David O’Brien is 67 years old and lives in The Villages, a retirement community in central Florida. He met a 21-year-old woman on Tinder and proposed that she become his “sugar baby”: he would pay her every time she agreed to have dinner with him and go shopping together.
They met for the first time on July 21. She arrived accompanied by three friends who waited outside in the car, as a precaution. O’Brien gave her $200 to buy lingerie and then another $600 during dinner. Once at his house, something changed. She felt uncomfortable and called her friends to pick her up. O’Brien demanded that she return the money because, he said, “that was not the deal”.
When she got into her friends’ car, he chased them in his Ford F-150 pickup truck until he rammed them at a roundabout, causing them to crash into a pole. Three fled, but O’Brien pointed a .22-caliber pistol at the face of the fourth, a 22-year-old man, and ordered him to lie on the ground or he would kill him. The young man waited for a distraction and escaped. Police arrived and arrested O’Brien next to his truck, gun in hand. He now faces charges of aggravated assault and aggravated battery, with a hearing scheduled for August 14.
