Missing pilot in custody in Florida

QUINCY, Fla. – Authorities in northern Florida say they have found an Indiana businessman believed to have tried to fake his own death in a plane crash.

Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Jim Corder says 38-year-old Marcus Schrenker is alive and in custody in Gadsden County Tuesday night.

Authorities believe Schrenker let his plane crash in the Florida panhandle and apparently parachuted to safety.

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HARPERSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — With his personal and financial worlds crumbling around him, investment adviser Marcus Schrenker opted for a bailout.

In a feat reminiscent of a James Bond movie, the 38-year-old businessman and amateur daredevil pilot apparently tried to fake his death in a plane crash, secretly parachuting to the ground and speeding away on a motorcycle he had stashed away in the pine barrens of central Alabama.

Now the search is on for Schrenker, who is running not only from the law but from divorce, a state investigation of his businesses and angry investors who accuse him of stealing potentially millions in savings they entrusted to him.

“We’ve learned over time that he’s a pathological liar — you don’t believe a single word that comes out of his mouth,” said Charles Kinney, a 49-year-old airline pilot from Atlanta who alleges Schrenker pocketed at least $135,000 of his parents’ retirement fund.

The events of the past few days appear to be a last, desperate gambit by a man who had fallen from great heights and was about to hit bottom.

On Sunday — two days after burying his beloved stepfather and suffering a half-million-dollar loss in federal court the same day — Schrenker was flying his single-engine Piper Malibu to Florida from his Indiana home when he radioed from 2,000 feet that he was in trouble. He told the tower the windshield had imploded, and that his face was plastered with blood.

Then his radio went silent.

Military jets tried to intercept the plane and found the door open, the cockpit dark. The pilots followed until the aircraft crashed in a Florida Panhandle bayou surrounded by homes. There was no sign of Schrenker’s body. They now know they should never have expected to find one.

More than 220 miles to the north, at a convenience store in Childersburg, Ala., police picked up a man using Schrenker’s Indiana driver’s license and carrying a pair of what appeared to be pilot’s goggles. The man, who was wet from the knees down, told the officers he’d been in a canoe accident.

After officers gave him a lift to a nearby motel, Schrenker apparently made his way to a storage unit he’d rented just the day before his flight. He climbed aboard a red racing motorcycle with full saddlebags, and sped off into the countryside.

Now, a search that began in the air and continued across land and sea has been turned over to the U.S. Marshals.

“I believe he’s out of the U.S.,” Harpersville Police Chief David Latimer said Tuesday. “He’s already shown a mentality that’s interesting to police. He jumped out an airplane and left it to crash who knows where. He’s shown a total disregard for human life. I think he’d do anything to get away.”

At 38, Schrenker was at the head of an impressive slate of businesses. Through his Heritage Wealth Management Inc., Heritage Insurance Services Inc. and Icon Wealth Management, he was responsible for providing financial advice and managing portfolios worth millions.

And by outward appearances, he was doing quite well.

He collected luxury automobiles, owned two airplanes and lived in a 10,000-square-foot house in an upscale neighborhood known as “Cocktail Cove,” where affluent boaters often socialize with cocktails in hand. In May 2000, he wowed onlookers by flying a special airplane at 270 mph, 10 feet above the water and under two bridges in Nassau, Bahamas.

“This stunt should not be attempted by any pilot that wishes to stay alive,” read the caption on a self-made video of the flight posted on YouTube.

He’d come a long way from his humble beginnings in northwest Indiana, where he and his two brothers were raised after their parents’ divorce by their mother and stepfather, a Vietnam veteran who worked at U.S. Steel Corp.

But officials now say Schrenker’s enterprise was ready to topple.

Authorities in Indiana have been investigating Schrenker’s businesses on allegations that he sold clients annuities and charged them exorbitant fees they weren’t aware they would face.

State Insurance Commissioner Jim Atterholt said Schrenker would close the investors out of one annuity and move them to another while charging them especially high “surrender charges” — in one case costing a retired couple $135,000 of their original $900,000 investment.

The tangled web of Schrenker’s financial affairs began to unravel more than two years ago.

The aviation buff had convinced dozens of active and retired Delta Air Lines pilots — including Kinney — to allow him to manage their retirement accounts. But some of the pilots stopped investing with him after a court case raised questions about his past.

In 2006, with Delta in federal bankruptcy proceedings, he convinced a group of pilots opposed to Delta’s move to terminate their pension plan to let him help.

