Part 1 of a 2-part Series
Photo: THE VICTIM: SIGHT-IMPAIRED WILTON MANORS RESIDENT ROBERT JACOBS

WILTON MANORS – A part-time resident of Wilton Manors, Robert Jacobs, alleges that early one Saturday morning last month, he was held against his will in his own apartment for over an hour by another man who took advantage of Jacobs’s visual impairment. Jacobs—known by some locals as the “blind snowbird”—spends most of the year living in the Greater Boston area and usually spends the winter months in Wilton Manors.

Jacobs says that he was unable to get a taxi during the early morning hours of March 17 after visiting a friend’s house the night before, and so was walking home on NE 4 Ave. in the Fort Lauderdale city limits, just south of where the street approaches Fort Lauderdale High School and then turns into Wilton Drive.

“That’s when the ‘Hopper’ pulled up,” say Jacobs, referring to the not-for-profit community shuttle service that provides free transportation to locations in and around Wilton Manors. Jacobs himself didn’t “hail” the vehicle to pick him up. He says that was the action of the man who he claims accosted him just a short time later. (Because of the ongoing police investigation, Jacobs was unwilling to give the name of his assailant; for the purposes of this article, he will be referred to as “Jim.”)

Jacobs says that he recognized Jim’s voice from several previous occasions in which the man had greeted him on the streets. Jacobs explains “As far as I knew, he was a street guy. I was always polite with him when he said ‘hi,’ but never overly friendly.” Jacobs says that his blindness makes him naturally dependant on many things the ‘sighted’ take for granted, and that although he is careful about with whom he associates, “I can’t live my life suspicious of other people,” he offers.

Jacobs relates that after he got into the Hopper—an electric vehicle similar in design to stretch golf cart—it continued up Wilton Drive before stopping at the corner of NE 21 Court, in front of the Gables Wilton Park condominium apartments. Jacobs says he got off the Hopper and prepared to cross the Drive when Jim told him that he was willing to walk Jacobs across the street to his apartment, but first needed to stop for about five minutes at a unit in the Gables Wilton Park complex. “I need to swing by a friend’s house,” Jacobs says that Jim informed him. “It didn’t seem like a big deal.”

For those who are visually-impaired, Jacobs relates, the street corners on Wilton Drive are not very “user-friendly.” “There are no safe crossings,” he explains, “with just a single audible signal light [which emits a beeping sound to alert a light change] at NE 6 Ave.” This may have contributed to Jacobs’ willingness to wait a few minutes for Jim to help him across the Drive.

“I felt a bit in his debt,” Jacobs admits, since the man had been responsible for getting the shuttle to stop and pick him up. “I knew him casually from my walking around town, and I didn’t have any reason to fear him.”

Jim “brought me up to the unit,” says Jacobs, one of the upper story apartments in Gables Wilton Park that faces the Drive. When they got upstairs, he relates, “Jim told the guy who lived there to ‘get this guy’—meaning me—a drink of water.” Although he was willing to wait on Jim for a few minutes in the strange apartment, Jacobs had a sense right away that things were “odd” in the relationship between Jim and the other man whose apartment they had entered. The dynamic between the two men, Jacobs says, was agitated, with Jim making demands and giving orders, and he knew that Jim didn’t live there.

After a few minutes, “Jim went out to the balcony,” says Jacobs, “and I asked the guy [who lived there] ‘what’s the story here? Is he [Jim] your master?’ ‘Yeah, sort of,’ the guy told me, and I just wanted to get out of there.” A short time later, Jacobs relates, Jim came inside the apartment from the balcony and then pulled Jacobs outside with him. Jacobs says the man asked him if he wanted to smoke some marijuana. Jacobs eschewed the offer, and he says that Jim continued to smoke something on the balcony. “I knew it wasn’t pot because I have smelled that before, and this was something entirely different.”

Although he was in unfamiliar surroundings, Jacobs says that at this point he started to “get bolder and more assertive,” insisting that Jim take him back downstairs to the sidewalk on the street corner. Jim delayed their departure until Jacobs’s demands to leave became more insistent. After a time, they went downstairs. Although Jacobs told Jim to leave him on the corner, he says that Jim insisted upon walking him across Wilton Drive.

They walked across the Drive, and Jacobs says that Jim physically steered him behind the strip center located on the 2100 block of Wilton Drive, between Copy This and the Florida Agenda editorial offices. He claims that Jim pulled him into a breezeway (“I can’t describe it very well because I haven’t seen it,” he acknowledges). “I started to plead with him to take me to the front of my apartment building.”

Claiming that he was roughly handled by Jim through the hallways of his apartment complex during the still-dark pre-dawn hours, Jacobs was stunned and horrified when—after being finally escorted to his own unit by Jim—the man pushed him through the door of his apartment and pulled closed the door behind him, locking both men in. “I didn’t want to show too much fear,” Jacobs admits.

Once inside, Jacobs says that Jim started demanding money from him. “He said that we had been smoking dope at his friend’s place and that he wanted to be paid for what I had supposedly smoked,” relates Jacobs. “I told him that I hadn’t smoked anything and that he needed to leave my apartment.” Jacobs explains that he tried to maintain a level voice and keep things calm and reasonable as he attempted to convince Jim to leave. “I told him that I would call the police if he didn’t leave.”

While he listened to Jim wander around his apartment, opening drawers, doors, and cabinets, Jacobs tried to call for assistance on his smartphone. “I didn’t think a blind man could use an iPhone,” he admits, attempting humor in the face of the decidedly unfunny. “I couldn’t make a speed dial to the police. Then he pulled the phone out of my hand and flung it across the room,” Jacobs recounts.

“He was pushing up against me, demanding money, which I told him I didn’t have. I tried to approach him—to try and steer him towards the door—but he shoved me back each time.” Jacobs says that Jim shoved him back so hard that Jacobs fell back onto the floor of his apartment. He also pushed Jacobs into the counter, which injured his ribcage. That assault became an opportunity. “He left when he thought that he had really hurt me,” Jacobs offers. “He may have thought that he had made so much noise, it could have awakened my neighbors.”

Next week: The aftermath of Jacobs’ perilous home invasion ordeal.