gives the chief's account and the arrest affidavit's, and on the Hillsborough State Attorney's announcement of May 1, 2023. Donaldson was an accused man when he was arrested. He maintained his innocence for more than five years, then pleaded guilty on May 1, 2023, to four counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to four consecutive life terms, in a plea that took the death penalty off the table.

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