Sanford shootings kill woman, hurt 5
Cops arrest boyfriend after brief pursuit
SANFORD — A shooting spree that ended with a woman dead and five others injured began with an argument over keys.
It was just after 3:30 a.m. Monday, and Latina Herring and her boyfriend, Allen Dion Cashe, were quarreling on the front lawn of the Hays Drive home where she lived with her father and two young sons. Cashe, who has a long criminal history, had the keys to the house and would not give them back, she told police.
Police showed up but said they had no reason to arrest Cashe.
About 6:20 a.m., Herring, 35, was shot and killed, and her sons, 7 and 8, were critically hurt. Her father, Bertis Gerard Herring Jr., 60, was outside, injured and yelling for help.
Police said that as Cashe, 31, ran through the neighborhood, he shot two others: Winter Springs High School student Rakeya Jackson, 18, who was waiting for her bus, and Lazaro Paredesquelite, 43, who was near a baseball
field.
“There is no way for us to predict what is going to take place,” Sanford Police Chief Cecil Smith said. “We did everything we believe is possible.”
Bertis Herring survived but was in critical condition late Monday. Jackson and Paredesquelite were in stable condition.
Neighbor Arlene Bush said she heard about a dozen gunshots, with a pause between each, and ran outside to see Bertis Herring on the ground.
“When I looked at that man, I didn’t know if he was going to make it,” she said.
Dominique Smith, 17, was waiting for a school bus near Hartwell Avenue with three classmates when she noticed Cashe, dressed in all black, and realized he had a gun. He started running, and everyone scattered, she said.
Dominique later stood on Hays Drive with her mom, watching the police investigate.
“I seen all this,” she said. “I don’t even feel safe right now.”
Cashe was arrested within 10 minutes, after a Sanford police officer spotted him and followed him to Seminole Garden Apartments. He had an AK-47 rifle on him, police said. They haven’t disclosed what kind of gun was used to kill Latina Herring.
Cashe has a violent arrest history, much of it directed at women, according to Seminole County court records, and he is currently on probation.
In 2013 he bashed in the windows of his girlfriend’s car with a baseball bat. A few months earlier, a UPS man called 911 when he saw Cashe on top of a different girlfriend, pummeling her with his fists.
In 2010, he pointed a gun at a relative and the woman he was with and said, “If I wasn’t on county GPS, I would pull the trigger and kill both of you,” according to an arrest report.
Prosecutors dropped charges in each of those cases.
But in 2012, a Seminole County jury convicted him of punching a different girlfriend in the face several times in the Casselberry home they shared, and he wound up serving five months in jail.
He also has been convicted on drug and gun charges.
Four people — not including Latina Herring — petitioned for domestic-violence injunctions against Cashe in the past 12 years. A judge granted one request in 2005.
Jeanne Gold, CEO of SafeHouse of Seminole, which has an emergency shelter for domestic-violence victims, said the shooting was a sad situation.
She said she doesn’t know all the facts, but these situations typically have a perpetrator who needs “power and control” over the victim. The person can resort to violence if that power and control are lost, she said.
“Why else would you give violence and pain to someone you love or profess to love?” she said. “When you lose control, who [knows] what he is capable of?”
Latina Herring and Cashe began arguing about the keys about 3:20 a.m. at a Wawa gas station, and the fight continued at Herring’s home but never got physical, police said. A caller whom Herring identified as her exboyfriend called 911 to report that Herring had been battered and Cashe had a gun, according to an arrest report.
When the police showed up, they searched Cashe and his car but didn’t find any weapons. The keys were found on a nightstand in Herring’s bedroom.
Cashe told officers he just wanted to get his belongings, and Herring came out with a book bag she said was his.
But Cashe wouldn’t take it. After he left, police found a loaded Glock .22-caliber handgun, two loaded magazines for the Glock, five empty boxes of .40-caliber ammunition, a loaded rifle magazine and a loaded drum magazine, the report states.
As a convicted felon, Cashe cannot legally possess a gun, but officers had no cause to arrest him because they couldn’t know whether the weapon really belonged to him, the Sanford police chief said.
The shooting left neighborhood residents and community members shaken.
Gwen McKinney said she worked with Herring at a Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and described her as a strong, hardworking mom.
Herring loved her boys more than anything and always worked hard for them, she said. She had been living in the house on Hays Drive with her father since her mother’s death about a year ago, McKinney said.
The boys’ paternal grandfather, Theodore Jones, said he is praying for them.
“They ain't got their mother, but they have their granddaddy and daddy and God on their side,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes as he spoke outside Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, where his grandsons were in critical condition. “… They [are] strong. They are going to fight.”