Bob Dillinger loved bridges.
On his way to the courthouse, where he served six terms as the Pinellas-Pasco public defender, he would often put his car in cruise control and look out at the glistening water as he crossed the Bayside Bridge.
“If there was a bridge in sight, he’d want to go over it,” said his wife, Kay Dillinger.
On Tuesday, Pinellas County commissioners voted to rename the Bayside Bridge the Dillinger McCabe Bayside Bridge in honor of Dillinger and Bernie McCabe, the former Pinellas-Pasco state attorney who worked alongside Dillinger for nearly three decades to help improve the region’s juvenile justice system.
The idea originated from Commissioner Chris Latvala, who sought Kay Dillinger’s permission to pursue the name change after her husband died in 2024.
She was immediately on board.
“It means that Bob’s name will continue to be known throughout the county,” she told the Tampa Bay Times. “If he had the decision to have something named after himself, it would be a bridge.”
Kay Dillinger met her future husband in 1976, when she was a court reporter and he was an assistant public defender. They got married four years later.
Years later, he told her he wanted to run for public defender because “I’m tired of going into court and seeing the same children there week after week that have dead eyes and no hope,” she remembered.
“I intend to change that,” he told her.
Dillinger concentrated on revamping the juvenile portion of the public defender’s office to ensure children had the same attorney throughout their proceedings, concentrating on keeping youth out of the criminal justice system through positive experiences with counsel.
He created Crossover for Children in 2008, which pairs a child with the same public defender for both civil and criminal cases. The program gives children legal help and a consistent advocate when their lives are often marked by uncertainty and trauma, Kay Dillinger said.
Bob Dillinger was diagnosed with leukemia in 2007. By the time he retired in 2020, he was on his ninth round of chemotherapy.
He died in 2024 at the age of 72.
Dillinger and McCabe served together on the Juvenile Welfare Board and advocated for Safe Harbor, a shelter and service center for people experiencing homelessness that opened near Largo in 2011.
To honor the service of Dillinger and McCabe, who died in 2021, the Juvenile Welfare Board created the Dillinger-McCabe Putting Children First Leadership Award. It’s presented annually to “a well-established leader and champion for Pinellas County children and families,” according to the organization’s website.
Kay Dillinger said McCabe and her husband had a “wonderful working relationship and friendship.”
“They agreed to disagree and agree at times because they had a job to do,” she said. “It was known around the state that the state attorney and the public defender in Pinellas-Pasco were the epitome of making the criminal justice system work.”
Kay Dillinger maintains a close friendship with McCabe’s wife, Denise, who stood alongside her Tuesday morning for the announcement of the bridge’s renaming.
The most touching moment was when the commissioners handed them a miniature version of the road sign that will appear on the bridge, said Denise McCabe.
Bernie McCabe always wanted to be a defense attorney, she said, until he worked in the State Attorney’s Office prosecution clinic while in college at Stetson University.
“He was not just blindly prosecutorial,” she said. “No other pairs in those two seats in the state of Florida at the time got along.”
Despite their different backgrounds, Denise McCabe said, Dillinger and her husband always had a mutual respect for each other and worked together as a team.
“I know Bernie is smiling down and I know he is so honored,” she said.
Read the article as originally published at https://www.tampabay.com/news/pinellas/2026/01/20/bayside-bridge-bob-dillinger-bernie-mccabe-public-defender-state-attorney/