“He had a way about him — you trusted the guy,” says David M. Smith, one of the retired pilots. “He was very credible. He talked a good story. So, we entrusted him with a task he never produced.”

Two days before the Sept. 1, 2006, hearing at which Schrenker was supposed to testify about an analysis he had done on the pension plan’s viability, he suddenly withdrew from the case.

“It happened very fast,” Smith recalled. “He literally was a no-show. He literally just disappeared. We were shocked at the whole thing.”

The retired pilots were unsuccessful in stopping Delta from terminating the pension plan, and the group accepted a small settlement from the airline.

Smith believes Schrenker may have been running from a past unknown to many of his clients at the time, a past that was disclosed just days earlier in a deposition of him by a Delta lawyer.

“They uncovered things that literally made your jaw open,” said Smith, adding that he and other pilots stopped letting Schrenker manage money for them after the deposition. “I believe he was scared to death that Delta was going to expose him.”

According to the 156-page deposition obtained by The Associated Press, a judge in a 2003 bankruptcy reported being “deeply concerned” that Schrenker was not disclosing thousands of dollars in monthly income to the court and not reporting the income on his tax returns.

“It is obvious to the court that the debtor has access to a significant cash flow that he is using for his personal benefit that has not been disclosed in this bankruptcy filing and in his personal tax returns,” one document reads.

Kinney said he and his parents had invested hundreds of thousands with Schrenker, but considered him more like a family friend than a financial consultant.

Schrenker, his wife and three children vacationed twice at Kinney’s parent’s lake house on northern Georgia’s Lake Lanier. But a few years ago, cracks began to surface in the relationship.

Kinney’s brother discovered $60,000 was inexplicably missing from his 85-year-old father-in-law’s investment with Schrenker. Schrenker told the family not to worry, that the money was still there in complex financial statements.

“It’s still the most disgusting thing I’ve been a part of — to know that someone let you hold their new baby on one side and was basically stealing you from on the other,” Kinney said.

In recent weeks, Schrenker’s life began to spin out of control. According to documents in a lawsuit filed in Indianapolis, Schrenker sent a frantic e-mail to plaintiffs on Dec. 16.

“I walked out on my job about 30 minutes ago,” it read. “My career is over … over one letter in a trade error. One letter!! … I’ve had so many people yelling at me today that I couldn’t figure out what was up or down. I still can’t figure it out.”

It’s unclear to what “error” he is referring. In another e-mail to a neighbor following his disappearance, Schrenker made reference to having “just made a 2 million dollar mistake.” But it appeared he was hoping to work things out.

“I’d rather lose everything than screw a person out of a dime,” he wrote to the plaintiffs in the Indianapolis case.

But things were now out of his hands.

On Dec. 31, officers searched Schrenker’s home, seizing the Schrenkers’ passports, $6,036 in cash, the title to a Lexus and deposit slips for bank accounts in Michelle Schrenker’s name, as well as six computers and nine large plastic tubs filled with various financial and corporate documents.

In the supporting affidavit, investigators suggested Schrenker might have access to at least $665,000 in the offshore accounts of a client.

But it wasn’t just his finances that were in turmoil.

Just a day before, Michelle Schrenker had filed for divorce. She told the people searching the house that her husband had been having an affair and had moved into a condominium a week earlier.

Schrenker’s mother is just happy to know that he is alive. She hopes whoever finds him will treat him well and give him a chance to explain what he did and why.

“Sometimes we just all have too many problems,” Marcia Galoozis said at her home outside Gary, Ind. “And I don’t know what all his problems are, but sometimes we just don’t think straight, get our heads twisted on wrong.”

Hours after Schrenker vanished, neighbor Tom Britt received what he believes is an e-mail from Schrenker.

Despite the fact that no blood was found in the plane, Schrenker suggests in the note that the crash was truly an accident and blamed oxygen deprivation.

“Hypoxia can cause people to make terrible decisions and I simply put on my parachute and survival gear and bailed out,” the e-mail reads.

Britt says the message reads to him like a suicide note.

“I embarrassed my family for the last time,” Britt quoted Schrenker as saying. “By the time you read this I’ll be gone.”

Before the crash, Schrenker’s life was spiraling downward: His wife filed for divorce, and his financial management companies were under investigation.

Sarasota woman cuts infant, boyfriend with knife

SARASOTA, FL. - A Sarasota mother has been arrested for slashing her boyfriend and infant with a knife over the weekend.

According to a report from the Sarasota Police Department, officers were dispatched to a home in the 1600 block of Oak Street Saturday evening after a man called about a loud noise coming from the home.

