Terrell Williams stood outside on his lunch break when a white sedan pulled up behind the Walmart superstore on U.S. 19 in Pinellas Park.
Two men wearing black ski masks -- one with a rifle, the other a handgun -- emerged and fired about 20 times. Williams was killed.
The brazen ambush at a bustling store in broad daylight dominated evening newscasts in November 2019.
While Pinellas Park police were tight-lipped about the killing, behind the scenes they learned that rumors among the store's employees were true. Williams and his identical twin brother were in a gang. A bounty had been placed on their heads during a turf war in St. Petersburg that had terrorized neighborhoods with gunfire since May 2019.
The shootings haven't stopped.
The Tampa Bay Times reviewed dozens of police reports and court records and interviewed police, prosecutors and defense lawyers embroiled in the city's gang war. It found that private feuds have spilled into public spaces like the Pinellas Park Walmart and St. Petersburg nightclubs, putting bystanders at risk.
The violence has been so rampant that police investigators struggled to keep up, forcing them to change how they handle nonfatal shootings that often precede murder, said Mike Kovacsev, an assistant chief of the St. Petersburg Police Department.
"Those are the ones that could spiral out of control very quickly," he said. "If you don't get on top of the initial shootings that occurred -- ones that could continue on for a couple days or a week or two afterward -- you start risking innocent people being involved."
It would take investigators four years to make arrests in Williams' killing only to have the cases against the three men charged with his murder crumble months later. Charges were dropped after key witnesses changed their stories. Further undermining the state attorney's case was a relationship between the lead prosecutor and a state witness.
Despite netting a record number of prosecutions in their hard-fought battle against armed gangs, police regard the collapse of the cases as a reminder of how easy it is to surrender ground.
To understand why anyone would dare drive up to a crowded Walmart to commit an execution, you could start with Zaki Starks.
Starks skippered one of the largest drug trafficking operations in St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, detectives say. Friends called him a "trap genius" because he was such a shrewd businessman in the drug trade. Starks was also flashy with his money and once visited famed jeweler Johnny Dang in Houston to be fitted for a diamond grill over his teeth.
His gang -- "Only My N----- Ballin' Outta Control" -- was among the first to move marijuana at a large scale in the area during the late 2010s, according to depositions from two lead gang detectives with St. Petersburg police.
As marijuana sales grew, so did members' notoriety, investigators said. Drug sales financed a rap and music video business, testified Michael Bletsch, a homicide detective with the St. Petersburg Police Department.
"The fame -- the allure -- attracted other gang members, like gang members from Harbordale, 8-Hype, gang members from Bethel Heights," he said, referring to other city gangs. "They used them as kind of their muscle."
Members affixed the acronym OMNBOC to rap stage names. The letters also littered dozens of police reports at the time.
They started out mailing marijuana, then grew by trafficking large amounts of drugs through local airports, detectives testified. But at the height of his growing drug empire, Starks was killed in a deal-gone-wrong.
A 16-year-old friend of the Williams twins went to Flagler Pointe apartments in St. Petersburg to buy marijuana from OMNBOC members.
It was May 15, 2019.
When the teen took out his money, he was robbed at gunpoint by Starks and his men, according to a police interview with the twins' oldest brother.
The teen called the twins -- who police say belonged to the Woodboys, a smaller gang from St. Petersburg's Lakewood Terrace neighborhood. In tears, he told them about the robbery.
When the Williams brothers confronted the group at the Flagler Pointe complex, a fight broke out. At least six guns were fired during the melee, and Starks was hit. He died at a hospital the next morning.
Detectives described a cult of personality surrounding Starks. After his death, gang members were tattooed in his honor, with some that read "23" -- the age of Starks when he was killed.
Antonio Ford took Starks' death hard, police said. Ford is known to detectives as a "street-level commander" in the gang and dedicated his rap career to Starks after his death, Bletsch said. In 2021, police seized from him a diamond-encrusted, gold pendant with Starks' face on the back.
He also has a tattoo in Starks' memory on his left forearm. Visible in Ford's music videos, it reads "Long Live Ki" in cursive font.
