Homeless man charged in brutal Tampa attack had a family, a job, a life
On a warm May evening with daylight still left, a 30-year-old woman was out for a long walk on the streets of Hyde Park, with its oak-shaded bungalows, swanky shops and bustling bars and restaurants.
She would later tell police she didn’t think anything of it when she passed by a homeless man. Then he chased her.
The man grabbed her by her ponytail, slammed her to the ground and punched her in the face again and again. He laughed, according to police reports. Afterward, the man said something about God, a witness said.
A lawyer walking home with his family from dinner at a restaurant heard the woman’s cries and ran to the scene, one of several people who tried to help. He fired a shot from his handgun ― he had a concealed weapons permit — but no one was wounded.
The woman, later quoted in TV news reports, suffered a broken nose, a concussion, bruises and abrasions. She has publicly been identified by only her first name, Taylor. The Tampa Bay Times is not including her full name because she is the victim of a violent crime.
“I never talked to him. I didn’t provoke him,” she recently told the Times. “There was no reason.”
“I have never seen a demon like I saw in that man,” she said.
When police arrested the man on nearby Bayshore Boulevard and took him to jail, he gave the unlikely name of Esja Beelzebub Nodopa — Beelzebub being a name for the devil. In fact, the man accused in the attack had a different name and a backstory from more than a thousand miles away.
Investigators would learn he was Michael Samdass, 44. And he had vanished from Canada more than three years earlier.
He worked in real estate. He had a close family. He was the kind of person who took care to make sure his socks matched his tie — an image that bore little resemblance to the matted-haired inmate with the penetrating eyes in his jail mug shot.
“Of course it’s your brother,” his oldest sister Reisha Dass said about his mug shot. “It was just not a version of him I expected to see.”
“Like Jekyll and Hyde”
Michael Samdass was the middle child of five tightknit siblings in a family that immigrated decades earlier from Guyana to Hamilton, Ontario, according to Dass. The family started out poor, she said, but built a comfortable life.
Her brother played sports and went to art school for a time. As a teenager, he got in trouble for robbing a convenience store to pay for photo day at school, she said. As an adult, he worked in her real estate business, renovating and flipping houses.
Family photos show Samdass with neat hair and bookish glasses. He’s playing with toddlers, dancing at a wedding. Friends and family called him outgoing.
Several years ago, they started to notice changes. He stopped returning calls, stopped going out, stopped caring about how he looked. He slept a lot. He began talking to himself “like he was talking to the clouds,” his sister said.
“It was like Jekyll and Hyde,” friend Mara Casagrande said in a TV show about his disappearance.
Samdass began having outbursts, including a violent one against their father in 2017, Dass said. His neighbors nicknamed him Rant and said they sometimes heard him yelling, she said. He was charged with disrupting the peace after an altercation with a bank teller. He was also involved in a confrontation with a homeless person, his family said.
In 2017, Dass said, family members tried to get him detained for psychological evaluation and treatment under the country’s Mental Health Act. “Every time he got a test here, they said he was perfectly fine,” she said. “Four times they released him.”
He vanished on Sept. 5, 2019. He left behind his cellphone, laptop and car. His bank account showed no activity, his family said.
The police investigation stretched on for months, then years. The family offered a $25,000 reward for information. Missing persons organizations got involved. There were posters and searches of shelters and city streets. A Facebook page pleaded for help in finding him. Someone told the family that a psychic said he’d been murdered and chopped into pieces, Dass said.
Two years in, Paramount Plus aired an episode about Samdass in a series called “Never Seen Again.”
But for more than three years, nothing — until a violent attack far away.
Dass said a missing persons group using a facial recognition program got a hit on a jail mug shot in Florida. Fingerprints from an inmate at the Hillsborough County jail calling himself Nodopa were a match.
In Canada, two officers came to the family’s door. “He’s alive,” they said.
“It’s terrible what happened,” Dass said of the assault and the victim. “Terrible. I hate to know what she’s going through.”
“It made him more human”
The concussion and broken nose have healed, though Taylor has scars on her knee and her back. She wants to deal with what happened, to process it, to move on.
“I was in a very happy season of my life and still am,” she said. “I didn’t want him to rob me of that.”
It was difficult seeing him at a court hearing.
And she didn’t expect his backstory.
