There was their long lost friend, on the TV news. It wasn't good news: He had died in a shootout with deputies.
By NICOLE JOHNSON
Published November 11, 2005
[Courtesy of the Edwards family
James Guy Lambert, left, is pictured on a happy occasion as best man for childhood friend Bill Edwards on Nov. 7, 1992. Lambert was shot and killed in a shootout with Pinellas deputies Wednesday.
Hitting the snarled traffic on East Lake Road, Deborah Edwards knew she'd be late for her 9:30 a.m. appointment with her stylist Wilma.
Creeping south, she saw the police cruisers and media trucks at the Grey Oaks subdivision. She got to Fantastic Sam's on Tampa Road after 10 a.m., but nobody there knew what the fuss was about.
It wasn't until Edwards clicked on the 11 o'clock news Wednesday night she realized the commotion was about James Guy Lambert.
Her husband's childhood friend.
The best man in her wedding.
And someone she and her husband, Bill,thought was already dead.
"Jim's on the news. Jim's on the news," she yelled to her husband working in his office.
"Everybody thought he was dead," said Edwards, a New Port Richey resident.
But Lambert, 34, was alive until about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, when he was shot and killed after opening fire on Pinellas County sheriff's deputies.
It had been almost six years since Bill Edwards had last seen Lambert. Their last meeting had been troubling.
In 2000 an anxious-looking Lambert knocked on the door of the Edwards' Palm Harbor home. He asked Bill Edwards to help him interpret some dreams he was having about the Largo mobile home park where the two men grew up.
"We sat outside on a bench in front of my house," said Bill Edwards, 35. "He said he was having some dreams. He thought I would know what the dreams meant. . . . I couldn't help him."
Other parts of Lambert's life were hard to make sense of, as well.
In October 2000, Lambert was fired from his job as a utilities technician for the Pinellas Park water maintenance division. Lambert hadn't shown up to work for four straight days, according to records.
Weeks after their encounter, Edwards went to Lambert's trailer at 142nd Avenue in Largo and found another man was living there, he said.
Family seemed unaware of Lambert's whereabouts.
A childhood friend called to tell Edwards that Lambert had reportedly skipped town and was living in his red Ford Ranger in a state park in North Florida.
"He went off the map, friends couldn't find him, family hadn't heard from him," said Bill Edwards, an AT&T employee.
Edwards and Lambert had been thick growing up at the Whispering Pines mobile home park in Largo. Both young men lived in households headed by single mothers.
The youngsters spent their time listening to Van Halen, playing pinball at a nearby rec center and talking about life.
Lambert had a boyish face, Edwards said. He wore his dark hair feathered and parted in the middle.
"When he was young he did really good with the girls," Bill Edwards recalled.
Their lives took different paths as they got older:Edwards went to college and Lambert worked on a General Educational Development certificate, but the two stayed in touch.
Edwards asked Lambert to be his best man in August 1992.
"He was happy to do it," Edwards said. "I had known him so long, he was happy to do it."
On Nov. 7, 1992, Lambert stood by Edwards in a charcoal gray tuxedo as he took his vows.
"The guy we're talking about on East Lake Road and the guy we're talking about that I grew up with and had in my wedding are not the same people," Edwards said.
Bizarre accounts from neighbors and sporadic run-ins with the law are all that is known about Lambert's life between when friends and family last saw him and Wednesday's shootout.
Lambert rented a room at 7015 Astor Lane, a small house just off U.S. 19 in New Port Richey, for a couple of years.
"When he first came, he was very polite, very neat and very clean," said Alice Paxton, Lambert's landlord. "Then as time went on he would get very angry if you didn't say what he wanted to hear."
Paxton said Lambert often hung strange, Satanic-looking pictures on his door. The pictures had writing on them that no one could read.
"It looked like devils to me," she said. "Very disturbing. The writing underneath was nothing you could read."
Last year, Lambert was arrested in Tarpon Springs on charges of possessing cocaine and marijuana, but prosecutors decided not to pursue the case, records show.
His next encounter with the law was Wednesday after being spotted running in and out of traffic on East Lake Road wearing a black cape fashioned from a hurricane tarp.
Authorities had no explanation Thursday why Lambert stopped his red Ford Ranger in front of the Grey Oaks subdivision. Inside the truck were clothes, blankets and food.
"That's something we may never know," Pinellas County sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Jim Bordner said.
But once in front of the gated subdivision, Lambert fired at least 10 shots at deputies from the .40-caliber handgun he was carrying.
Deputy David E. Webb fired 12 rounds from his .45-caliber handgun at Lambert. Cpl. Kent Johnson, who arrived at the scene later, fired two rounds from his department-issued rifle, according to authorities. Both deputies were put on paid nondisciplinary administrative leave after the shooting, which remains under investigation.
"I don't blame the police for what they had to do," Edwards said. "But Jim wasn't always some sort of a monster that he appears to have been."
Times staff writer Phil Davis contributed to this report. Nicole Johnson can be reached at 727 445-4162 or njohnson@sptimes.com
