"Ninth Street and A1A Boulevard." Richard Whitecloud relays his oceanfront location to the emergency dispatcher. "The fatalities just keep racking up in this intersection," he mutters. "Dammit, man. Intersection of death!" Whitecloud, six feet one...

Al Holden's 34-foot yacht, M/V Close Knit, bobbed as he prepared a meal of chicken and dumplings. On his way to Key West, the Canadian had threaded his way off the Intracoastal Waterway and found a sweet spot to drop anchor. Sunset Lake is situate...

Bobby C. Billie was born in the Everglades, about a mile off Tamiami Trail, in 1945. For years, that was all he knew of the world. Children planted pumpkins and corn, hunted deer or raccoons, and stuck their feet into alligator holes to see if tur...

In summer 2012, lawyer Laurence Leavy was late to a Miami Heat playoff game. Before the matchup began, the team had laid out white T-shirts on every seat so the crowd would match. "But somebody had stolen my shirt," he remembers, so he remained in...

At 7:30 in the evening, Terri Frana noticed two black bears gallop through the backyard of her 10-year-old, $725,000 house in Lake Mary, just north of Orlando. Frana, a 44-year-old banker with brown bangs and a kind face, was used to seeing the be...