She scrolled through the Facebook page about his disappearance and, with her boyfriend, watched the “Never Seen Again” episode. That was easier than she expected, because that normal-seeming person didn’t look like the man who came after her.
“I’m a sister, too. I watched them talk about their brother and my heart broke for them,” she said. It also made her mad: “It made him more human … and he was very inhumane, what he did.”
In July, she attended a ceremony where Charles McKeon received a citizen appreciation award from the Tampa police chief. McKeon was the lawyer walking home after dinner at Timpano restaurant in Hyde Park Village that evening with his wife and his son, who was just home from college. McKeon, who according to police reports was hit in the face by Samdass in the encounter, also suffered a concussion.
“I really feel bad for Taylor, because she didn’t deserve what she received,” he recently told the Times.
News stories out of Canada reported that Samdass was found — but not the violent circumstances.
“This guy’s being portrayed as this victim, when in fact he could have beaten this woman to death,” McKeon said.
He also thinks about how badly the incident could have ended: “My son was in the middle of this,” he said. “Someone could have been dead.”
McKeon was armed that night because of another encounter with a homeless man.
The law office where he practices personal injury defense is on Franklin Street downtown, where homeless people are as much a part of the landscape as city benches and parking lots. As Tampa sprouts shiny new high-rises, workers and residents share space with people sleeping in doorways and panhandling for change.
On Jan. 20, just before 7 a.m., McKeon was headed to work early when a homeless man lunged at him outside his office, according to a police report, yelling and armed with a stick sharpened to a point.
“That’s why I started carrying a concealed weapon,” McKeon said.
“I just don’t want him on the street”
Samdass was arrested with two backpacks, a sleeping bag and personal items that included ID cards from California and Mexico, according to police reports. His family was told he didn’t know who they were, his sister said.
In jail, he signed a form declaring he had no money, property or government benefits and was assigned a public defender.
His charges — including aggravated battery with great bodily harm, punishable by up to 15 years in prison — are not typical for the local homeless population, police say.
“Usually what we see are nonviolent crimes,” such as trespassing, camping and panhandling, said Randi Whitney of the Tampa Police Behavioral Health Unit. “In fact, we find homeless are more victims of crimes than perpetrators.”
Estimates vary, but nationally, at least 25% of homeless people are believed to be seriously mentally ill. The yearly count of the homeless population in Tampa and Hillsborough County in 2023 was 2,040, up more than 500 from a year before.
Samdass was examined by a forensic psychiatrist and found incompetent to stand trial.
On Monday, sheriff’s deputies shuffled him into a Tampa courtroom in an orange jail uniform. Handcuffs and chains bound him at his wrists and ankles. He sat on a bench crowded with other inmates, hands folded in his lap, and gazed across the room at spectators.
His mother and two of his sisters, who had flown in from Canada, watched from the courtroom gallery. It was the first time they’d seen him in four years. He didn’t seem to recognize them.
When a prosecutor called the name Samdass, he showed no reaction. When his lawyer turned and quietly uttered, “Nodopa,” he rose.
Hillsborough Circuit Judge Michael Williams was told Samdass needed to be committed to the Florida State Hospital for treatment, and so the judge committed him. The hearing lasted less than a minute.
Defendants found incompetent and given psychiatric treatment are generally required to be reviewed every six months. If Samdass is later found to be competent, he will be sent back to Tampa to stand trial.
“It’s heartbreaking for us to see no reaction when he sees us,” his sister Leah Gerrard said after the hearing. She praised the public defender’s office for treating her brother with humanity and not as “just someone with a mental illness.” She also expressed sympathy for the victim: “Our heart breaks for her.”
“I hope that he’s going to be able to get the help that he needs,” she said.
What do the people who encountered him in the violent attack that day want to happen?
“It’s a question that I don’t even know the answer to,” Taylor said days before the hearing. “I would like him to pay for what he did.”
“I think I have to be at peace with my own life, no matter what the outcome is,” she said.
As for McKeon? “Whether he is in a mental hospital or whether he is in jail makes no difference to me,” he said. “I just don’t want him on the streets. Because he is a threat.”
Dass did not argue with the assertion that her brother shouldn’t be free.
“In his current state, I don’t disagree,” she said.
“What do we hope for Michael?” she said. “That he’s restored. That he’s Michael again.”
