Tyler Perry offers $100K reward in Fla. cold cases

The Associated Press

NAPLES, Fla. -- Filmmaker Tyler Perry is offering a $100,000 reward for information in the decade-old case of two men who went missing after separate encounters with a sheriff's deputy in southwestern Florida.

Perry joined the Rev. Al Sharpton and NAACP president Ben Jealous at a news conference Thursday to discuss the cases of Terrance Williams and Felipe Santos, who disappeared three months apart in 2003 after crossing paths with Collier County Sheriff's Deputy Steven Calkins.

Calkins denied doing anything more than dropping the young men off at different convenience stores. He was never charged, but the department fired him after he stopped cooperating with investigators.

Perry said the media didn't pay enough attention to missing-person cases involving minorities. Williams was black and Santos, a Mexican, was an illegal immigrant. Calkins is white.

When he announced the reward, a man stepped from the front of the crowd to tell Perry something, indicating he had information to offer.

"Wow. I have been praying for an answer for this family and I wasn't expecting this moment," Perry said afterward. He added, "The sheriff here has assured me that he will be safe and anyone else that wants to say anything or speak out about this will be safe."

Santos, who did farm work and construction, was 23 when he vanished in October 2003. He had been driving to work with his brothers when he got into a fender bender. He didn't have registration or insurance, and Calkins arrested him, put him in his patrol car and drove away.

When his brothers went to the jail to bail him out, he wasn't there. Later, Calkins told investigators that because Santos was so cooperative, he decided not to arrest him and dropped him off.

Williams was 27 when his white Cadillac broke down in January 2004. Calkins spotted it and called in to the Collier County Sheriff's Office to run the vehicle number and have the car towed. In the recorded conversation, Calkins and the dispatcher both talked in exaggerated black dialect.

Later, Calkins told investigators that Williams asked him for a ride to a store and he let him off there.

Don Hunter, the sheriff at the time, said both men would have had some reason to disappear -- Santos was in the country illegally, and Williams faced jail time in Tennessee for failure to pay child support.

Both cases remain open and active, current Collier County Sheriff Kevin Rambosk said.