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Store owner killed in robbery

By THOMAS LAKE and JONATHAN ABEL
Published December 23, 2006

TRILACOOCHEE - Gunshots. Two from the front of the store. Tom was stocking the Pepsi cooler when he heard them. He looked up and saw a strange man with dreadlocks. He hid behind a wall of beer.

Tom hugged the floor of PK's Food Store for several minutes on Thursday night, praying for invisibility. The robber cleaned out the cash register and left without further violence. But the bullets had found their mark.

At least one had. In the moments after the shooting, two friends and colleagues lay on the same floor, separated by shelves of kosher dills and sugar cones.

Tom was trying to keep silent.

Rahul Patel was trying to breathe.

* * *

This is what they say about Rahul Patel, 55, formerly of India, recently of Ridge Manor: husband, father, longtime owner of PK's Food Store, where a 12-pack of Miller High Life is $6.49 and the jumbo boiled peanuts come in regular and Cajun.

They say he was a good man. Nearly all of them say that. They say he did more than run a convenience store in this old-South neighborhood where impoverished families have lived in the same houses for generations. They say he ran a sort of ministry.

You might go in for a pack of smokes and a lottery ticket and find yourself deep in conversation with him. He would ask about your mother or your boyfriend and actually care about the answer.

"He wasn't in a hurry to push you out the door," said Charity Tarkington, 30, who lives up Trilby Road from PK's. "If you was short on money, he'd let you pay later."

Many of his customers were on food stamps or welfare or disability. But he trusted them to pay him back, because he knew them.

Most of them, anyway. According to his 25-year-old son, Ujjawl, Patel had been complaining for the past week or so about a suspicious stranger hanging around the store.

Could that have been the man who shot him?

* * *

Tom lay on the floor until he heard the robber leave. Then he got up and walked to the front of the store. Patel was lying by the cigarettes, shot near the heart, gasping for air.

Tom called 911 at 7:56 p.m. Thursday. Two others familiar with the store confirm he was on duty during the shooting, but he did not provide his last name to a reporter for fear of retribution by the robber. Patel was unconscious. He took a breath every 10 or 15 seconds. While Tom was still on the phone with the dispatcher, the breathing stopped.

Patel was the 29th homicide victim in Pasco County this year. Authorities cannot recall a year with nearly so many murders.

State law requires convenience stores to operate surveillance video cameras. Patel had such a system, but Pasco County Sheriff's spokesman Doug Tobin said the cameras had no tape. That will make the manhunt more difficult.

On Friday, deputies were looking for a black man, 20 to 30 years old, with bushy dreadlocks, who may have been driving a red, older-model full-size car, possibly a Lincoln, with tinted windows.

Fear and sorrow clouded the neighborhood. Just west on Trilby Road, Kristina Mallory said she no longer feels safe outside at night. Nor does her 4-year-old daughter, Alexandria.

"Someone shot a guy," Alexandria said. "And I didn't see it. I cried my head off."

It was unclear whether Patel kept a gun behind the counter. Tom said he never saw one. But further west at the Quik Mart off U.S. 98, the workers were ready for battle.

Co-owner Wleid Swalleh said he once served with United Nations forces in Croatia.

As he spoke he reached into his back pocket and showed his Smith & Wesson .44. He drew the black gun with effortless motion. He said he has never had to use it.

To his right was Linda Galster, who cooks the potato wedges and chicken fingers for sale at the front counter. She is a single mother, brimming with righteous anger over unpunished criminals. She keeps a .38 within reach.

She was asked if she could bring herself to shoot a robber. She replied:

"I wouldn't blink an eye."

Times staff writer Camille C. Spencer and researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.

[Last modified December 22, 2006, 21:20:14]

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