David Meredith can't fathom what would have made Ronald Huffman, a life-long friend he called a unique character, kill a 52-year-old woman behind a Fort Myers restaurant and then attempt a suicide that ultimately succeeded.
"I loved him like a brother," said Meredith, 78, a self-described "sunbird" with homes in both Florida and Virginia. "It just doesn't make sense."
Huffman, of Fort Myers Beach, fatally shot Ada Kajtazi of Pentwater, Michigan, before shooting and injuring himself the morning of April 11 in a parking lot behind the Denny's Classic Diner off Gladiolus Drive near Summerlin Road in south Fort Myers.
Kajtazi's death was the fifth homicide in Lee County in less than a week.
Kajtazi was an artisan jeweler who owned and had operated her own business, Jewels by the Sea in Pentwater, on the western shore of Lake Michigan. A message on a phone connected to the store said it was to reopen May 1.
A neighbor in Pentwater said she had not seen Kajtazi, who was single, since she closed up her shop and came to Florida for the winter.
"This is a small town," said Joan Wegner. "Everybody has heard what happened." She said she did not know Huffman.
A call from a person Meredith described as Huffman's "lady friend" shortly after the shootings alerted him to his buddy's death.
The woman Meredith mentioned declined to comment.
"We spent pretty much a lifetime as friends," Meredith said. "We went to high school together."
Much of that time was in Roanoke, Virginia, he said, where Meredith said the two palled around so much that they might as well have been brothers.
He said the two men were the kind of friends who might not see each other for years but, once reunited, would pick up as if they saw each other the day before.
"He was a unique character. He wouldn't harm a fly. I have no idea what happened," Meredith said. "I find it so hard. I can't understand what was going through his head."
Meredith didn't know the woman Huffman shot.
"It doesn't make sense," he continued, befuddled by the death. "It's so weird."
In Racine, Wisconsin, where Huffman had a tidy wood and brick home along a tree-shrouded street, neighbor Joyce Hershberger said she really didn't know him well.
"He kept to himself," she said.
After working for years as an electrician for the Norfolk and Western Railroad, Meredith said Huffman retired to Fort Myers Beach where the two turned their attention to golf.
"He had a very good retirement," Meredith said. "He loved to play golf. We played a lot together. We never lost a match."
What really stands out for Meredith is that Huffman was always a law-abiding, careful person.
"He wasn't a lawbreaker, he just wasn't that way," he said. "Neither was his brothers or sisters."
The thought that Huffman killed another person and then shot himself doesn't sit well with Meredith.
"It wasn't in his DNA," he said. "In the first place to take someone else's life. Nobody in his family would think of harming another person."
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