Port Orange, FL: Woman had feared man, and now both are dead

August 31, 2010|By Rene Stutzman and Gary Taylor, Orlando Sentinel

Loni Amber Turner was afraid. An ex-boyfriend she'd met online wouldn't leave her alone. He sent her text messages. He watched her apartment. He showed up at the trade school where she was a student.

"I am really afraid to come out of the apartment …" she wrote in a petition for a domestic-violence injunction last week.

On Monday, Turner's body and that of her ex-boyfriend Erin Ross, 27, were found in Room 7 of the Town & Country Motel in Port Orange. They had been shot to death, police said.

When 22-year-old Turner disappeared Sunday, police knew immediately for whom to look: Eight days earlier, Turner went to the South Daytona Beach Police Department, saying that Ross was stalking her. Two days later, she went to the Volusia County Courthouse in Daytona Beach and asked a judge for an injunction, an order for Ross to leave her alone.

Circuit Judge William A. Parsons said no. Turner had failed to prove she was in imminent danger, he wrote. He ordered Turner and Ross to come to court in two weeks and lay out their evidence.