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05-14-2012, 11:40 AM
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Fired Dishwasher Kills DeLand Restaurant Manager
A DeLand, Florida, restaurant manager was shot to death during an after-hours robbery, and the former employee accused of killing him later died in an apparent murder-suicide with his pregnant girlfriend, according to police and court records. Tom Walsh, 44, the manager of the Mainstreet Grill on New York Avenue in downtown DeLand, was found shot in the back of the head on March 31, 2012, after the restaurant had closed for the night, DeLand police said. A co-worker who had stepped outside to take out the trash came back to find him and called 911. "My manager is lying down and he's in a pool of blood," the caller told a dispatcher. "Please hurry." Investigators identified the gunman as James Seagraves, 29, a former Mainstreet Grill dishwasher who had been fired after tripping an electrical breaker and knocking out the restaurant's power, according to an arrest affidavit. The affidavit said the owner recognized Seagraves and an accomplice on surveillance video from the night of the killing. Seagraves had been released from prison on March 2, weeks earlier, after serving a two-year term for an armed robbery in Marion County. Seagraves took about $4,000 from the restaurant and bought a motorcycle two days later, the affidavit said. In the weeks that followed, police said, he robbed a series of businesses at gunpoint, including a Subway, an auto-parts store and a Burger King. Detectives said his girlfriend, Kayla Nemoto, 20, who was four months pregnant, took part in some of the holdups. U.S. marshals and the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office tracked the couple on May 10, 2012, to a mobile home at 9641 Symmes Road in Gibsonton, in Hillsborough County. Seagraves barricaded himself inside with Nemoto and, reached by phone, told authorities to "come and get it," a sheriff's spokesman said. A SWAT team fired tear gas into the trailer. When there was no response, deputies broke out the windows and doors and found Seagraves and Nemoto dead in a bathroom, each with a gunshot wound to the head, the sheriff's office said. The standoff ended just after 6 p.m. Deputies said they believed the couple had made a suicide pact. The Mainstreet Grill reopened within days of Walsh's death. The case closed with no one charged in the killing, which investigators had attributed to Seagraves.
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