The man made contact with a woman, Stacie Carr, at the home, who said she needed help. He then called police. A few minutes later, William Geeslin came out the residence screaming that Carr

had cut him and a baby with a knife

When officers arrived, Carr said Geeslin had the baby and pointed to a side door entrance, where he was holding the child. Geeslin told the officer that Carr cut him and the baby in the master bedroom. He also said that Carr pushed him down the stairs.

A butcher knife was recovered at the scene.

When paramedics arrived to help the baby, Geeslin refused and backed himself into a corner. Officers pinned one of his arms and snatched the child away. Geeslin was arrested for resisting an officer. He also was charged with battery for spitting blood in the face of an EMT. While in the emergency room at the hospital, he intentionally squeezing a nurse’s hand and causing damage to it, and was charged with battery.

Officers believe that Carr was the person who cut the child and Geeslin. She was arrested and charged with aggravated child abuse and domestic aggravated battery. Geeslin was additionally charged with felony child neglect.

The child was released to his grandmother by DCF.

Source: http://www.mysuncoast.com

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Chevy on 28 inch wheels roll over crash

West Palm Beach -
Chevy on 28 inch wheels rolls over in Palm Beach County Florida. The accident happened just after 4:00am, on Okeechobee blvd near I-95.

No one was injured, but the vehicle sustained major damage. No other vehicles were involved.

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Family of missing cruise woman believes she jumped

MIAMI (AP) — The family of a missing cruise ship passenger said Monday that they suspect the woman “chose an unfortunate ending to her life” and jumped from a cruise ship balcony into the waters off Mexico’s coast on Christmas night.

The U.S. Coast Guard suspended its search Monday for Jennifer Ellis Seitz, a Florida journalist, after combing more than 4,200 square miles off the coast of the popular resort area of Cancun, where the ship had just visited. Mexican authorities said they would continue their search for another 48 hours.

Seitz had “previous emotional issues,” yet there were no outward signs of distress while on the seven-night cruise from Miami, her family said in a statement given to one of her former employers, The News Chief in Winter Haven. Seitz’s mother joined her daughter and son-in-law on the cruise.

“Jennifer was in a very happy and uplifted mood both before and during the cruise,” the Ellis family said in the statement. “She was excited about starting a new job and her future career with a local newspaper. She and her husband had been talking about starting their family. The family suspects that Jennifer chose an unfortunate ending to her life. She was a beautiful and caring person and will be truly missed by all who love her.”

Seitz and her husband, Raymond, were celebrating their one-year anniversary on the Norwegian Pearl cruise ship.

A surveillance camera showed someone falling overboard at 8 p.m. Christmas night, authorities said. About eight hours later, Raymond Seitz reported his wife missing.

FBI spokesman Mike Leverock says agents met the ship at the dock in Miami on Sunday, collected materials and “are still trying to determine if a crime occurred.”

Norwegian Cruise Line said it is “cooperating fully” with the FBI.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of the guest during this difficult time,” the company said in a news release.

Raymond Seitz has not been charged with any crime, authorities said Monday.

The couple met in a weight loss support group; both had undergone bariatric surgery. She chronicled her weight loss journey for an Orlando TV station.

She was also a freelance writer, having written articles for The Tampa Tribune, The Ledger in Lakeland, and an online article titled, “Battling the Bulge Onboard,” about how not to gain weight while aboard a ship.

On her Web site, Seitz described herself as an “avid traveler and an amateur chef.” She was previously a reporter for Florida Today, a newspaper in Melbourne.

Raymond Seitz was arrested in April on a charge of domestic violence-battery after being accused of head-butting his wife. The charge was dropped after he entered a pretrial diversion program. Records show that she asked the prosecutor not to pursue the case.

A fellow passenger on the ship, Jim Nestor, told NBC’s Today show that Seitz and her new husband stood out on the ship with “large and raw personalities.”

Many of the passengers saw them as contestants on an on-board game called “The Not-So-Newlywed Game,” modeled after a 1960s TV quiz show. The game was also carried on the ship’s closed-circuit TV channel.

“They stood out a lot more than other people,” Nestor, a retired police officer, told NBC.

Nestor, who appeared on the game show with his own wife, said he ran into Raymond Seitz day after his wife was reported missing.

“I had given him my condolences, and he had a plastic bag filled with quarters, and he said to me that he was going to the casino to see if he could change his luck,” Nestor said.

Source: wsvn.com