Law enforcement is now offering $30,000 information regarding a brutal Frostproof murder that left three longtime friends dead Friday night.
BARTOW – Law enforcement is now offering $30,000 information regarding a brutal Frostproof murder that left three longtime friends dead Friday night, and for Dottie Payton, that information can’t come soon enough.
"I don’t want them to ever see daylight again," said Payton, whose 27-year-old son, Brandon Rollins, died that night. "Brandon was my only son, and Damion was Elizabeth Tillman’s only son. Keven was the youngest boy. We have to go to the cemetery now to visit them."
Rollins, along with Damian Tillman and Keven Springfield, had gone to Lake Streety in Frostproof just after 9 p.m. Friday to go fishing – something Payton said the three best friends did often. About 10 p.m., Cyril Rollins got a phone call. It was his son.
"He was hard to understand because there was so much static," she said Monday, "but we heard him say ‘Come help me. Help me.’ He sounded very weak, and I could tell he was hurting. He sounded different."
The father knew where to go because it was a favorite fishing spot, Payton said. Rollins found his son and quickly recognized the severity of his injuries. The younger Rollins, like his two friends, Tillman, 23, and Springfield, 30, had been beaten and shot.
Having left without his cell phone, Cyril Rollins raced to a nearby convenience store to call for help.
By the time paramedics arrived to the remote location, all three friends had died.
At a press conference Monday, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said detectives are piecing together information about the case but need the public’s help to solve it.
He said the killings don’t appear to be motivated by drugs, a domestic issue or robbery, and the crime scene suggests there may have been more than one assailant. Several valuables were left behind.
Payton said she, too, questions what could have led to the brutal murders.
"We had a normal day Friday," she said. "Brandon got up and went to work, then came home and got dog food. He tinkered on the boat for little while because they were going out in it Saturday morning, and he was getting it all ready."
He didn’t seem bothered by anything in the days leading up to Friday night, she said.
"You could tell when something was bothering him because Brandon had a habit of rolling little balls out of the stuffing from a pillow when he had something on his mind," she said. "I always knew, but he hadn’t been doing that."
He worked for a lawn care business, she said, and would spend his free time hunting wild hogs.
"That was his passion," she said. "Everybody knew Brandon was a hog hunter. He’d catch them and sell them."
He loved fishing almost as much as hog hunting, his mother said, and his 14 hunting dogs even more.
"Brandon was always soft-hearted for dogs or cats or any animal," she said.
He and Springfield had grown up together along the same rural road in Frostproof, a community of about 3,300 residents in southeast Polk County.
"Brandon met Damion later, but they were friends from the first time they met," Payton said. "Damion like to fish, but he wasn’t much on hunting. Keven was a mechanic and he loved to fix things, but I never saw him when he was wearing a pair of shoes."
She said reading and writing had been challenging for her son, "but he could do anything with his hands. He could take things apart and put them back together again. And he was everybody’s bodyguard. If somebody couldn’t fight, Brandon would take up their fight for them. That got him in trouble a few times."
She said he didn’t deserve to die the way he did, and she wants to see the killers brought to justice.
"I hope that their mothers have to deal with what I’m having to deal with now," she said.
Judd said Tuesday that he, too, is committed to holding the assailants accountable, which is why he raised the reward from $5,000 to $15,000. Then the Florida Department of Law Enforcement stepped in with another $10,000, and the Florida Sheriff’s Association added $5,000 more, bringing the reward to $30,000 for information that leads to an arrest.
"We want to be the voice for those young men who lost their voice on Friday night when their life was snuffed out by some nasty, evil person or persons," he said.
Suzie Schottelkotte can be reached at suzie.schottelkotte@theledger.com or 863-533-9070. Follow her on Twitter @southpolkscene.
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Reward in Frostproof triple murder raised to $30,000 - The Ledger
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