The Other McCain

Citrus County, Florida, is a scenic place if you like trees draped with Spanish moss. Although it sits on the west coast of Florida, about 75 miles north of Tampa, Citrus County isn’t a place with hotels lining beaches, because there are no beaches to speak of. The coastline of Citrus County is defined by two bays — Crystal Bay in the north and Homosassa Bay in the south — into which empty two rivers. Despite its lack of beachfront, Citrus County has experienced tremendous growth in the past 50 years, exploding from less than 20,000 residents in 1970 to about 170,000 now. This background is by way of introduction to Travis Duane Lovett, who at age 22 made headlines — not in a good way.

Lovett is from Bushnell, in neighboring Sumter County. On the morning of April 28, 2019, an F-250 pickup truck was reported stolen in the Citrus County community of Floral City. Two hours later in Inverness, which is the Citrus County seat, a tip led sheriff’s deputies to the truck’s location:

A high-speed chase through Citrus and two other counties ended Sunday morning with authorities ramming a stolen truck driven by a Bushnell man, who earlier had fired on pursuing troopers.
Medics airlifted Travis Duane Lovett to Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point after the 22-year-old was ejected from a burgundy 2007 Ford F-250 pickup truck off of Sumter County Road 476 near Southwest 41st Terrace, outside of Bushnell, according to the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP).
As of Monday, he was still being treated at Tampa General Hospital for his injuries, FHP spokesman Sgt. Steve Gaskins said.

The reason I mentioned those “trees draped with Spanish moss” in Citrus County is because the pursuit of Travis Lovett was captured on a Florida state trooper’s dashcam, and it’s one of the most harrowing chases you’ll ever see, despite the verdant scenery:

 

If you don’t want to watch the whole frightening (but scenic) chase, you can click here to see the moment the trooper finally rams the truck off the road into a brutal rollover crash. Afterwards, you can hear the trooper and deputies talking about Lovett being “in bad shape,” as might be expected after being hurled from a truck at 90 mph. You can actually hear Lovett in what sounds like “agonal breathing,” which is almost always an omen of impending death. But more about the chase:

Working off of a tip, sheriff’s deputies at 9:15 a.m. went to a property on the 5300 block of East Muzzleloaders Court in Inverness and found Lovett in the truck.
Lovett drove the truck toward one of the deputies, who had to jump out of the way. Lovett continued to drive through a fence and accelerated towards another responding deputy’s cruiser, which swerved to avoid a collision, the sheriff’s release states.
A neighbor told a Chronicle reporter she saw several people sitting at the front porch warn the getaway driver about the approaching deputies, who had parked their patrol cars to block the driveway and much of the front yard when the truck backed up through chicken-wire fencing to escape. . . .
Lovett got onto South Great Oaks Drive and travelled south, leaving the roadway near the intersection with Bayberry Lane to travel on the Withlacoochee State Trail, according to CCSO spokeswoman Jodi Sanders and FHP.
Lovett continued driving on-and-off the trail for roughly 1.6 miles, almost colliding with several pedestrians, before going south on Istachatta Road.
Troopers kept pursuing Lovett into Hernando County and eastbound onto County Road 476.
Troopers said Lovett pointed an unknown object at them before he fired three gunshots from a handgun through the truck’s rear windshield, with one round striking the right side of an FHP cruiser’s front windshield, according to the agency.

If you watch the video, you realize that the Withlacoochee Trail is for walkers and bicyclists — no motorized vehicles permitted — and Lovett’s 60-mph race down that narrow one-lane trail is one of the scariest parts of the chase, no matter how much you enjoy seeing that lovely Spanish moss hanging from the trees. Considering how many lives he endangered, not to mention shooting at the state trooper who risked his life during that pursuit, I found myself actually hoping that Lovett was killed in that final crash. Alas, he survived, but fortunately you are unlikely ever to encounter Lovett, as he is currently in the Sumter Correctional Institution, from which he will not be released until 2065.

Because most of the criminals featured in my blog are either black or illegal immigrants, it’s important occasionally to emphasize that I have zero sympathy for white criminals like Travis Lovett. The headline features a line from the 1985 dark comedy Better Off Dead, which has become a sort of cult classic. The movie is about a high school kid played by John Cusack, who becomes suicidal after his girlfriend dumps him. In one scene, Cusack decides to end it all by jumping off a highway overpass, only to land in the back of a garbage truck. Two black men, in a bucket lift trimming trees beside the road, look down and see Cusack sitting in the garbage truck and one says to the other, “Man, now that’s a real shame when folks be throwing away a perfectly good white boy.”

This line crossed my mind after reading about the December 2020 hearing where a Florida judge sentenced Travis Lovett to prison:

Bushnell resident Travis Duane Lovett was handed a 50-year state prison sentence Thursday stemming from a multi-county vehicle chase with law enforcement last year, which one prosecutor in court described as “blood curdling.”
Circuit Judge Richard “Ric” Howard sentenced the 24-year old man after agreeing with state prosecutors that Lovett was a habitual offender, already having amassed five felonies and 10 traffic violations. Lovett had been released from prison in 2017 before the high-speed pursuit in 2019.
The April 2019 chase involved three counties, including Citrus and Sumter, and portions of the Withlacoochee Trail, during which he nearly struck two cyclists.
Before the chase, Lovett stole a truck, and when a Citrus County Sheriff’s deputy was identifying the license plate not knowing Lovett was inside, Lovett reversed the vehicle, nearly striking the deputy.
During the chase, Lovett also forced a second pursuing deputy off the road.
In March [2020), a jury found Lovett guilty of two counts of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, felony fleeing and grand theft of an automobile.
During the sentencing hearing, Lovett’s court-appointed lawyer, Edward Spaight, presented a court psychologist who oversaw counseling efforts for Lovett when Lovett was 14 years old and 16 years old.

(Permit me to interject that if “a court psychologist” was counseling Lovett when he was only 14, he was already a criminal by the time he was in middle school.)

Psychologist Patrick Ward told Howard that Lovett had been exposed to a drug environment during his early childhood and shown how to make and use drugs, which he often did with his mother and father, often using methamphetamine.
Ward said Lovett “bonded heavily with a model that was very negative” and was never shown how to control impulses and live normally in society. . . .
In a rambling effort to try and explain what he had done, Lovett told the judge that his intent in stealing the truck and running was to force law enforcement officers to kill him. He said his grandmother had committed suicide a few years before and his mother was threatening to do the same and the stress was too much.
During the time of his arrest, both his parents were in prison. Lovett said his life and recent events caused him to mentally come apart.
Spaight asked Howard to show Lovett mercy in sentencing, saying “if he had been raised by wolves it probably would have been better.”
But Howard declined, saying that the chase and near misses was one of the most frightening things he’d ever seen.
While Howard sympathized with Lovett’s troubles as a youth, he told him “but you made your choices.”

“Raised by wolves”! Both of his parents were in prison! He had just gotten out of prison himself two years before the stolen truck chase! He started doing meth as a child! His grandmother committed suicide!

No sympathy for white trash — 50 years in prison.

Civilization requires us to reject the appeal to sympathy that would have us treat dangerous criminals leniently on account of the difficult circumstances of their lives. The Vice President of the United States grew up in the kind of white trash millieu that produced Travis Lovett, but because of the intervention of his grandmother, J.D. Vance didn’t go down the road that leads to prison. As they say, it’s a shame to “throw away a perfectly good white boy,” but some of them are just trash.