That frigid Tuesday morning, Nov. 16, 2021, Barbara Humer saw her common-law husband Ronnie Woods off to his contracting job at about 7:30, and took their chocolate lab Princess for a walk.
She got Princess into their golf cart and rode about a hundred yards to the back of the sprawling, rural property, in a hollow off Husson Road near Felton, for their morning ritual.
The property is on a long lane off the twisty one-lane rural road. A canal, built by Ronnie, feeds the large pond, home to bass, catfish, perch, blue gill and “all sorts of critters,” Ronnie said. The canal, parallel to the north branch of Muddy Creek, runs the length of the property, nestled between two ridges in southern York County. Ronnie has a 20-ton steel-hulled English canal boat, anchored in a lock, which he also built. There is a replica of a lighthouse from St. Michael’s on Maryland's Eastern Shore at one end of the pond, and you drive by it on the lane leading to their log home, which Ronnie also built.
In the back pasture, accessible by a bridge over the canal, there is a camper that has been permanently mounted to a foundation. Their fifth-wheel travel trailer – a large trailer that hitches to the bed of a pickup truck - is parked by the garage.
It’s an idyllic setting, the kind of place that, if you lived there, you’d never have to take a vacation because it’s the kind of place where city folk would go to get away from it all. It’s peaceful.
That morning, as she walked Princess, Barbara didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It was a normal Tuesday morning.
After the walk, she returned to the house, got a shower, did some paperwork to take to the bank and prepared to leave the house to head into Red Lion to take a friend to breakfast.
Her car was in the cavernous garage at the back of the property. As she walked to the garage, she spotted a car in the canal. It was a sporty coupe, nosed into the opposite side of the canal.
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She thought, oh my gosh, somebody might be in there. She called Ronnie and told him, “There’s a car in the canal.” Ronnie was confused. How could a car get into the canal?
She hung up and took a closer look at the car.
At that moment, a man, soaking wet and wrapped in a towel, jumped from the trailer parked by the garage and leveled a pistol at her.
Ronnie called her back, and when she answered the phone, the man put his finger to his lips, indicating to her to not say anything. Barbara, thinking quickly, told Ronnie that it was her car, and she must have forgotten to put it in the garage.
Ronnie laughed and said, “OK.” The call ended.
Barbara felt terror.
She thought, “I’m a witness to something here, and they don’t let witnesses live.”
She said, “I knew I was going to die that day.”
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'It's always there'
The man wrapped in a towel was Robert Vicosa. Barbara didn’t know who he was; news of his rape and torture of his estranged wife, Marisa, and the kidnapping of his two daughters, Giana, 7, and Aaminah, 6, hadn’t broken yet. By the end of the week, the news would be all over the media, concluding in horrific tragedy.
Vicosa, a former Baltimore County cop who had been fired that previous summer, had lured Marisa to the couple’s former home to celebrate her birthday with their daughters.
The couple was legally separated and had an agreement that awarded 50-50 custody. While Marisa was at the home, her husband held her at gunpoint and, with the assistance of his girlfriend, Baltimore County Police Officer Tia Bynum, tied her to a table in the basement and forced her to ingest an unknown drug and smoke marijuana. He later raped her and held her hostage for two days before Marisa was able to talk her husband into letting her leave to return to her mother’s house to get some clothes and her laptop. He threatened to kill her, their daughters and her family if she called police.
She went to the Target store in East York and asked employees there to call the police. The York Area Regional Police responded, advised her to seek an emergency protection from abuse order and a search warrant to get her girls back. The order and warrant were granted, and over the protests of officers on duty that Sunday night, Police Chief Tim Damon delayed serving the warrant.
By the time police went to Vicosa’s home on Pleader Lane in Windsor Township, he and the girls were gone.
What followed was a four-day-long manhunt that ended on a rural Maryland highway when Vicosa killed Bynum and his daughters in a moving car before taking his own life.
Barbara, by chance, became another of Vicosa’s victims.
What happened during those three, long hours that Tuesday morning, she said, will be in her thoughts for the rest of her life.
“It’s always there,” she said.
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'Please don't hurt me'
Vicosa told her to get in the trailer. She wasn’t going to do that. If she got in the trailer, she thought, it would be the last thing she ever did. He asked her if there was any rope in the trailer so he could tie her up. She replied that there wasn’t anything in the trailer. She also thought that she wasn’t going to let this man tieher up. She told him, “Here are my car keys. Just take the car and leave.”
