25 YEARS SINCE DEATH OF OFFICER ROCKY HUNT
No one tied to the case can ever forget the brutal slaying in 1993.
LANTANA — Twenty-five years later, as retired Palm Beach County sheriff’s Detective Ron Tomassi described the night of his old friend’s murder, the phone line fell silent. The veteran detective was sobbing.
Finally, he croaked out, “It’s ... a part of you died with him.”
Nicholas Hardy, just 18, sneaked up on sheriff ’s Deputy Rocky Hunt and pumped two bullets into his face. A short time later, Hardy placed the deputy’s gun in his mouth and fired. And didn’t die.
The moments of madness 25 years ago today, at an ATM west of Lantana, mark the last time a law-enforcement officer was murdered in the line of duty in Palm Beach County.
Hardy failed at his own demise, but he succeeded in ending the life of a 41-year-old veteran lawman and father of two, destroying a family in the process.
His actions brought to a climax a three-day binge of sociopathy that remains one of the more disturbing episodes in an region whose residents believe they have seen it all.
As the sheriff ’s spokesman that night in 1993, Bob Ferrell was a person who made a living finding the right words. This time, he couldn’t.
“I don’t know what you call this. A wilding?”
A man called Rocky
Rocky Hunt’s widow, Judith, did not respond to requests for an interview. His sisters declined a formal interview. Sister Roxana Hunt-Gale said on behalf of the family that “Our lives were shattered and our hearts broken that day, and not a day goes by that we don’t miss him dearly!”
James Stone Hunt III, rugged
and athletic, played lacrosse, soccer and softball. He skied the Rockies and the Alps, invested in the stock market, became a pilot, hunted in Canada, and rode his own Harley.
He might have gotten rich riding a desk instead of a police motorcycle. His grandfather — the first James Stone Hunt, the man who dubbed him “Rocky” — had built and sold 15,000 homes across Broward County, and had developed what’s now the city of Coral Springs.
Hunt grew up on a 160acre cattle ranch in Davie. He graduated from Fort Lauderdale’s Cardinal Gibbons High in 1969 and got a B.A. in political science in 1973 at Ole Miss.
He was a Fort Lauderdale cop from 1975 to 1977, when his family persuaded him to get out. But the itch didn’t go away. In 1979, he applied to the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office. It was the same year he met Judith Louise Ziel, the woman he’d marry in September 1982.
By 1987, he was a sergeant. He and Judith had two boys. Hunt would relish taking them fishing and to soccer practice.
In February 1993, James IV — Jamie — was 9. Jason was 7.
Hunt didn’t live off his grandfather’s money. He and his family lived in a modest three-bedroom home in suburban Lantana. It was not far from where Nicholas Hardy moved with his family in April 1992.
A family’s time bomb
Hardy was born in San Bernardino, Calif., in 1974. When he was just a boy, his father was convicted of shooting a girlfriend, and Hardy had no contact with him.
The family — his mother, Julia Shell, his younger brother, Christopher, and older half-sister, Alexandra — moved around and landed in Delray Beach in 1987. Five years later, the family moved into the Concept Homes development, off Lantana and Jog roads.
Hardy had been a top skateboarder, but he traded that for a pickup. And he became obsessed with body-building. Dyslexic, he had trouble in school and eventually dropped out. He took some classes at South Tech, and was just short of his welding certificate when he quit going to class.
Then he stopped going to the gym and sought a substitute family in gangs.
Christopher Hardy, then 16, told The Palm Beach Post in 1993 that his brother had grown erratic in recent weeks. He bragged openly about stealing cars and being part of a gang.
“Basically, everybody knew what was going to happen in the end,” his brother said at the time. “That Nick would do something far out and stupid. And he did.”
The wilding
According to police reports and news accounts, from late Feb. 23, 1993, to early Feb. 26, six boys took part in the chain of events that ended with Rocky Hunt dead. In addition to Hardy, they were:
Ricky Rodriguez, 15, of Lantana, who a month earlier had been suspended from Christa McAullife Middle School. Scott Allen, 14, also from Lantana, a classmate of Rodriguez at McAullife. Bryan Sanders, 16. Jose Nieves, Jr., 17. And Glen Wilson, 19, from West Palm Beach.