Bletsch called Starks' shooting, for which no arrest has been made, "the catalyst for what is now the gang war that has occurred over the past several years."
OMNBOC members blamed the Williams brothers, the teen who had been robbed and another friend who was there for Starks' death, investigators said.
The gang offered rewards of $50,000 for their murders, police said.
A month after Starks was killed, drive-by shooters pumped a bullet into the back of Williams' twin brother, Derrell, outside his home at Osprey Pointe Apartments. He survived.
The home of the teen who had been robbed was shot at next. Then the grandmother's house of the friend who had been at the fight.
A few months after the first attempt on Derrell Williams' life, another was made, this time as he washed his grandfather's classic car in the man's driveway. His grandfather was sitting on the porch, saw the shooters coming and told his grandson to get down. No one was hurt.
Then, six months to the day after Starks had been killed, gunfire popped at the Pinellas Park Walmart.
Police would come to believe Ford was one of three men who collected the reward for killing Terrell Williams.
Ford, police believed, had rapped about it: "When we get three, that's when we even. They know we up the score. We don't do no f - - - ing grieving."
In another he rapped: "We gonna shoot a n - - - - until your ass moves out of town."
There were a series of retaliatory shootings from the Woodboys, but Terrell Williams' death had apparently sent a message.
At least two members of the group moved, including Williams' twin brother.
Leads on Williams' murder soon dried up. It wasn't until St. Petersburg police made a traffic stop on Ford nearly a year later that they made substantial progress.
On May 12, 2020, Ford rode in a car driven by his music tour manager. When St. Petersburg police stopped the vehicle for running a red light, Ford ran into the house of another OMNBOC member on 36th Street South.
Inside the car, police found the handgun they believe had been used in Williams' killing and other shootings and $28,000 in cash.
Federal prosecutors brought a charge of being a felon in possession of a weapon against Ford, and the Pinellas state attorney's office charged Ford and two other men in Williams' murder. The accused killers were indicted Dec. 1, 2023, more than four years after Williams' death.
Prosecutors had spent years building their case, bolstered by a state witness who told detectives that one of the men confessed to his involvement in Williams' homicide and implicated the others.
A trial was set for November of last year. In the meantime, OMNBOC members would carry out another shooting that offered investigators a glimpse into the group's finances.
The gang's last high-profile outburst occurred on Easter Sunday when five men fired pistols into a crowd milling about a parking lot outside the Sonic Sports Bar and Lounge on 49th Street in St. Petersburg. Four people were wounded.
Police quickly arrested the alleged gunmen, who investigators said were friends of Rodarius Green, also known as St. Petersburg rapper Rod Wave. Green soared to fame after cracking the Billboard Hot 100 in 2020 with "Heart on Ice," a song made popular on TikTok.
The accused shooters left the scene in a blue Infiniti SUV registered to Green. Surveillance video showed they returned to a home owned by Green in the 500 block of Palm Avenue. A raid at that house and another owned by Green turned up cash, jewelry, weapons and a BMW that police said had been linked to multiple shootings.
Green was arrested in Manatee County on two counts of possessing ammunition as a convicted felon. He was released hours later when police realized he had never been convicted of a felony.
St. Petersburg police downplayed Green's involvement in the Easter shooting.
"This isn't about him," Kovacsev told reporters at the time.
Kovacsev told the Times in a recent interview that he has avoided casting blame on Green because it's not a crime to financially assist friends, even if they are accused of criminal activity.
"Does it make our job a little more challenging sometimes? I would probably say yes, but it's his money, and he can do what he wants with it," he said. "As of right now, he is an outsider looking in."
Ford and Green became friends at a young age and often appear together in music videos and social media posts, although police do not believe Green belongs to OMNBOC, they said.
One St. Petersburg police detective noted in an affidavit that the Easter shooting erupted between OMNBOC members and a rival gang named the Young Gangsters, though police have not stated what triggered their feud.
Just as the prosecutions in the Easter shooting took shape, the Williams case fell apart.
A key part of the prosecution was to tie Ford to the gun that had been found in the car during the 2020 traffic stop.
