Gunman who killed 4 kids, then self had violent history
At just 7 months old, Aidan Lindsey slipped from his mother’s grasp as his father, Gary Wayne Lindsey Jr., dragged her by the neck through the living room of their Orange County apartment while threatening her with a knife, according to arrest paperwork from a April 2012 incident.
Aidan wasn’t hurt that day. But on Monday, more than six years later, he couldn’t escape his father’s violence. Aidan, 6, and his three siblings — 1-year-old Dove, 10-year-old Lillia and 12-year-old Irayan — were shot and killed by Lindsey during a nearly 24-hour standoff.
Lindsey had battered their mother earlier in the day, then shot at officers who arrived at the Westbrook Apartments to answer her call for help, critically wounding Officer Kevin Valencia, police said. Sometime after killing the children, Lindsey took his own life, authorities said.
While details of Monday’s incident are still emerging, records document Lindsey’s history of violence and arrests dating back more than a decade across three
counties: Volusia, Seminole and Orange.
At the time of his death, Lindsey, 35, was on probation, having pleaded no contest to domestic battery, arson and fleeing law enforcement in a 2008 case out of Volusia County. The plea also included a suspended 10-year prison sentence, but it was never enforced — even after he repeatedly violated his probation.
The Volusia County case involved another woman with whom Lindsey had been in a relationship for five years, and to whom he was engaged for more than three before she broke up with him in August 2008 because she couldn’t see a marriage in their future.
He was lazy, she later explained in a deposition. He was unemployed since leaving his job at Convergys, an information-management firm in Lake Mary, and was not taking care of himself or his diet, despite being an insulin-dependent diabetic.
“His lack of motivation for life, mainly,” she told attorneys, asked why she broke off their relationship. “Not any lack of love there or anything like that. I genuinely loved him. I just knew that it wasn’t going to work out so I broke up with him because I didn’t want to waste my life.”
He moved out of the home she owned on Dixon Street in Orange City, but came back the night of Dec. 16, 2008, to pick up a tool. An argument began. Within hours, he had destroyed her electronics in a fury and ordered her to leave the house — which he said would be his “grave.”
“I know when Gary’s being serious, too, because I was with him long enough to know,” the woman testified later. “He was dead serious. There was no changing his mind. I got scared.”
After she left, he doused the house in gasoline and lit it on fire.
Lindsey pleaded in the arson case in late 2009 and was sentenced to probation in April 2010. His first probation violation came in February 2011, when his probation officer wrote that Lindsey had violated his house arrest by leaving his home in Deltona without approval.
In a letter to his judge, Lindsey claimed that he had been getting medical treatment at Florida Hospital Fish Memorial in Orange City.
Lindsey spent 153 days in jail after that arrest before being released back to house arrest. This time, he was ordered to apply for disability benefits and wear a GPS monitor to track his whereabouts, records show.
As part of his probation, Lindsey was not allowed to have weapons. He was ordered to live without breaking the law. When officers got into the apartment where he was barricaded Monday night they found two shotguns, two rifles, and one handgun, which Orlando Police Chief John Mina said were passed on to Lindsey when his father died.
In July 2011, he asked Circuit Judge Randell Rowe for permission to move to an apartment of Silver Star Road in Orange County, which was granted. That’s where deputies were called April 12, 2012. Aidan’s mother reported Lindsey had become violent during an argument about taking their son to the doctor — and kicked a bathroom door until it broke.
He briefly left the apartment, then returned.
The argument resumed. Then, the woman told deputies, Lindsey grabbed a knife and held her by the throat before dragging her into the living room as their son fell to the floor.
Lindsey was arrested on felony charges — again triggering a violation of his Volusia County probation — but the case was short-lived: The following month, prosecutors deemed the case not suitable to move forward and opted against filing charges.
“Based on the facts of that case, the victim’s cooperation was essential in order to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Eryka Washington, a spokeswoman for the Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office, said Tuesday. “She was unwilling to cooperate. We were unable to prosecute.”
The probation violation in that case resulted in a 324-day jail sentence, though Lindsey got credit for 214 days of time served. He was violated again in August 2013 for failing to make restitution payments, records show, but released after entering a plea.
Records obtained by the Orlando Sentinel show an Orange County circuit judge ordered Lindsey committed for mental health treatment under the state’s Baker Act in March 2014, based on a petition from the victim in the 2012 case, who described him as violent, unpredictable and paranoid.
Lindsey was arrested again last month after a lossprevention officer at the Walmart on Rinehart Road in Sanford saw him exiting the store with a shopping cart full of unpaid merchandise he had placed into old Walmart bags, according to an arrest affidavit.
The grand theft arrest also violated Lindsey’s probation. But, records show, he again was released back to his probation after pleading to the violation, under the same rules of supervision as before.
The judge who approved Lindsey’s release after his latest arrest, Circuit Judge James R. Clayton, was not available to comment Tuesday, said Ludmilla Lelis, a Volusia County courts spokeswoman. Lelis said the prosecution and defense agreed to the terms of Lindsey’s most recent plea.
Suspended prison sentences like the one Lindsey got in his arson case are not common, said defense attorney Mark O’Mara, who was not involved in Lindsey’s cases. They typically entail a judge giving the defendant a list of conditions, like probation or anger management, which he or she can fulfill to avoid prison time.
“You can suspend it and literally hang it over their heads,” O’Mara said. “And if you do everything perfect, you will not go to prison for 10 years.”
But a probation violation — especially based on new criminal charges — would usually be enough to send the defendant to prison, O’Mara said.
“You gave him the break of a lifetime: You gave him 10 years and then took it back away,” he said.