Fred HiersStaff writer| Ocala Star-Banner
Before May 13th, Robert Morgan had never had a run-in with the law.
The 39-year-old unemployed warehouse worker had lived a mostly quiet life for the past seven years with his 37-year-old girlfriend, Tammy Hulon.
They rarely fought, adored their children and grandchildren from previous marriages, and planned to grow old together.
Until May 13th, the only place you'd find pictures of Morgan would have been in the couple's family photo albums and on the walls of their home in Northeast Ocala.
Now thousands of people in Ocala and who knows where else have seen his picture and laughed or grimaced at the sight. His booking mug on Ocala.com's Mug Shots feature is the most viewed — more than 6,000 hits — in the past four months.
Until now, that top honor has always gone to pretty young women. But youth and beauty have lost out to curiosity about a bloody, beaten face.
The mug shot shows a huge red welt over Morgan's blackened left eye and a smaller cut beneath it. His nose is skinned red raw. The photo doesn't show them, but knots cover the back of his head.
He was charged with beating Hulon outside a bar where the couple, family and friends had gathered. Some of those same people beat Morgan when they saw what he had done to Hulon.
Although the photo and the arrest report tell part of the story, there's more to it. What led a quiet, law-abiding family man to the front of the mug shot popularity line?
“She's the best woman I ever had. I still love her,” Morgan said recently from his mother's home in Alabama, where he is recovering.
“He was the best man I've ever been in a relationship with,” said Hulon, sitting on her couch and wiping the fluid that still drains from her broken eye socket.
“We were going to spend the rest of our lives together.”
Hulon delivers semi-truck parts for a living. Morgan worked at a now-out-of-business warehouse in Ocala.
Both had been in bad relationships before they met. Hulon's first husband had physically abused her for years, she said, and after their divorce she was determined never to be with a violent man again.
“We got along really well,” she said of Morgan. “We always talked …and if there was something wrong we'd talk about it. That's what I wanted…in a relationship.”
But some of that communication started to wane after Morgan lost his job more than a year ago. Hulon said he applied for work at more than a hundred area businesses, but no one was hiring.
“That's when he started having a lot of anxiety and problems,” she said. “That's about the time …he started having mood swings.”
Hulon said she tried to get him to consider taking medicine to help with the frustration and depression. But he refused, and things got worse. In April, after an argument, Morgan left for three weeks.
A few days after he returned, the couple went to Gracie's Cougar Lounge to celebrate and listen to Hulon's daughter sing in a karaoke contest. At least a dozen family members and friends came to encourage the 20-year-old singer.
Among them was the couple's mutual friend Don Frisbie, who sat with Hulon and Morgan at the bar.
Frisbie had been talking with Hulon much of the night. Frisbie was interested in her cousin and wanted Hulon to help get him in the other woman's good graces.
For some reason, Morgan became jealous. In hindsight, Morgan says he never should have thought Hulon was interested in the 34-year-old Frisbie, and shouldn't have considered him a romantic threat.
But after a year out of work and a few drinks, watching Hulon talk too much with another man was all it took.
Hulon's daughter had managed to belt out only two karaoke songs: Carrie Underwood's “We're Young and Beautiful” and Miranda Lambert's “Gunpowder and Lead.”
That's when the violence started.
“He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me across the dance floor and I'm still sitting in the chair,” Hulon recalled.
The two went outside. Morgan wanted to talk. An angry and embarrassed Hulon would have none of it.
“I told him, ‘Let's just go home,' but he said, ‘No' and that he wanted to talk,” Hulon said. “Lookin' back on it, I guess I should have just listened to him.
“Instead, I walked over to my truck door. And that's the last thing I remember.”
Morgan said he didn't remember much about those last few minutes, either.
“I don't even remember doing it,” he said, referring to hitting Hulon. “I just wanted to get it resolved (verbally)…and not let it build up. (Because) since I lost my job, I'd stopped communicating.
“I wasn't providing for my family any more,” he said. “I don't think it would have gone to where it went …if I had been working.”
Witnesses told Ocala police that Morgan hit her many times. In addition to the eye injuries, Morgan bruised Hulon's face and gave her a mild concussion.
He remembers Hulon laying on the ground next to her truck. “I do remember cradling her …and thinking I really messed up,” Morgan said.
He wasn't the only one who thought so.
Hulon's daughter — the karaoke singer — had gone outside to check on her mother. Hulon “wasn't moving,” Shantell Dyess recalled. “There was blood all around her. I thought she was dead.”
She ran toward Morgan and grabbed him around his head and neck. She yelled toward the bar for help.
Dyess hit Morgan a couple of times in the back of the head. Then the rest of the patrons joined in.
“The next thing I know is, I'm waking up in the jail infirmary,” Morgan said.
When police arrived, the beatings had ended. Both Morgan and Hulon were unconscious or semi-conscious. Morgan was arrested. Police did not, and have not, arrested anyone for beating him.
“I never would have expected something like this out of him,” Dyess said. “He was really a good guy.”
Within a few days, Morgan's arrest photo jumped into the lead on Ocala.com's Mug Shot feature, which posts the booking mugs of everyone arrested in Marion County. Morgan's has remained the most-viewed photo ever since. The site automatically refreshes and shows the most recent mug shots. Morgan's photo doesn't pop right up now, though it can be retrieved with a search.
Hulon thinks it has been popular because it's the picture of a man — a 6-foot-1, 190-pound man — who's been arrested for beating a woman.
“And they think he got what was coming to him. That he beat up a woman and people stepped in to help,” Hulon said.
Morgan had asked his lawyer to try and have the picture removed. He's embarrassed — but not just about his beaten face. He's devastated by the charge listed next to his name: battery/domestic violence.
“I always used to get mad when I heard about other men doing that (beating wives and girlfriends),” he said. “Now this.”
He thinks people click on his picture to get a better look at his wounds and that some of the repeat visitors are among those who hit him.
Kelly McBride, an expert in media ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, said that the most popular mug shots at these kinds of websites are those of people injured or clearly under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
“This is anecdotal (but) as I have watched people go through (mug shots), offering commentary...For the most part, it's clear most are doing it for entertainment.”
Viewers often speculate why the people were arrested and guess the circ*mstances that led to that moment, McBride said.
A judge has told Morgan and Hulon to have no contact for now. The criminal case is pending; Morgan's next court date is July 1.
Morgan said he doesn't know if he wants to reunite. “It's hard to say what's the next chapter of my life,” he said.
“We had seven years together. You can't just turn it off. We were going to grow old together. We were going to die together.”
Despite a three-hour operation setting the bones around her eye and installing a metal plate near the socket, Hulon still has double vision in the eye, which pulls to the left. She's grateful that she can see at all, though. She will likely have more operations.
Hulon still has not erased the photos of the couple from her laptop computer. There are still dozens of Morgan in her family albums.
“They're part of my life. He was part of my life for seven years,” she said, wiping the liquid from her broken eye socket.
“I don't want him to go to jail. I know I sound like one of those abused women, but he's not like that,” she said. “I want him to get help.
“I'll always love him,” Hulon said. “But I'll love him from a distance.”
Fred Hiers can be reached at fred.hiers@starbanner.com and 352-867-4157.
