You probably wouldn't remember the name, but you might remember the colorful parade floats of yesteryear made by Stanley Quaggin, who died April 28, at the age of 88.
Quaggin made headlines of a different kind nearly a decade ago when he twice went on trial for manslaughter -- convicted the first time and acquitted the second time in the 1997 shooting death of a teen boy.
All these years later, the Quaggin case troubles me, having covered both his trials. It's not the verdicts, but how the evidence was presented that resulted in those verdicts.
There were no winners in this case -- only losers. Quaggin, an elderly man who had to endure not one, but two trials as well as a lot of media attention, and the boy he fatally shot, 13-year-old Eric Brooks of Deltona, who mistook his dilapidated DeLand home for a junkyard office. There was also a 10-year-old boy who saw the ugly side of death.
The teen and the boy had gathered up some scraps of wood, some cans of soda and some comic books and took the materials inside with them to ask permission to take them as well as use the wood to build a fort.
Quaggin mistook them for burglars and fired a single shot into the chest of the older boy as he and a younger child meandered through a winding hallway, climbing through junk.
The gun jammed or the second boy might have been killed as well.
Quaggin's street, just outside the DeLand city limits near where a Wal-Mart now stands, was aptly named Parade Circle. His 3-acre was littered with so much junk from his parade floats that at one point, the county had assessed millions of dollars in fines against his property.
The case was controversial from the start. Then-State Attorney John Tanner tried to get a grand jury to consider murder, but the lesser charge was handed up. The question was whether Quaggin's use of deadly force reasonable, and after two trials, the answer was not any clearer because two different juries were presented the same critical information two different ways.
At issue was Quaggin's intent, which the state claimed was supported by his demeanor and tone in his own words on a 9-1-1 call. The defense countered he was simply scared and under no obligation to retreat in his own home.
During the initial trial, the jury heard an emotional tape of the dead child's friend, 10-year-old Jonathan Eidelbach, crying, "I don't want to die," to a 9-1-1 dispatcher as he called for help after the fatal shooting with a .357 Magnum revolver pointed at his head.
But in the second trial a year later, after an appeals court threw out the first verdict on improper jury instructions, the judge allowed the jury to hear only a written transcript of the tape read aloud by the prosecutor and his assistant through role playing -- simply reading a written copy of the transcript, even though that issue was not part of the appeal
The child cried into the phone: "I don't want to die!"
The dispatcher responded: "You're not going to die!"
"You need to put the gun down!" the dispatcher then ordered Quaggin.
Quaggin answered back: "I can't put it. . . I'll tell you why because I've got it cocked and it's ready to go off again."
The operator responded: "Sir, you shot a child! You're scaring this 10-year-old boy to death!"
"Hold on, sweetie. Just hang on baby," the operator told the crying child as as he heard the ambulance siren coming.
They heard a radio, the boy testified during Quaggin's first court appearance and so they opened a sliding door to what they thought was a junk yard office.
Quaggin jumped out of a chair and yelled: ``What the hell are you doing here?'' Then he fired a single shot, which struck the older boy in the chest as he fell to his death.
"We weren't trying to steal," the boy told the 911 dispatcher. Then a few seconds later, he screamed, `"My friend! My friend!"
Gregory Wagner, Quaggin's attorney, convinced the judge not to allow the jury to hear the 911 call made by Eidelbach.
Robin Rentz, Jonathan's mother, who shook her head from side to side during the reading, dismissed the role playing later outside the courtroom as a "joke."
Though the first jury was allowed to visit Quaggin's Parade Circle residence and its 3-acres littered with junk from abandoned parade floats, the present jury was allowed only to see photographs of the property. That's because the property was cleaned up in the interim between trials as opposed to a tour by the jury the first time around.
The other problem was the age of the case. The 10-year-old boy with the spaghetti-bowl haircut who testified at the first trial was now 13 and had grown taller than Quaggin himself. Also, Quaggin opted to testify the second time around, much aged and slow afoot. His hearing had also deteriorated, often asking that questions be repeated.
What this jury saw was a frail old man and a budding teenager, a far cry from the first go around.
Eidelbach endured years of depression, his mother told me several years ago. I sent a mesage to Eidelbach the other day on his Facebook page, but I got no response.
The slain boy's mother, Maria Russell, was livid after the county forgave the $3.5 million in fines against Quaggin's property so it could be sold to help pay for his legal bills. She sued to get the property, but it went nowhere.
"Eric was a good boy," Russell told me after that second trial. "They made him out to be a thief and he was the one killed. Where's my justice?"
Then-Assistant State Attorney Raul Zambrano, who is now a circuit judge, told me after Quaggin walked out of court a free man: "There are no real winners. Time was the biggest factor in this case. The evidence got older. The defendant got older, the witness got older."