GIRL, MAN CHARGED IN BEATING
THE LEESBURG PAIR ARE ALSO SUSPECTS IN THE RECENT SLAYINGS OF A PIZZA DRIVER AND A SECURITY GUARD.
Orlando Sentinel

LEESBURG -- Her grandmother said the girl hadn't been the same since getting out of foster care last year.

She never dreamed the 13-year-old might hurt anyone.

On Monday, Pamela McCoy, a middle-school student whose trouble escalated last month with stealing and staying out late, was arrested along with a 24-year-old man in connection with the attempted murder of an elderly woman who remains hospitalized with multiple skull fractures. The brutality of the crime shocked law-enforcement officers.

"Ever since she's been back [from foster care] she's been a different child," said Catherine Henderson, who cared for her granddaughter for the past year. "But I didn't know she'd been into those kinds of things."

She spotted her granddaughter a few times with a man 10 years older, but didn't think much of it at the time.

Quawn Franklin, 24, an ex-convict also charged Monday with attempted murder, was a neighbor McCoy hung out with. He and McCoy are also suspects in the Leesburg slayings of a pizza deliveryman and a security guard.

Police on Friday night found Alice M. Johnson lying on the floor of her Leesburg home, semiconscious and severely beaten, her feet bound with duct tape. Her assailants also stole her 2000 Toyota Camry. Johnson remains in critical but stable condition at Leesburg Regional Medical Center, where she is to turn 76 today.

On Sunday, St. Petersburg police received a call from someone who spotted a suspicious vehicle parked in a driveway with two people asleep inside. Police found Franklin and McCoy inside Johnson's Camry, as well as a .357-caliber Magnum handgun.

Along with attempted murder, they both were charged Monday with armed burglary and home-invasion robbery. McCoy has not been charged as an adult.

Police said Franklin lives on Church Street, three blocks from Johnson's Jordan Street home, where she was attacked late Thursday or early Friday.

McCoy, who turns 14 Thursday, lives on South East Street in a home just behind Johnson's.

Police suspect that Franklin used his young friend to get inside Johnson's home.

"There is a strong likelihood that she [Johnson] knew her," said Capt. Steve Rockefeller of the Leesburg police. "That could possibly explain why there was no forced entry."

Henderson said her granddaughter had been put in foster care, along with her three sisters, when she was taken away from their mother. She didn't say why. The girl's older sister also lived with their grandmother.

Henderson said she last saw McCoy on Thursday. She wondered why the girl hadn't called but thought she was staying at a friend's house.

"She would do that sometimes," she said.

On Saturday, though, she began hearing from neighborhood children that McCoy had been "mixed up" in the Johnson attack.

"I couldn't believe it," she said. "I still don't know what happened, or why she was with this guy."

Henderson had seen her granddaughter sitting outside with Franklin at least twice, but said she didn't know anything about him.

MCCOY'S PROBLEMS NOT NEW

Police said the girl recently received several city curfew violations -- the Leesburg curfew is midnight. She was arrested last month in an attempted auto theft, and in 1999 was charged with auto burglary.

Much of Franklin's adulthood has been spent behind bars.

He served seven years of a 14-year sentence for robbery and car-theft convictions and was released from the Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown in early October.

While locked up, Franklin posted an ad on a prison pen-pal Web site.

In the July 9 ad on www.prisonpenpals.com, he wrote that his time in prison had "dampened some opportunities. But in due time, no later than this year, I shall return to society and hopefully have that one thing that can make my life complete."

Whether Franklin ever struck up any relationships through the pen-pal site is unknown, but the state Department of Corrections Web site warns people "to be cautious before establishing social or pen-pal relationships with inmates."

St. Petersburg police Sunday charged Franklin with carrying a concealed firearm, possession of a firearm by a felon, resisting arrest without violence, providing false information to a law-enforcement officer and auto theft. McCoy was also charged with auto theft.

On Monday, they both remained in Pinellas County, where St. Petersburg police said Franklin once lived and may have relatives. Pinellas County is also where Franklin stole a car in 1992 and committed a robbery in 1993.

Rockefeller of the Leesburg Police Department expected the girl and Franklin to be brought back to Lake County, where they will be held without bond, as early as Monday evening.

MORE CRIMES IN LAKE

Both are also suspects in the Dec. 19 robbery and shooting death of pizza delivery driver John Horan on Talley Box Road -- the same street where security guard Jerry Lawley was shot early Saturday.

Horan was bound and gagged with duct tape and shot in the back with a handgun, and his car was stolen.

Lawley died a day after he was attacked at Elberta Crate and Box but was able to describe to police his assailant's car -- similar to the description of Johnson's Camry.

Early Saturday, Lawley told officers that a masked man approached him and forced him onto the ground, shooting him in the back with a handgun.

Police, who described all three attacks as "vicious and senseless," said that along with Johnson's car, additional evidence ties Franklin and McCoy to the Johnson beating. They also are analyzing tire tracks from outside Johnson's house and at the packinghouse.

"The likelihood they are all related is pretty high," Rockefeller said.