Wilson would testify at Hardy’s murder trial that Hardy once told him that if it ever came down to him or a cop, it would be the cop.
At about 8:50 p.m. Feb. 23, a silver 1990 Cadillac was stolen from the Boynton Beach Mall. Police said the thieves were Hardy, Allen, and Nieves. The boys drove north to Palm Beach Gardens. At about 2 a.m. Feb. 24, they approached a pickup. Eight shots tore into the truck as the driver, Kenneth Speranza, ducked.
A short time later, on Military Trail near Community Drive in West Palm Beach, the boys spotted David Cook. He was a homeless man who worked cleaning up area restaurants after closing. Three bullets ripped into Cook. He would be hospitalized in critical condition. He is believed to have recovered, but his eventual fate could not be learned for this story.
At about 4 a.m., the teens pulled into the Leisureville area of Boynton Beach and began pumping bullets into three homes. Residents called police to report more than 20 shots.
On Feb. 25, Hardy, Wilson, Sanders, Rodriguez, and Allen got together with a bag of marijuana at Hardy’s home.
At about 10 p.m., they decided to go out. Sanders begged off and went home to watch a movie with his mom. Hardy went into his bedroom and passed a shotgun out his window to Wilson. Hardy also brought along a .38-caliber revolver.
The four remaining youths jumped in Wilson’s car, but it broke down. They pushed it into the parking lot of the Publix Super Market at Lantana and Jog roads.
At 10:51 p.m., an alarm sounded at a nearby Barnett Bank ATM.
Sgt. Rocky Hunt was near the end of his shift, but no other deputies were close. He radioed dispatch: I’ll take it.
‘Hang on, Rocky!’
As Hunt pulled up, his field of vision caught four kids running across the lot. He radioed for backup. The sheriff ’s office later said Hunt did everything by the book, from the moment he spotted the boys until he started patting them down. The agency said deputies can’t wait for backup to arrive.
Hunt started asking the teens what they were up to. He searched Wilson, then Rodriguez. He couldn’t have taken his eye off Hardy for more than a second.
Hardy reached in his waistband, pulled out the .38 and fired.
Two bullets struck Hunt in the left eye.
The other three boys jumped at the explosion and started running. Hardy stopped to reach down and pick up Hunt’s chromeplated 9mm service pistol.
At 11:10 p.m., 19 minutes after the ATM alarm had sounded, Deputy Dale Fox reached the shopping center. He had been scheduled to tag in for Hunt at the 11 p.m. shift change.
Fox saw Hunt, slumped in the grass. He got on his radio and put out the call: Officer down.
Sgt. Thomas Hill came up. The two were starting CPR when the paramedics arrived. Hill shouted, “Hang on, Rocky!”
‘But he’s dead’
Detective Ron Tomassi had just drifted to sleep when his phone rang. It was a colleague.
“He said, ‘Rocky’s been shot,’ ” Tomassi, who spent 28 years at PBSO and now is retired in Central Florida, said this month.
“I sat straight up,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Where is he? I’m on my way.’ He said, ‘Delray Community. But he’s dead.’
“It’s like you’d taken a cement block and hit me in the stomach and knocked the air out of me.”
It was Hunt who in 1982 had talked Tomassi, a young Deerfield Beach officer, into joining PBSO.
Tomassi raced to the hospital, now Delray Medical Center.
At 12:18 a.m., on Feb. 26, the doctors declared Hunt dead.
Within minutes of the shooting, deputies had been crawling over the area near the crime scene. The chopchop of helicopter blades and the snarls of police dogs echoed through the neighborhoods, stirring people in their beds.
