By Drew Harwell, Times Staff Writer
Monday, October 11, 2010
HOLIDAY – In July, Thomas Cacacie checked into a Pasco mental health care facility and told nurses he was thinking of killing the mother of his children.
His threats seemed earnest, "very calm and very matter of fact," a discharge planner told deputies. But Cacacie, 26, was released that month.
In his discharge report, Cacacie wrote, "I don't have any plans. But if I stay in the area I will go back to my son's mothers house and take her life."
Early Friday morning, deputies said, he did exactly that. Cacacie is charged in the brutal strangling and rape of Sarah Ann Capps, 22, in her apartment on Golden Nugget Drive. He told detectives that for years he had fantasized about killing and sexually assaulting her body while watching pornography.
Capps' body was found about 1:30 p.m. Friday, 10 hours after Cacacie punched and choked Capps to death in her bedroom, deputies said. He cleaned her in a bathtub "with anything he could find," he told deputies, and sent a picture of her body to a friend in Virginia Beach.
That woman's call to the police bounced to Tampa officers, the U.S. Marshals and Pasco deputies, who arrived at Capps' complex that afternoon. Cacacie, neighbors said, had spent the morning in a white plastic chair smoking a cigar, drinking a Coke and chatting about the beach. When deputies arrived, Cacacie was across the street with blood on his shorts and a knife in his pocket, watching the scene with other onlookers. One man told the Times that Cacacie said he had come "to take care of some things."
Three months earlier, when Cacacie checked into The Harbor Behavioral Health Care in New Port Richey for depression, homicidal thoughts and issues with substance abuse, he said he had recently moved to Holiday to live with Capps, his ex-girlfriend, and help raise their 4-year-old son (the couple also had a 5-year-old child; authorities say both children are in state custody). Cacacie had been working as a line cook in Crystal River when Capps called with a promise, he told nurses, that they could "start anew and be a family."
The couple's relationship had already been scarred with brutality. He told nurses he beat and abused Capps for six years. In 2006, on Mother's Day, Cacacie had almost strangled Capps to death, he said, "but something stopped him."
Cacacie was held in state prison for two years for domestic violence against Capps and released in 2009, when he moved to Crystal River. But the fantasies of violence didn't stop. While they lived together, Cacacie planned to kill Capps one morning before she went to work, he told nurses. That morning he woke up too late.
He told nurses it was "no big thing" to spend the rest of his life in prison. "You get three squares, a bed, medical care, watch TV, am taken care of and have friend," he said, according to a nurse's report. "I'm a junkie – nobody cares about a junkie."
A discharge planner at the facility told deputies that he hears violent threats all the time, but Cacacie's were especially haunting. "Thomas seemed to be very calm and very matter of fact," he told deputies. This was not Cacacie's first run-in with mental health counselors: A 1998 judgment from his adopted parents' divorce stated he suffered "from severe mental problems" and needed "long-term assistance to deal with anger." He had been arrested more than two dozen times, including once, when he was 14, for a charge of aggravated battery with a weapon.
When deputies told Capps of the threats, she said she would move out within the week. The apartment where her body was found was two miles away from her former apartment on Kepner Drive.
Cacacie had moved to a New York rehab, his stepmother told the Times, to get away from Capps. He told detectives that he had moved from New York to be with Capps three days earlier.
Two days into his stay, he said, she decided to end the relationship.
He told detectives "if he couldn't have her, no one could."
Contact Drew Harwell at dharwell@sptimes.com or (727) 869-6244.