Jacob Pearson drove to the Citibank Center in Hillsborough County on Wednesday morning, crashed through a courtyard gate and opened fire before a security officer ended the attack with return fire. Pearson, 35, was later taken to Tampa General Hospital, where he died from his injuries after being struck five times in the exchange.
The shooting left LeAnne Selmon, 41, dead after she was shot three times outside the campus. Four other employees were hurt in the frantic rush to escape, including a worker with a busted lip, another with abrasions from a fall, one man who had chest pains and a pregnant woman. About 3,200 employees were on campus, running for safety or hiding as the gunfire moved across the property.
The emergency was already in motion before Pearson arrived. Around 9 a.m. Wednesday, he called a collection attorney's office contracted by Citibank and, angry about a court summons tied to a delinquent $2,500 payment, warned that he was armed and ready to kill if the summons was not dismissed. Citibank's head of security treated the call as an active threat and alerted authorities, and officers with the Orlando Police Department went to Pearson's home for a welfare check. His wife told them he had already left while visibly angry, without saying where he was headed.
What investigators later described does not fit the image of a man with no prior criminal record. Pearson had driven over an hour to the campus armed, and the sequence that followed was fast and chaotic: he shot Selmon, returned to his car to retrieve a handgun after his rifle malfunctioned, then entered the cafeteria where workers were fleeing or hiding. John Fraley opened fire from a tactical position inside the men's restroom after Pearson entered the cafeteria, and the security officer's shots were the final barrier between Pearson and anyone else on the campus.
Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said Pearson had come with one purpose: to hunt and kill anyone he could find. The unanswered question now is not whether the threat was real, but how a debt dispute escalated into a deadly campus assault in a matter of hours, and whether the warning that triggered the welfare check could have been turned into a stop before Pearson reached Tampa.
