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The young entrepreneurs carefully picked their outfits. A collared shirt for Giovonnie Lenhart. Long black pants for Santiago Salinas. Closed-toe Birkenstocks with socks for Alekos Speaker.
The college students set out June 25 to promote their businesses: Lenhart washed windows; Speaker and Salinas cleaned cars.
As they knocked on doors that afternoon in a Pinellas County neighborhood, a man approached them with a gun. He accused them of casing houses and demanded to see their IDs.
A neighbor called police. The case was closed without criminal charges.
But the three-minute video of their interaction has since gone viral on social media, and some think the man should face consequences.
“If you own a firearm, you have a responsibility,” Salinas, 18, told the Tampa Bay Times. “I don’t think the police handled it well.”
College students launch their businesses
Early in the afternoon on June 25, Speaker parked his white van on Sandpiper Way in Bear Creek, a neighborhood west of Gulfport.
The 19-year-old keeps the van full of equipment — a vacuum, an extension cord, a pressure washer and a steamer. That way, if customers want their cars detailed, work can begin on the spot.
Armed with a clipboard of flyers advertising their company, 2 Clean Whips, Speaker and Salinas made their way down the U-shaped street. Lenhart, 20, took the opposite end, looking for homes with windows he could offer to wash.
They skipped homes with “No Soliciting” signs or gates, and homes without a car in the driveway. They eventually met in the middle.
Lenhart waited at the end of a driveway while his friends spoke with people in the home. Video from a dashcam in Speaker’s van captured Charles Hoffman crossing the street toward Lenhart, clutching his waistband.
Speaker remembers feeling happy as he and Salinaswalked back toward Lenhart. He thought his friend had made a sale.
Hoffman asked the three young men to show him their ID cards. They refused.
It was then, Speaker said, that Hoffman took out his gun.
When Salinas saw it, he said he immediately handed over his ID. “If I could just make it home safely, I would be very grateful,” he rememberedthinking.
Lenhart began recording on his phone and stepped back to stand in line with his friends. He hoped the formation would appear less threatening to Hoffman.
“I can tell you’re checking out the homes. I want to know why,” Hoffman said.“If you want to f--- with people on this street, you’ve got the wrong f---ing street. You got me? There are a lot of f---ing guns on this street.”
Throughout the video, Lenhart and his friends apologized to Hoffman and made other attempts to placate him. Hoffman kept the gun in his right hand, pointed to the ground, for most of the video.
Then, Hoffman, who is white, brought up race. Salinas is Hispanic, and Lenhart and Speaker are Black.
“And believe me, it’s got nothing to do with color,” Hoffman said.
“Yes, sir,” Speaker said.
“I don’t give a f---what color anybody is.”
Standing next to Hoffman, a bystander who had been observing the interaction pointed to the gun.
“The gun is ready to shoot,” he said softly. A Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office report identified him as Patrick K’Maur.
“I know it is,” Hoffman said. “It’s always ready to shoot.”
“All right, just making sure you know,” said K’Maur, who then led the young men away from Hoffman to ask about their car detailing business.
Efforts to reach Hoffman at phone numbers and an email address listed for him in public records were not successful.
When a neighbor called 911, three Pinellas deputies and one Gulfport police officer arrived at the scene, according to Jessica Mackesy, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.
Lenhart, Salinas and Speaker flagged a deputy and explained what happened, according to an incident report from the sheriff’s office.Another deputy spoke with Hoffman, who said the young men circled the neighborhood, parked in a “suspicious” manner and skipped some homes, the report states.
Hoffman thought they “may have been attempting to burglarize residences,” the report states. The deputies told him to call the police next time, according to the report, and Hoffman said he would.
Hoffman’s actions appeared “justified” because of the young men’s “suspicious” activity, Deputy Taylor Kimberly wrote in the report. The report also states Lenhart “did not wish to get Charles (Hoffman) in trouble.”
In an interview with the Times, Lenhart said it was not clear he had the option to press charges.
“He threatened us,” Lenhart said. “We didn’t know our rights, and we felt rushed to leave the situation.”
The officers at the scene issued a warning to Speaker, Lenhart and Salinas for soliciting without a permit. They photographed “the subjects,” the van and the 2 Clean Whips flyer, the report says. Kimberly, the deputy, recommended the young men wear branded company clothing while canvassing.
In an emailed statement, Mackesycalled Hoffman’s actions “inappropriate” but not illegal. The young men deserve recognition, she said, as they acted “respectfully and calmly.”
When is it OK to brandish a gun?
Hoffman did not break Florida’s law against improper exhibition of a firearm, Mackesy said. The statute prohibits holding a gun while behaving in a “rude, careless, angry, or threatening manner” that is “not in necessary self-defense.”
Florida’s open carry rules do not allow a person to walk around confronting others while holding a gun, said Ryan Thomas, owner of Tampa Carry, a firearm training school that offers concealed carry classes.
Florida’s Justifiable Use of Force statute — what many people refer to as the stand your ground law — specifies what counts as self-defense. Under it, Thomas said, a person must have a reasonable belief that one of three things is imminent: death, great bodily harm or a forcible felony.
“You do not have the right to threaten the use of a gun unless you also have a right to kill that person,” Thomas said.
Luis Feliciano, co-founder of firearm training school Orlando Carry, agreed.
“Open carry does not give you permission to act like the police,” he said.
The three-minute video continues to generate attention on social media.
“Is this the precedent now?” Marc Jason, host of “Pinellas Podcast,” said in a June 30 Instagram post viewed about 626,000 times.
“You see three people walking around soliciting, so you can go and approach them on property you don’t own, pull out a gun, demand their IDs?” continued Jason, who said in the video he supports Florida’s stand your ground law. “Man, I can’t — I don’t think I can get around that.”
The next day, influencer Michael McWhorter, who goes by the username @tizzyent, drew more than 18,000 comments on a post that included the video. On July 14, Tampa radio host Arlandal Davis, known as Orlando Davis, posted a video with Speaker in the WILD 94.1 studio.
“@pinellassheriff how is this not a crime?” Davis wrote in the caption. “Pulling a weapon on these kids? Cmon guys. How?????”
Speaker’s parents, Maria and Dorian Speaker, say they are still seeking answers from the sheriff’s office. They hope Hoffman will face consequences.
“If he gets away with this, people are going to think this is normal, this is how we can behave,” said Maria Speaker.
Young adults with big dreams
Lenhart is a business major at St. Petersburg College. He thinks about expanding his window-washing business to Iowa, where he spent part of his childhood.
Santiago is majoring in biology so he can become a dentist.
Speaker, a mechanical engineering major, wants to bring his car detailing business to North Carolina, where his girlfriend lives. He envisions a franchise in every state.
Dorian Speaker, Alekos’ father, sees his son’s activity as following an American tradition. Think of Girl Scouts who sell cookies, he said, or midcentury vacuum salesmen peddling their wares to housewives.
In 2007, when Maria Speaker was nine months pregnant with her son, she and her husband went door to door to leave flyers advertising their moving business. They walked for miles around Tampa Bay suburbs.
Alekos Speaker opted for knocking on doors to make the pitch more personable.The day Hoffman accosted him and his friends, it was their first time canvassing.
It will also, Speaker said, be their last.
