Re(1): Trying to locate information UPDATE IP: 72.185.171.1 Posted on October 31, 2011 at 04:53:16 PM by webmaster
Dear Jerry:
Thank you so much for getting back to me so quickly, and for finding an email address for Chief Smith. That is very kind of you. I will message him today. I had also been given Ed's email address by another former officer, and was going to contact him to see if he knew anything or was on the force in 1962.
Also, I truly appreciate your putting my note on the website. I had not included more specifics about my father's death in my email to you, because I did not realize you might be posting my email on the site. But if it helps folks who frequent the site, here's a bit more information:
The drowning incident occurred when my father, Orval Robert "Bob" Workman, got into a fight with another man at the Fortune Street Bridge on July 1, 1962. Bob was pushed into the water and drowned. His body was not recovered until the next day in the Davis Island shipping channel near the phosphate elevators at Seddon Island, according to the Tampa Tribune story July 3, 1962. Two men, Harold Wicks and Burnett Albert Peters, were taken into custody, but TPD and the state attorney's office couldn't find anything to charge them with regarding the death and it was ruled an accidental drowning. Mr. Wicks, who was 72 years old, was the man who got into the struggle with my father, who was only 45 years old when he died and had moved to Tampa from Huntington, WV in 1960. Bob had been living at the Salvation Army home in Tampa, according to the TPD report.
If anyone would like to contact me by email, they are certainly welcome to do so at frank.christlieb@yahoo.com. Also, if folks would like to see that Tampa Tribune story I attached with my first email to you, I would be happy to email or mail it to them right away.