A misunderstanding over an Xbox video game system may have sparked the bloodiest mass murder in Volusia County history.
Four men, intent on recovering the video game system and some clothes, used aluminum baseball bats and knives to slaughter six people whose bodies were found early Friday, Sheriff Ben Johnson said Sunday in a press conference announcing the arrests.
Three of the four admitted their roles, Johnson said, but their confessions could hardly explain an attack so vicious that one victim has yet to be identified, even with dental records.
"This is the worst thing I've ever seen in my career," said Johnson, who personally made the stop that led to the arrest of two suspects late Saturday. All the suspects, he said, "are a danger to society" and deserve the death penalty.
Investigators say the attack was led by Troy Victorino, a 6-foot-5 27-year-old who has spent eight of the last 11 years in prison. In 1996, he beat a man so severely that doctors needed 15 titanium plates to rebuild the victim's face. Victorino was being held Sunday in the Volusia County Branch Jail along with three 18-year-olds whom investigators say he recruited for the attacks.
Victorino and the others -- Jerone Hunter and Michael Salas of Deltona and Robert Cannon of Orange City -- will have bail hearings this afternoon on charges of first-degree murder and armed robbery.
Victorino had squatted briefly in a house that belonged to one victim's family, Johnson said. That victim, believed to be 22-year-old Erin Belanger, took Victorino's belongings to 3106 Telford Lane, where the murders occurred. The attack on her was particularly brutal, Johnson said, which is why a positive identification has yet to be made.
Investigators thought from the outset that the killer or killers knew the victims. This led them to Victorino, who had been overheard vowing revenge for the theft of his belongings, authorities said.
But Johnson said Victorino's video game and clothes had been "boxed up, waiting for him" in the Telford Lane house when the attack occurred.
Deputies tracked down Victorino and Hunter on Saturday afternoon at a home on Fort Smith Boulevard. Hunter gave details that only a perpetrator could have known, admitting his involvement and implicating the other three defendants, officials said.
Hunter told investigators that the men dressed in black and put scarves over their faces before going to the Telford Lane home. Victorino kicked in the locked front door and Hunter entered first, then repeatedly struck one victim with a bat. They beat the victims and stabbed them with knives found in the house, Hunter told investigators. The men, he said, had intended to use the bats as weapons in a fight.
Cannon and Salas were picked up by Johnson and chief deputy Billy Lee at 10:30 p.m. Saturday. They confessed later that night. Victorino did not confess.
Family and friends remembered the victims Sunday night in a candlelight service at Good Shepherd Evangelical Lutheran Church in Deltona.
Four of the victims worked together at the Burger King on Elkcam Boulevard and shared the rented house on Telford Lane. The sheriff's office has identified five victims: Michelle Ann Nathan, 19; Anthony Vega, 34; Roberto "Tito" Gonzalez, 28, who recently moved from New York; Belanger's boyfriend, Francisco Ayo Roman, 30; and Jonathan Gleason, 18.
The sixth is believed to be Belanger, whose grandparents own the home in which Victorino had squatted.
Joe Abshire, Belanger's brother-in-law, said he spoke with her last Sunday. She talked about heading to her grandparents' house to swim and finding several people living there illegally. The squatters were told to leave, but deputies were called to the house six times in 10 days before the killings, and the Telford Lane victims had reported a tire-slashing at their home and a threat.
The squatters warned Belanger that "they were going to come back there and beat her with a baseball bat when she was sleeping," Abshire told "The Sun," a Lowell, Mass., newspaper.
Victorino was arrested eight years ago after beating an Orange City man with a walking stick. The man required 18 hours of reconstructive surgery.
Michael Stern -- who's now in state prison after robbing an Orange City convenience store last year -- later changed his name to Michael Simpson. A friend said Sunday that Simpson worried Victorino would come after him again.
"Mike had significant fears about Troy getting out of prison," said the friend, who asked not to be named. "Troy's a bad man. He needs to be put away for good."
In the '96 beating, police said Victorino, then 19, beat Stern until the walking stick was broken. After the beating, Stern was on life support, breathing through a trachea tube. Stern's mother described the injuries to The News-Journal in a 1996 article:
"His face had collapsed. It was beaten away from his skull and crushed back down and blocked his airway. . . . My son had every bone in his face broken. Every tooth in his mouth was broken. His eye orbits were pulverized, his eyes exploded."
jeannine.gage@news-jrnl.com
