Tampa killer connected to Mets
Talk about a chilling coincidence. With Tuesday’s arrest of Howell Donaldson, a former St. John’s walk-on basketball player, who has been charged in a string of murders in the Tampa area, the Mets have now had a second brush with a horrifying crime in two years.
According to his LinkedIn page, Donaldson was a part-time, seasonal employee at Citi Field as a ticket scanner and elevator operator.
And the Pulse Nightclub mass murderer Omar Mateen, the 29-year old psychopath who murdered 49 people and injured 58 more in Orlando last June, was last employed as a security guard at the PGA Village in Port St. Lucie, a gated community not far from the Mets spring training complex. In fact, several players rented housing there during spring training.
When Mateen was identified and his picture was flashed on television screens during the 2016 season, there were at least two Mets players who said they remembered him being at the back gate of the complex. Neither player wanted to discuss it on the record out of respect for the victims, but they were admittedly shaken by having been the man around.
“It’s scary thinking how you just see a person and then you find out how evil he was,” one player said of Mateen later. “I remember his face and I will never forget it now.”
And in the aftermath of Howell’s arrest there will be many around the St. John’s campus who will be wondering if they had ran into the man who has been charged with four premeditated murders. Donaldson was a walk-on for the Red Storm in 2011-12, but never played in a game.
Howell (Trai) Donaldson III, 24, is accused of shooting four people to death between Oct. 9 and Nov. 14 in the city’s Seminole Heights neighborhood. He was taken into custody Tuesday afternoon at the McDonald’s where he worked as a crew leader near the neighborhood he allegedly victimized, according to police.
According to reports, Donaldson was turned in by the McDonald’s manager after he asked the manager to hold a bag for him and not look inside. The manager found a handgun in the bag and alerted police.