HORROR IN YBOR CITY-The Victor Licata Murders
Blood soaked the beds and dripped off the sides, forming thick red puddles on the wooden floors of the Ybor City casita. Mangled and mutilated bodies were strewn throughout the house. A dying boy lay in his bed, struggling for his next breath. And under the front porch, a dog caked in its blood let out one final whimper before joining the afterlife. The home looked like something out of a modern-day horror flick. Just hours before, sadistic acts turned this once peaceful home into hell on earth. Yet, no one in Ybor City knew anything was wrong.
Ybor City went about its business as usual that morning. The streetcars rumbled down their tracks and laid upon the brick streets of the Latin District, dropping off the cigar workers at the factories. The cafés were filled with Latinos sipping their café con leche and arguing politics. Kids rushed off to school, the boys exclaiming that they would rule the schoolyard baseball games that day while the girls whispered about which boys they thought were cute. The clickity-clack of dominoes slamming onto tables echoed throughout the Cuban Club and Centro Asturiano. And the Seventh Avenue merchants unlocked their doors for another day of business. Everything seemed normal in Ybor City- well, almost everything.
The casita located at 1707 15th Avenue, the Licata family’s home, was quiet, far from ordinary. Michael Licata, the family’s patriarch, owned two successful downtown barbershops. In the late morning hours, neighbors began to think, surely Michael should have left for work already, yet they never saw him leave home that morning. The Licata’s have two school-age children, yet the neighbors never saw them leave for school. And the family has a dog, but no one has walked it. If the Licatas had gone on vacation, they would have told somebody, whispered the neighbors. As minutes turned to an hour and there was still no noise from home, neighbors finally contacted the police.
When the police arrived, they had to enter the home through a rear window; all outside doors were locked. Once inside, they found horror!
On the bed in the front room, they found Michael Licata lying in a welter of blood, killed with one swing of an ax. In the adjoining bedroom, they found the bodies of the family’s 22-year-old soon-to-be-married daughter, Prudence, and her 8-year-old brother, Jose, hacked to death. Finally, in the rear bedroom, they found the murdered mother, 44-year-old Rosalie. On the bed beside her lay her 14-year-old son, Philip, alive but suffering from numerous ax wounds. And lying on the floor next to the bed was the murder weapon, a blood-stained axe.
After removing the dying boy from the room and getting him to the hospital, the police continued their search, finding the Licata’s 21-year-old son, Victor, cowering in the bathroom, dressed in a clean white shirt and well-pressed trousers. Underneath his clean clothes, though, his naked skin was stained with blood. Police didn’t need to strip search him to finger him as the killer, though. Victor Licata was a tiny man- just 5’8 and 127 pounds. He was soft-spoken and often described as possessing “queer manners” by friends and family. But he was long known to be dangerous and mentally unstable, so much so that his father slept with a pistol between his mattresses. A drunk and a habitual marijuana smoker, the police tried to commit Victor a year ago, but his family refused, claiming they could take better care of him themselves. But the family underestimated the demons that lived inside Victor. It wasn’t until the police interrogated Victor that anyone understood how insane he’d become.
