All of us want to believe that Susy Tomassi is still alive and out there somewhere.
We want to believe it’s her dementia preventing her from remembering where she belongs, and returning home.
We want to believe she wasn’t kidnapped and killed, her body dumped in a location known to only her killer.
But believing that got harder last week when the Sheriff’s Office released surveillance video that shows a person getting into a white pickup truck at the exit of South Vero Square, about an hour after Tomassi wandered away from the Quilted Giraffe restaurant at about 5 p.m. on March 16, 2018.
Tomassi’s husband, Patrick, says the person the video depicts getting into that truck was his wife, who he said often would walk from the restaurant to the Oslo Riverfront Conservation Area behind the Publix-anchored plaza to smoke cigarettes.
Deputies say the video shows the truck, after Tomassi got in, heading east on Oslo Road – toward the boat ramp – before turning around and speeding west toward U.S. 1 only a few minutes later?
“This enhances our speculation of foul play,” Sheriff Deryl Loar said last week.
But to still believe Tomassi’s disappearance was voluntary – or even accidental – starts to seem like wishful thinking at this point.
While it’s theoretically possible the truck driver merely offered to give her a ride and innocently dropped her off somewhere, it seems highly unlikely – especially since police never heard from the driver during the intensive search for the missing woman.
“I believe whoever was driving that truck did something bad to her,” Sheriff’s Detective Greg Farless told me.
“We know she walked the plaza, turned left at the Pizza Hut and was almost to the conservation area when she ran into the stopped truck,” Farless explained. “You can’t really see it, but I believe he said something to her as she walked behind the truck.
“I say ‘he,’ because I believe a man was driving the truck,” he continued. “Anyway, it appears they had a brief conversation before she walked around to the passenger side and got in. The driver then goes east on Oslo Road, but, just a few minutes later, we see him traveling west at a noticeably higher rate of speed.
“Maybe he was going to do something to her there, but there were too many people around,” he added. “For whatever reason, he turned around and got out of there.
“She was still in that truck.”
That fits, given the failure of a massive search of the area to turn up any clues as to Tomassi’s whereabouts, despite the Sheriff’s Office having dispatched a helicopter, K-9 and marine units, agricultural units on all-terrain vehicles, a SWAT team, detectives and patrol deputies within an hour after she was reported missing.
Farless said the westbound truck reappeared on the video only 3 ½ to 4 minutes after first departing eastbound with Tomassi. That’s only slightly longer than the 3 minutes and 15 seconds it took the detective to make a test-run round trip on Oslo Road between the driveway behind South Vero Square and the Oslo Boat Ramp.
That means there was no time for the driver to have done something to Tomassi before heading back toward U.S. 1
“She’s not down there,” Farless said. “We’d have found her.”
We can only wonder if Tomassi will ever be found, now that the Sheriff’s Office has publicly released this video, which was recorded by a surveillance camera at the rear of the Publix Supermarket.
While Loar and his detectives are hoping the video will prompt calls from witnesses who might’ve seen the white truck in the plaza on that day, the grainy video could not be enlarged enough to identify the vehicle’s make, model or license-plate number.
In fact, when deputies initially reviewed the poor-quality footage from that camera many months ago, they saw only a generator in the foreground and what appeared to be a vehicle in the background.
It wasn’t until an outside agency enhanced the video at the Sheriff’s Office’s request that detectives discovered a white truck driving out of the plaza and stopping at the Oslo Road exit. They also noticed a pedestrian getting into the vehicle.
Detectives then showed the video to Tomassi’s husband, who confirmed the person getting into the truck was his wife, based partly on what she was wearing that day.
That was several months ago, Farless said, adding that detectives working the case didn’t go public with the video at that time because they were checking out at least one possible suspect.
“We were looking at somebody else,” Farless said, “and we didn’t want to release the video and give the guy a chance to get rid of the truck.”
Would releasing the video several months ago have made a difference? Probably not.
It might not make a difference now: By going public with the video last week, detectives are telling us they’ve got nothing.
No suspects. No leads. No clues.
That’s not likely to change, unless someone comes forward with new information – which is where the video can help.
But they’ll need to get lucky.
At the moment, they don’t know what kind of truck it was. They don’t know if the driver was a local resident, or someone passing through. If he was a resident, does he still live here. They don’t know if Tomassi is still alive, though they can’t help but suspect she is dead.
“I pray that I’m wrong,” Farless said.
All of us do.
But Tomassi was 73 and suffering from dementia, which her husband said made her very trusting of others, so much so that it left her vulnerable to those with bad intentions.
She had no access to money, other than the watch and jewelry she was wearing, so robbery was an unlikely motive.
And now, more than 19 months after she disappeared, we see this video that shows her getting into a stranger’s truck.
“There’s a wild chance someone is holding her captive,” Farless said, “but those cases usually involve younger victims.”
As grim as things seem – with everything about this case pointing to tragedy – all of us want to believe Tomassi will be found alive and returned to her husband and family.
But it got harder last week.