Though Ford's DNA was discovered on bullets loaded inside the pistol, police said, his DNA was not on the weapon's frame.
"In that world, they kind of tend to pass guns around," said Bruce Bartlett, the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney. "You have to be able to show that person was the one that was (at the scene), and that's where you run into trouble."
An early sign of weakness for prosecutors was Ford's January 2023 acquittal by a jury of the federal weapons charges, an outcome Kovacsev said is "very, very rare."
"It was disappointing, I know, to some of the detectives here as well as (Pinellas Park), that the case didn't necessarily have the legs it needed," he said. "Sometimes that's what happens, and you just have to kind of pick the pieces up and try to find a different way."
A few months later, the Pinellas state attorney's office dropped the murder charges against Ford and two other suspects: Aunyis Cherry and Ra'Quan Britten.
Bartlett said the state's case fell apart even more after key witnesses who said they could identify the shooters had recanted.
"There was some pressure involved, I think, from the people in the community," Bartlett said. "And they just find it easier just to withdraw and act like they never saw what they said they saw -- just back away from it."
Ford's music lyrics at the time put his optimism on display, prosecutors said. He rapped: "F -- k the case. They ain't got a witness ... Play with us, a b-tch go missing."
In a court filing, Ford's lawyers also accused Bletsch and the lead prosecutor on the case, Pinellas assistant state attorney Elizabeth Traverso, of being in a secret romantic relationship that was a conflict of interest in the case.
"This relationship was hidden from all superiors in both the State Attorney's Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department for over two years," lawyers wrote. "They not only continued with the relationship, but failed to disclose it until they had to disclose it."
Less than a month later, the case was reassigned from Traverso to another prosecutor.
"They made the allegations, and so it was going to become an issue for the trial, and we just figured it was better to try to pull her out of it than have her stay there," Bartlett said. "It's not the first time that a lawyer in the office has met a police officer through the work and a relationship has developed."
"It's not a bad thing. It doesn't make you a dishonest person," he added.
Bletsch and Traverso's relationship had been out in the open, and was not hidden from anyone at the police department, a St. Petersburg police spokesperson said.
Not long after taking over, assistant state attorney Chris Billings recommended Bartlett drop the case, which he did on July 23.
Around the time of Williams' death, detectives often found themselves "behind the eight ball" on shooting investigations, Kovacsev acknowledged.
But he's seen less violent crime associated with OMNBOC members following the Easter arrests, he said. It's signaled a breakthrough in law enforcement's investigation into a gang whose staying power has persisted for several years.
"I'm not going to say they're on their best behavior," Kovacsev said. "But they're understanding the fact is, you don't want to bring attention to yourself while you're currently under indictment for other crimes."
The assistant chief attributes his agency's success to its Gun Response Investigative Team, which has prioritized shootings where no one was killed or injured. In the two years since its inception, murder case closure rates have reached a record high, he said.
Kovacsev is also eager to reopen Starks' murder investigation. It's not uncommon for leads on cold cases to emerge after gang members are arrested and face prison time. He thinks the Easter shooting suspects could shed light on a backlog of open cases.
"Even though all this occurred in 2019, we're still investing efforts and time to try to address the ongoing disputes between the groups," he said. "You can't just let them kind of wash away and forget about them."
But with charges dropped against the three suspects in Williams' murder, that case will likely stay cold, according to the state attorney.
"Investigations continue, but as far as the Walmart (shooting) goes, it's done," Bartlett said. "We did everything we could."
Cherry is in prison on a weapons charge conviction that stemmed from the traffic stop with Ford, records show. He has 20 years, plus five years of parole, left to serve.
Britten is awaiting trial on an attempted murder charge in connection with another retaliatory gang shooting, according to court filings. He is being held without bond.
Ford was released from jail the night his charges were dropped.
A month later, Ford aired the first song since his release, titled "He's Back." One clip from the music video showed Ford shopping for designer clothes with Green. Another captured him jogging away from the Pinellas County Jail entrance.
Above the song's booming bass and upbeat melody, Ford rapped a celebration: "Victory, another one ... Set a trial with a smile."
Messages welcoming him home flooded the comment section.