Celebration Florida

Disney's master-planned, pictureqsue Florida community, Celebration, experienced its very first homicide in its 14-year existence on Tuesday.

The town is located just five miles south of Disney World.

Matteo Giovanditto, a 58-year-old man living alone in a condo, was murdered over Thanksgiving weekend.

Neighbors got suspicious because they hadn't seen Giovanditto since the day before Thanksgiving, so they called the police.

"This is very rare and unusual for a crime of this magnitude to occur in this community," said Twis Lizasuain, a sheriff's spokeswoman.

She further said that the murder was "an isolated incident" and that "we don't believe the safety of the residents is in jeopardy."

The town, brainchild of then-president of the Disney Development Corp. Peter Rummell, opened in 1996 to residents.

The community would be a "wonderful residential town east of I-4 that has a human scale with sidewalks and bicycles and parks and the kind of architecture that is sophisticated and timeless. It will have fiber optics and smart houses, but the feel will in many cases be closer to Main Street than to Future World," Rummell wrote a letter to then-CEO Michael Eisner about the building of the town on a huge vacant lot owned by Disney.

This unsolved killing is the first major crime in the city of 11,000 residents. The town that Disney built is still known to be safer than neighboring communities.