A Villager arrested in a fatal country club attack said he didn’t think the victim appeared to be 87 years old.
Robert Moore, 75, of the Village of Polo Ridge, is facing a charge of aggravated manslaughter of an elderly person.
Villager Dean Zook died July 16 more than two weeks after he was attacked over a fender bender at Glenview Country Club. In the wake of the attack, Zook was helicoptered to UF Health-Shands Medical Center in Gainesville, having suffered a “massive brain bleed” when he was punched in the jaw.
Interviewed Thursday by a Sumter County Sheriff’s Office detective who had tracked him down, Moore claimed Zook “was older and appeared to be frail,” but stated that he “did not think he was 87 years old.” The detective informed Moore of Zook’s age before taking him into custody.
Moore, who stands 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 220 pounds, was apparently enraged on the evening of June 28 when he walked out of Glenview Country Club and believed that Zook’s vehicle had struck his black Lexus in the parking lot. Moore allegedly began punching Zook, before realizing it wasn’t his Lexus.
A call was placed to 911 and Sumter County sheriff’s deputies found Zook and his wife in the parking lot. The Villages Public Safety Department also responded to the scene, after Zook began slurring his words and stumbled. He was transported by ambulance to UF Health-The Villages Hospital then flown to Gainesville. At the time, he was “unresponsive.” He was placed on hospice care at Shands on July 15 and died the following day, “due to the trauma he sustained from being punched.”
The day after the incident, the sheriff’s office posted surveillance images of the suspected assailant on social media. The story was picked up by Villages-News.com.
The Glenview surveillance showed the assailant entering the country club to pick up a to-go food order. While he was walking through the restaurant, he bumped into a server carrying drinks, causing them to spill on a patron sitting at the bar.
The release of the photos triggered a tip from someone who said he’d seen the assailant at Havana Country Club, wearing similar clothes as he had been wearing at Glenview on the day of the attack. The tipster shot a photo of the man “sitting at a table with several unknown females,” according to the arrest report. The tipster said the man’s name was “Bob” and sent the photo to the sheriff’s office.
The detective’s Google search led to a photo of Moore published in November by Villages-News.com. In the photo, Moore was smiling in celebration of a hole-in-one at Tarpon Boil Executive Golf Course.
“Moore appeared to be wearing the same shoes, shorts and sunglasses as seen in the video surveillance from Glenview Country Club,” the detective wrote in the affidavit of probable cause.
The detective also noted that the article indicated that Moore lives in the Village of Polo Ridge, “which is in close proximity to the Glenview Country Club.”
The detective discovered that Moore is the owner of a black 2022 Lexus RX350, a close match to the vehicle that was struck by Zook on that fateful evening at the country club. The detective also called up Moore’s driver’s license photo and found that it matched the Glenview surveillance image and the hole-in-one photograph.
The Massachusetts native remains free on $30,000 bond.