Wilson was captured near a mobile home and a police dog found Rodriguez on a canal bank. Minutes later, the deputies found Hardy. Hunt’s gun lay at the teen’s side. He had put the barrel in his mouth and fired. A chopper flew him to the hospital, where the prognosis was not good.
A colleague stopped Tomassi at the hospital’s front door. He was afraid what Tomassi might do to Hardy, being worked on inside.
“He said, ‘You’re not going in there. You’ll just lose your job. I might have to arrest you.’ ”
At 3:30 a.m., deputies went to Allen’s home and arrested him. He was asleep.
‘Takes everything out of you’
On Tuesday, March 2, at Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church in suburban West Palm Beach, priests celebrated Mass over Rocky Hunt.
“He was a great officer,” Richard Wille, sheriff from 1977 to 1995, recalled this month.
“It’s just something that takes everything out of you,” Wille, now 89, said. “You wonder how it could have been prevented.”
Initially, investigators didn’t bother to charge Hardy. They didn’t expect him to survive.
They did charge Allen with two counts of attempted murder in the drive-by shootings. Because he was 14, the disposition of his juvenile case could not be found for this story.
Rodriguez, then 15, was charged in an unrelated incident two weeks earlier, on Feb. 16, in which he allegedly threatened other teens at a neighborhood basketball game. That disposition also could not be found.
Judith Hunt was angered the other teens weren’t charged in her husband’s death. She boycotted a November 1993 “officer down” memorial ceremony, saying, “my boys and I feel totally betrayed by the department.”
Hardy eventually would come off a respirator, and by early April, doctors said he could smile and blink his eyes. On April 16, he was moved to the home of his mother, now living in Lake Park.
By December, he was moved to the state hospital in Chattahoochee.
It took two years, but in February 1995, a judge ruled Hardy fit to stand trial. Prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty.
‘Best father and role model’
On Halloween 1995, the trial began. Hunt had been dead for nearly a thousand days.
The first witness didn’t get two minutes in before breaking down in sobs so racking the judge had to declare a break so he could compose himself. It was Fox, the first deputy to come across Hunt’s crumpled body. Fox, now retired, said this month he did not want to talk about it.
At the trial, Hardy’s pals from that night told what they saw. Hunt “didn’t have time to see nothing coming,” Wilson testified.
On the fourth day of trial, the jury took 15 minutes to declare Hardy guilty. He had no reaction. Judith Hunt wept. So did relatives, friends and prosecutor Barry Krischer.
Hardy’s lawyers fought to keep him alive. His options were the electric chair, a life term with a mandatory 25 years, or life without any possibility of parole.
Hardy’s mother, Julia Shell, said Hardy and his two siblings suffered years of abuse from their father. Palm Beach Gardens neuropsychologist, Dr. Laurence Levin, went so far as to say the man who shot Hunt “died that day. He’s the hulk of that person.”
But Krischer argued this no longer was about Hardy or Hunt. He said the only thing that prevents more cop killings is the knowledge of what awaits a cop killer.
This time, the jury took 70 minute to make its recommendation. Its vote was nine to three: Death.
But in June 1998, the Florida Supreme Court threw the sentence out, saying Hardy’s act was “spur of the moment,” rather than cold planning, and his suicide attempt confirmed the idea of panic. The high court also agreed he was not the man he’d been before he put Hunt’s gun in his mouth.
Instead, he’d serve life with no chance of parole.
Hardy is in the Taylor Correctional Institution Annex, about 60 miles southeast of Tallahassee. He did not respond to a Palm Beach Post letter to him. Calls to his siblings and other relatives weren’t returned.
Prison records show 19 disciplinary actions between 1996 and 2010. They range from refusing drug tests to unspecified sex acts to getting caught with a homemade knife.
Hardy’s first chance for a parole interview will come in March 2023, when he is 48. Rocky Hunt will have been dead for 30 years and one month.
And his family will never forget.
“I think about you every day. I love you so much,” son James Hunt IV wrote in August 2014 in a posting in the national “Officer Down Memorial Page.” “I always wonder what my life would be like if this never happened.”