Passerby gawked and took photos of suspects car.
People gawked, took photos of suspect’s van
Paul Bilodeau parked at a Publix in Oakland Park, Florida, last Thursday and couldn’t help but notice the van that parked next to him — an old white van plastered with Trump stickers. He couldn’t help noticing the driver either.
“He had been foraging through his car,” Bilodeau said, “and I thought he looked like a shooter — like somebody who was gonna shoot up a store.”
Bilodeau was not the first in South Florida to notice the festooned van, home to Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr., the man charged Friday with mailing pipe bombs to prominent Democrats across the country.
From Aventura to Hollywood to Davie and farther, people have gawked and photographed the oddball vehicle for some time.
“I saw this van dozens of times. It always struck me, always unsettled me. It appeared that somebody at times was in the van, though it was hard to tell because of the windows,” said David Cypkin, a documentary film producer who co-produced 2006’s “Cocaine Cowboys.”
“This is also Miami and you don’t know — this guy’s an enthusiastic Trump supporter, that’s one thing, but the number of stickers he had on his car combined with some of the more threatening stickers seemed to indicate this might be a person with a problem you don’t want to confront directly, especially in Miami, where you don’t know if anybody’s armed.”
Cypkin encountered the van regularly when he lived near the Shoppes at the Waterways in Aventura, where it was regularly parked. Cypkin believed someone could be living in the van, and finally, on the morning of New Year’s Eve 2017, he snapped a few quick pictures so he could get a better look at some of the stickers later.
“I had seen it there at least a year,” Cypkin said. “I did see someone standing at the back one time, with one of the back doors open. I didn’t make eye contact.”
Bilodeau, the Publix shopper in Oakland Park, kept an eye on Sayoc before deciding he couldn’t have a gun on him.
“He was wearing gym clothes, but, like too small,” Bilodeau said, explaining why he didn’t believe Cesar Sayoc could be armed.
Bilodeau snapped pictures of the van and afterward saw that Sayoc had gone into Publix to buy lottery tickets. The Friday Mega Millions jackpot was nearly a billion dollars, after all.
In Davie, people frequently saw the van outside Whole Foods, and Geo Rodriguez, a former South Florida Sun Sentinel reporter, came across it in front of Papa John’s pizza in Hollywood.
Rodriguez, who now works for Memorial Regional Hospital, likes to take pictures of strange things around his city. He hashtags them on Instagram, #Hollyweird. On April 6, he stepped outside a 7-11 and saw the van, parked on the swale next to Hollywood Boulevard, in front of the Papa John’s. Several readers said they have seen the van delivering pizza.
I’ve seen him off and on. You can tell he’s from around here,” Rodriguez said. “I see him at the Publix here in Hollywood all the time. He’s kind of like a fixture.”
When he saw the van on the news, being towed down the highway by the FBI, he remembered it right away.
“One of my coworkers was watching it on TV,” Rodriguez said, and like so many others, when he saw it, he thought, “I know that van!”