He didn’t. He said he had his two little girls in the trailer.
He stood there for a while.
Barbara, who, at 66, is retired from working at a nursing home and as a driver for a trucking company, thought fast. She told him. “You’re cold and wet. Why don’t we go up to the house?” They got in her car and drove the short distance to the house.
She had no idea where he had come from, or how his car had wound up in the canal. She hadn’t seen any cars come down their lane that morning and hadn’t seen the car in the canal when she walked Princess earlier that morning.
Ronnie believes that Vicosa was driving on Herbst Road, which runs along the ridge west of the house, and spotted the camper in the back pasture, thinking it would be a good place to hide. With the trees being bare, Ronnie said, he could have seen the camper from the road. Vicosa somehow navigated through the woods, down the steep ridge and forded the north branch of Muddy Creek to get to the strip of grassy land between the canal and the creek that led to the camper. As it heads north, the grassy strip narrows, and at one point, Ronnie believes, he ran out of room and the car tumbled into the canal.
Barbara kept pleading, “Please don’t hurt me.” Vicosa told her he wouldn’t. He asked her, “How do you get out of here?” She told him to go out the driveway, turn left and then right and that would take him to the main road.
He drove out the driveway and turned left onto Husson Road. He had his gun under his thigh. He drove past a driveway and decided to turn back. He told her that he thought Ronnie would call the cops. She assured him he wouldn’t.
When they returned to the house, Giana and Aaminah sat on the couch with Barbara. Vicosa sat in Barbara’s armchair, dragging it from the corner to the middle of the room, in front of the stone fireplace, so he had a view out the window to see whether anyone drove down the lane.
He asked her for some pants. Barbara had just finished doing laundry, and some of Ronnie’s pajamas were there, so she gave them to him. He asked for underwear, she said, and she said they were upstairs. He followed her upstairs, holding his gun on her, while she fetched them, but he didn’t like Ronnie’s underwear and declined them.
She kept pleading, “Please don’t hurt me.”
He assured her, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Back downstairs, she went to the kitchen and got the girls some Little Debbie snacks. She offered them milk to go with the snack cakes, but Vicosa told her the girls don’t drink milk. She gave the girls water instead.
He asked for her cell phone and scrolled through it. He complained that nobody knows anybody’s phone number anymore. His phone was still in the car in the canal, and Barbara now believes he was searching the Internet for Bynum’s phone number.
She pleaded again, “Please don’t hurt me.”
He said, “This is what we’re going to do.” He holstered his pistol and put it on top of Princess’ crate, covering it with a towel.
She tuned the TV to some cartoons for the girls. Vicosa asked her to take the girls upstairs to watch TV. Barbara said the TV in the bedroom didn’t work so well and wanted to know why he wanted the girls out of the room. Vicosa explained he didn’t want someone walking in and seeing her there with two Black girls, that it would be hard to explain. Barbara told him she could just say she was babysitting them. He accepted it.
They talked. He told her he was a cop and, referring to Princess, that they had a dog and the girls liked dogs. He told her the girls were homeschooled.
As they talked, Giana and Aaminah were “very quiet,” Barbara said. She tried to talk to them, but they were reluctant to engage in conversation. Barbara said it seemed “they didn’t understand what was going on.”
She asked Vicosa how he had driven his car into the canal, and he replied, “I don’t know.” He only said that he wanted to get his daughters away from their mother.
Barbara told him, “There are other ways of doing that.” She told him she had gone to court years ago to get custody of her grandson, who was now serving in the Army. Later, she said, “I was trying to talk to him like a therapist, you know?”
He kept scrolling through her phone and repeating that nobody knows anybody’s phone number anymore. She asked him, “Why don’t you get your phone out of the car?”
He said, “That water’s cold.”
She told him he could take the bridge over the canal to the other side and crawl down on top of his car, sitting in three feet of frigid water, to get to his phone. He asked for some boots, and she gave him Ronnie’s rubber boots and he went and fetched his phone.
