Deadly chaos rocks Ark. resort towns
The waitress hardly looked up when the police cruiser and the green Pontiac pulled into the parking lot at the Brass Door Motel -- the inn has a large parking lot and sits on the main throughway in Gassville, so traffic stops are pretty routine, and besides, she had a pile of club sandwiches to deliver to a party of eight.
But then, at about 2:30 on a warm afternoon in the Ozarks, Jeri Inman heard a series of loud sounds and ''some hollering," and she rushed to the window.
Inman, like others interviewed last night in the small towns that dot the trout-rich White River of north-central Arkansas, had seen and discussed the news coverage Friday of a brutal hatchet-and-gun attack in a Massachusetts gay bar, but that was the furthest thing from her mind when she looked into the parking lot and saw the dead body of James Sell, a retired police officer who had moved to town and was helping the local police part time.
''Everybody was in shock -- we couldn't understand why if a police officer pulled you over, you'd open fire and shoot him in the head," Inman said in a telephone interview. ''Then later we learned his history."
The small resort and retirement towns of Baxter County, Arkansas, where a big event is the Great Cotter Trout Festival and a local newspaper is called the Trout Capital News, were jolted yesterday by a taste of big-city crime. Jacob D. Robida, 18, drove into the hilly region on a multistate flight from police. He was wanted in Massachusetts after being identified by patrons and police as the man who just after midnight Thursday morning strolled into a New Bedford gay bar named Puzzles, ordered a Captain Morgan on the rocks, and then slashed and shot two men and assaulted a third before escaping into the darkness.
Sixty-three hours and 1,500 miles later, Robida and a female passenger were traveling along State Highway, 62, when he was stopped by Sell and pulled into the Brass Door parking lot. According to Mary Crownover, a desk clerk at the motel who heard about the shooting from her boss, when Sell got out of his cruiser, Robida got out of the Pontiac and opened fire.
Gassville, according to its website named for a gasbag who once served as postmaster, is a working-class community of 1,700 people, where the local children hang out at the filling station and one main road passes through town. It is located about 150 miles north of Little Rock, but, and perhaps more significant, it is just 3 miles east of Cotter, a town of 900 that claims to be ''Trout Capital USA" and has a fishing-based tourism industry. The main employer in Gassville is the Mar-Bax Shirt Co., but many residents work in the county seat, Mountain Home, and the region has become increasingly popular among retirees as well as a site for second homes along the river.
''The police officer got out of his vehicle, and then this guy jumped out and started shooting him," Crownover said in a telephone interview. Crownover said Robida then got back in his car, circled the motel once, and fled down the highway.
''Oh, Lord, it's a shame he didn't die," she said. ''I don't mean to be cruel, but he killed an innocent man, and our police go out every day and put their lives on the line. It's very frightening for something like this to happen."
From Gassville, Robida took a roughly 16-mile journey along the winding, hilly two-lane highways of Baxter County. He headed east on Highway 62, made a right onto 201 south, and then took a right onto Highway 5, which leads into Norfork, a riverfront, logging, and retirement community at the confluence of the White and North Fork rivers, below Norfork Lake dam.
Norfork is so small -- just 500 residents -- that it doesn't have a police department. But the Baxter County sheriff's deputies were waiting and had laid spikes in the road. Authorities say Robida lost control of his car and shot Jennifer Rena Bailey, 33, of Charleston, W.Va., the passenger in his car. Police said he also opened fire on the waiting officers, who returned fire. Robida was shot twice in the head and taken to a hospital in Springfield, Mo., where he is in critical condition. Bailey was killed.
''It's real rare what happened here -- there's domestic violence and property crimes, but never . . . like this," said Eddie Baker, a fire marshal in Norfork.
Hours after the last shoot-out, the wooden porch railings of the Riverview Emporium building, where the crash occurred, were splintered and glass shards littered the road.
''Somebody's running, and a police officer gets killed," said Norfork's mayor, Jim Reeves. ''What can you say?"
Globe correspondents Waylon Harris reported from Norfork, Ark., and Liberty Parks from Gassville, Ark. 