Now Thomas recounted the final scene at the store.  He said that he stood beside the car as Zeigler unlocked the front door for Mays. Zeigler told Thomas to come in with them, but Thomas refused.

Q: How long did you sit in the car?

A: I ain't sitting in the car no time.  As soon as they closed that door and got into the store, I just got right out of the car and went cross over there to TG&Y over there.

Q: Why did you do that?

A: Because he had been acting a little strange.  I ain't paying too much attention because he was on the truck when everybody trying to get their equipment sharpened there....

This reference was puzzling.  It seemed to suggest that Thomas had seen the tall white man somewhere before, perhaps in the fields.  But Hadley let it pass.

Thomas said that he rode back into Oakland with friends he met at the shopping center, that he went back to the bonfire where he had met Mays, and from there to the house of a friend,  Cleo Anderson, who was cooking wild game for Christmas dinner.  They drank some liquor, and Thomas told Anderson and a woman about what had happened to him at the furniture store.

From Cleo Anderson's house he went back to the fire, and from the fire to a juke joint in Tildenville, a tiny community tucked in between Oakland and Winter Garden.  At the bar, around midnight, he heard that there had been four murders at the furniture store.

He went back to Oakland, then with a friend to Winter Garden, where he joined the crowd outside the furniture store.  Then back to Oakland again, from where he and his brother-in-law began to drive to Orlando, fifteen miles away, to report what he had seen.  On the way to Orlando their car ran out of gas.  They walked into a restaurant on Route50 and Thomas told his story to a black sheriff's deputy there.

Q: Where in Orlando were you going to go?

A: Well, I was going to come over here and report it to some of the officers, you know.  I ain't really know where to report it at.  So I was coming over here to report it.

Q: What were you going to report?

A: I was going to report that I had been with the man that had got killed.

Q: You knew at this point that Charlie Mays was dead?

A: Well, they say he was in the store.

Q: Who said that?

A: Everybody that was standing around out there.