Former Flagler Beach Fire Chief and Historical Museum Founder Robbie Creal Dies at Age 75

Robert “Robbie” Ramsey Creal, who led the Flagler Beach Fire Department for 26 years between 1976 and 2002 and subsequently founded and led the Flagler Beach Historical Museum,  died at his home on North 5th Street over the weekend. He was 75. 

He had been known as the city’s historian, and was a member of the Flagler County Historical Society, among other groups, and continued to volunteer his time in public safety roles. He was a director of the Flagler Beach Volunteer Firemen’s Association, a role he held for decades. 

The cause or time of his death is not yet clear. Creal had last driven his truck at the beginning of last week, according to license plate reader data, when he was part of a brief ceremony outside City Hall, where the last picture of him was taken. He was in full uniform for the occasion, a $20,000 donation to place AEDs for public access around town. 

On Monday his sister in Port Orange hadn’t heard from him since Saturday and asked Flagler Beach police to check on him. Officers did so, entering the house with the code she provided. Creal appeared to have died more than a day earlier. There were no signs of struggle, forced entry or injury. Creal had been at his laptop. 

Creal became a member of the volunteer fire department in 1972, when he was 21. The position became a full-time job in 1989. “He was a good chief. He knew his job and he did it well, in my book,” Ed Kuhnlein, a city commissioner at the time, was quoted as saying in a News-Journal report at the time of Creal’s retirement. “He took care of the fires in this community, he extinguished them and he had a good cadre of people.”  

Creal’s departure was not quite voluntary, occurring the day a city police investigation concluded that as chief, Creal had “used marijuana, provided drugs and alcohol to underage volunteers and looked the other way as underage youths used city computers to view pornography,” according to a news report at the time. 

Creal had failed a drug test that summer and been suspended. He attributed the incident to a lapse in judgment. Creal continued to serve with the Flagler Beach Fire Police. In 2013, then-City Manager Bruce Campbell offered Creal the acting fire chief position but soon declined after issues arose over his certification, which was not current.  He continued his involvement in civic and historical issues and participated in the city’s centennial last year. He  served on the county’s centennial committee in 2016-17 alongside local luminaries. In January he was instrumental in hiring Sheila Pillath to be the director of the museum. 

A member of the museum board posted a tribute to Creal on the museum’s Facebook page, reflecting on Creal’s surreal absence in the museum. The post elicited numerous responses, one of them calling Creal “the soul of our mission as a museum. His contributions to the museum and our little town were significant and innumerable. He will be greatly missed and always appreciated for his selfless and unflagging support for our museum and community.”

Craig’s Flagler Palms removed the body after the medical examiner released it, though a physician declined to sign the death certificate. The Flagler Beach Police Department is continuing an investigation into Creal’s death and criminally concerning findings at his home, from where four laptops and an iPad were seized as evidence, as was a 6TB storage device that had been connected to one of the laptops, according to 911 dispatch notes.