While they sat in the living room, Barbara received two phone calls. The first one was the friend she was supposed to take to breakfast. It was 10 o’clock and she wanted to know where Barbara was because she was never late. She told her that Princess, who was a puppy then, had torn up some things in the house and she had to cancel to clean up the mess. The other call was from a neighbor who sells lawn mowers and stores them in their garage over the winter. He wanted to come over and drop some off. She told him he could come over when Ronnie was home. “I didn’t say nothing, no mention of him being over here or nothing,” she said.
After about three hours, Vicosa decided to leave, taking Barbara’s 2014 Volkswagen Jetta. He took her cell phone and the landline handset and went to fetch the car. She asked him to leave the girls with her. He said OK.
While he was gone, she got a shotgun, slid a shell into the chamber and put another in her pocket. Holding the gun behind her back, she asked the girls, “Is your daddy going to hurt me?”
The girls told her, “No, our daddy’s nice.”
She asked the girls to wait on the porch for their father. They were cold and Barbara wrapped them in Afghans her aunt had made. She locked the door behind them. And she went back upstairs with the shotgun.
Vicosa returned and pounded on the door, demanding that she let him in. She told him, “Just take my car and leave.”
He said, “No, it’s going to be OK. Just let me in.”
She repeated, “Just take my car and leave.”
He went to the living room window and pounded on it. Barbara shouldered the shotgun and thought, “Help me out here, Lord.”
She thought, “If I see him pull that gun up, I’m just going to shoot him.”
It became quiet. She looked out the window and saw him driving away in her car.
Barbara went back upstairs and got a handgun and put it in her pocket. She got Ronnie’s deer rifle and put it on the bed.
And she waited. She thought that she couldn’t leave, that he might be waiting in the woods for her to show herself.
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'No clue'
She had to call for help but didn’t have a phone.
She crept downstairs, fearing that Vicosa was still lurking outside, and grabbed her laptop and went back upstairs. She got on Facebook and posted, “Someone call 911. I need help.”
Nobody did. Her friends thought she had been hacked; they didn’t believe it, she said.
She sent a Facebook message to her son, asking him to call the police. He asked, “What’s going on?” She messaged him a brief description of what had been happening for the past three hours. He asked whether she was hurt. She said no. He called the police and messaged her that they were on the way.
She waited about 20 minutes. It seemed like forever. She kept messaging her son, “They’re not here yet.” Her son messaged, “They’re on their way.”
She went to the bedroom upstairs and looked out the window. Her son messaged her that the cops were surrounding the property.
She could see two police cars on Herbst Road on the ridge. Then she saw a SWAT team coming down her lane, in full gear and creeping along behind riot shields. There were maybe 20 or 25 cops, she said.
When they came to her door, she said she shouted, “This is Barb. He’s not here. He left.”
She told the police she would put her shotgun and handgun on the couch and open the door with her hands up. “And that’s what I did,” she said.
When she opened the door, the police grabbed her and pulled her out of the house. The police swarmed into her house and conducted a search, even pulling her washer and dryer away from the wall, she said. Her son and Ronnie had arrived by then, but police kept them from entering the property.
When the house was cleared, the police told her what was going on. She told them that she wished she could have kept the girls in the house and let Vicosa leave without them. She said one officer told her, “That would have been a bloodbath. He wanted those girls.”
She said, “He would have shot us all. He would have shot me and those girls, if I tried to save them. I just feel so bad that I told those two little girls to go out and wait for their dad.”
Looking back on how it ended, Barbara wept.
She said, choking on the words, “No clue. No clue.”
'He shot them'
On Thursday that week, Nov. 18, 2021, she saw on the news that police had found Vicosa. She and Ronnie were watching the news and saw that the car was pulled by the side of a Maryland highway. She didn’t know the outcome. It hadn’t been reported yet.
At about the same time, before news of the terrible ending of the manhunt surfaced, she said, a female detective knocked on her door. The detective looked shaken.
Barbara said, “Oh, good, I’m glad they got the girls.”
The detective just looked at her. She was crying.
“No,” the detective told her. “He shot them.”
'It will be with me forever'
Barbara wept as she said, “They were such sweet little girls.”
And she is haunted. She feels guilt, that she could have done something, anything, to save their lives.
She can’t imagine the pain their mother feels. But she feels that she shares it in some very small way. She went to counseling for a year afterward. She’s still uncomfortable being home alone. She can’t walk into the back of her property by herself. A devout Christian, she prays for the girls and their mother every day, that they will know peace.
“It will be with me forever,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It never goes away.”
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
