Retired paramedic recalls response to 1980 quadruple murder
The call came in about 5 p.m. Aug. 1, 1980, out of Holmes Beach and paramedic Richard C. Zavadil raced to the Kingfish Boat Ramp.
Soon after arriving to the park on the north side of Manatee Avenue, the young paramedic with Manatee County Emergency Medical Services was transporting two men — both suffering gunshots and one of them mortally wounded — to Blake Medical Center in Bradenton.
Zavadil’s colleagues would take three other victims — two boys and a third man, all fatally shot — to the hospital.
The paramedics were first responders answering dispatches in a mass shooting — the unsolved quadruple murders known today as the Kingfish Boat Ramp Killings.
That evening in 1980, Dr. Juan Antonio Dumois, 47, of Tampa, with sons Eric, 13, and Mark, 9, and brother-in-law Raymond Barrows, 52, of Miami, returned to the boat ramp from a day of fishing.
The vacationers, who were staying on the island, had put their boat on a trailer hitched to a station wagon when, according to Barrows, a stranger walking a bicycle approached and asked for a ride.
Dumois and Barrows helped the hitchhiker put the bike into their boat and all three got into the wagon, with the hitchhiker joining the boys in the backseat and Dumois at the wheel.
Dumois was driving toward Manatee Avenue when the hitchhiker shot all four family members — Dumois and his sons would die — and then fled toward the nearby Island Foodway, now the site of Publix, where Westbay Cove resident Robert G. Matzke was shot during an altercation in the parking lot.
Still not known is the identity of the killer or killers or the motive.
“It takes evil to do something like that,” said Zavadil, who lives in a family home on Flamingo Cay with his wife of 39 years, Jennifer.
Zavadil, who moved to the area in the late 1970s from Illinois, is retired after a long career as a paramedic, first with the county and later in the ER at Blake. He studied to work in emergency medicine and “being a paramedic fit the bill.”
On Aug. 1, 1980, Zavadil was on shift in Palmetto when he and other paramedics were called to the island for what initially was reported as a car crash.
“I really couldn’t believe the amount of people and cars on the side of the road,” Zavadil said July 12 of his arrival. “A lot of people stopped. I do remember that. Just a sea of cars and people at the intersection.”
He made his way through a crowd near Manatee Avenue and East Bay Drive to tend to Juan Dumois and Barrows.
“The father had an obvious mortal wound,” Zavadil said.
But Barrows, who died in 1982, could sit up and Zavadil, as he tended to the man, spoke with him “just sort of about what happened.”
Zavadil had seen gunshot wounds before and his concern was triage, what he described as the ABCs of emergency medicine — airway, breathing, circulation.
When he looks at the old newspaper photos from the scene, Zavadil recognizes former colleagues, old friends.
“Everyone was there,” he said of the EMS team, part of the county’s public safety division.
And he’s wondered since whether he passed the killer while en route to the scene.
Zavadil said he doesn’t talk a lot about the shootings or the 43-year mystery.
“I pay attention when the anniversary comes up,” he said. “I can remember the day. But I’ve seen a lot since.”
Forty-three years ago, Zavadil answered a call to the Kingfish Boat Ramp, did his job and moved on to the next call.
“I probably stayed up all night on the job,” he said.
Do you remember that day? Email recollections to lisa@islander.org.