Spate of killings shatter picture-perfect community in the town that Disney built

JUST days after reporting its first homicide, the town Disney built is investigating another death. This time, a man killed himself after shooting at deputies.

Craig Foushee, 52, barricaded himself in a home on Thursday for more than 14 hours, according to an Osceola County Sheriff’s Office report. He shot at deputies several times, but deputies never returned fire because they couldn’t get a clear shot. No deputies were injured.

Police entered the home early yesterday and found him dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Sheriff’s spokeswoman Twis Lizasuain said there was no connection between Foushee and Matteo Patrick Giovanditto, who was found slain in a condominium on Tuesday.

That homicide was the first for Disney’s master-planned, picture-perfect central Florida community with 11,000 residents.

Giovanditto lived alone with his Chihuahua and had been slain over the Thanksgiving weekend, authorities said.

Neighbours hadn’t seen him for days, so they filed a missing person’s report, then went into his condo a day later and found him.

Details were still emerging in the second death, but a man with Foushee’s name and address was listed as the owner of a security business, Reliant Protection Group, that dissolved in September, according to online records from the Florida Division of Corporations.

Internet postings from a man believed to be Foushee indicated he had three daughters but had divorced.

A Facebook profile with Foushee’s name and the hometown of Celebration, Florida, showed him describing his daughters as “my treasures”. In April, he posted that he “went from being married to single”.

Photos also depict men at a firing range and doing what Foushee described as “convoy/motorcase IED-scenario training”.

A LinkedIn profile said Foushee was a pilot for American Airlines for 20 years and an Air Force pilot.

Celebration, has never reported a homicide in its 14-year existence — until this week.

Residents of the town five miles south of Walt Disney World woke up on Tuesday to the sight of yellow crime-scene tape around a condo near the Christmas-decorated downtown, where Bing Crosby croons from speakers hidden in the foliage. A 58-year-old had been slain over the long Thanksgiving weekend, deputies said.

A few years ago, a resident joked with a reporter that Celebration would feel like real town when a bike was stolen. Now, it has two murders on its hands.

Celebration is the kind of town where people give Christmas gifts to their favourite Starbucks barista, where welcoming wooden rocking chairs sit lakeside without being stolen.

As word of the homicide blew around town people started to worry.

In 1996, critics viewed it as something out of The Truman Show, or The Stepford Wives.

Fans saw other things. A return to small-town values. Safety.