“I was actually upset that I couldn’t get hold of Jennifer on that day,” Rachel remembered.
Where the heck is she?
* * *
Something happened during Rachel’s break at work earlier that morning that had upset her, especially now as she thought back on it later in the day.
Jennifer had called. “Mom?”
“Yeah . . . ? Jennifer, hi. How are you?”
Jennifer knew her mother had had surgery for a recurring cyst a few weeks prior and had been in a lot of pain. She was taking powerful pain medication for it.
“Do you have any pain pills left from your operation?” Jennifer asked.
Rachel was alarmed. “Pain pills? Why would you need pain pills, Jennifer?”
“Mom, listen.... Lamont got hurt. He’s in a lot of pain.” Lamont “Mont” Newton was Jennifer’s most recent boyfriend; she had been dating the twenty-two-year-old St. Pete native for the past several months. Lamont seemed like a “nice guy,” Rachel said. He was five-nine, and in great physical shape at 165 pounds. Lamont sported Bob Marley–type dreads down across his shoulders, had bushy eyebrows and clean-shaven facial skin, and generally had a calm disposition. He was polite. As Rachel saw it, Lamont was an excellent alternative and the polar opposite to Jen’s previous boyfriend, a pants-down-to-his-knees, boxer-shorts-showing, ball cap tipped to one side, “yo” this/“yo” that, spot-on “thug” and violent abuser—a man who had beaten Jen on more than one occasion. In contrast, at least on the surface, Lamont came across as a guy who was entirely into Jennifer as a partner. Not what he could get from her.
“We wanted her to date within her own race,” Rachel explained at the risk of coming across bigoted, claiming she and her husband were anything but racists. “Yet, Jen said she had chosen colored men to date because she had lost faith in—and wanted nothing to do with—white men altogether.” Her decision stemmed specifically from a difficult period in her life when Jen was a child.
“No,” Rachel said to the request for pain pills. “Tell him to go to the hospital, Jennifer. I need my medication.”
Jennifer didn’t sound frantic or dazed. “She didn’t sound normal, either,” Rachel was quick to point out. “More anxious—I felt like something was wrong, but I was clueless.”
That request had come from Jen as though she was simply calling and asking her mother for some pain meds to help her boyfriend work through a back issue. And when she couldn’t get the pills, well, that was it. The pair said their good-byes, promised to talk to one another later, and hung up.
But something was indeed wrong with Jennifer. Rachel had no idea that within a few hours after that phone call, their lives would take a turn none of them ever saw coming.
CHAPTER 3
RACHEL CALLED JENNIFER again as they prepared to leave Crescent Lake Park on October 24, 2010, somewhere around six in the evening.
Still, no answer.
Damn, what’s going on? Rachel asked herself.
Now she was truly concerned for her daughter.
On the way to drop off Ashley at her apartment—Ashley lived on her own in the city—Rachel asked Ashley what she thought Jennifer was up to, and if Ashley knew of any recent problems Jen might have, especially ones that Rachel should know about. Ashley and Jen had been tight once, but not so much anymore. Ashley did not approve of the way Jennifer had been living her life.
It was probably nothing, they decided after talking it through. Jen was likely just being herself and secretive for no apparent reason. Jen had a “diagnosed learning disability,” Rachel said. She had not graduated high school, partly because of her learning difficulties and the aftermath of her quasi-celebrity while becoming known around the world as the “Hiccup Girl” after a five-week bout with the hiccups. Some of the examinations Rachel had brought her daughter to had classified Jennifer as having the intelligence of a fifth or sixth grader, according to Rachel. Jennifer wasn’t stupid by any means. Yet, she did not have a lot of common sense and was often involved in things before she knew what she was getting into, or how deep the water was.
When Rachel got back to her parents’ place, she had dinner with her mother and father, called Chris to say she loved him and to check in with the younger kids still at home. They talked a little bit about the day and night. After that, totally wiped out, Rachel retired to bed by about 9:30 P.M.
As she lay in bed, thinking about her day, Rachel was worried about Jennifer, and what her daughter might be up to weighed heavily on the mind of the mother of five. Why hadn’t they been able to get hold of her all day and night? Where had she gone? It was unlike Jennifer to go off without talking to her mother. Not answer a text or call back? Jen might have hidden things from the family, but she wasn’t a daughter who disappeared off the radar.
By ten o’clock, Rachel fell asleep—and it was not an hour later when the phone call that would change everything rang throughout the dark stillness of her mother and father’s house, rustling them awake.
CHAPTER 4
AFTER THE COUNTY jail computer operator went through the various options for the man on the other end of the telephone, Jennifer Mee came on the line and said, “Is Mommy up?”
Jen’s grandfather, Rachel’s father, had answered the phone. Rachel was asleep. “No, she went to bed.... How you doing?” the grandfather said before asking why Jennifer was calling from jail.
“I got charged with murder . . . first-degree . . . ,” Jen uttered in a casual manner, as if it was just another day. She came across unfazed by this alarming revelation, even as it came out of her own mouth.
“What’d you do?”
“Murder in the first degree,” Jen reiterated.
“Murder? First degree?” the grandfather asked, stunned by the comment.
Rather plainly, maybe even calmly, Jennifer said, “Yes, sir.” It was almost as if she herself did not understand what was happening, where she was, or how serious the charges she faced were.
There was silence. Then, “Well . . . who did you kill?” Jen’s grandfather asked.
“Um, I didn’t do nothing. I was just there at the wrong time, the wrong place. I got caught up in it all.”
“When did all of this happen?”
“It took place last night and the police found me and arrested me today.”
That must have been the reason why Rachel had sensed something in Jen’s voice earlier that morning. She’d been involved in an incident where someone was murdered the previous night and yet she hadn’t mentioned it to Rachel during that phone call. Why hadn’t she shared this information with her mother when she had the opportunity while trying to pry those pills out of Rachel?
Jen’s grandfather told her he was going to wake up her mother.
Rachel sounded groggy and still half asleep when she came on the phone. “Hello . . . ?”
“Hi, Momma.”
“Jennifer, what’s going on?” Rachel asked, right away thinking, Drugs. She’s been arrested on drug charges, along with all of those derelicts she hangs out and now lives with.
“I’m in jail.”
“Why are you in jail?”
“Um, first degree . . . um, murder in the first degree.” Jennifer sounded a little more humbled now, even a bit scared.
“Who’d you kill?”
“I ain’t kill nobody.”
“Well, then, how are they charging you with . . . murder?”
“Because I set everything up.”
There was a brief moment of quiet between them after that.
Then Jennifer continued: “It all went wrong, Momma. Shit just went downhill after everything happened, Mom.” She was crying now, maybe realizing for the first time how serious a turn her life had just taken.
“Who were you trying to kill, Jennifer?”
“Nobody,” she said through tears and anguish, the weight of it all hitting her very hard. “It wasn’t even supposed to happen like that, Mom—”
Rachel cut her off: “Well, some
thing happened, obviously, Jennifer, if you’re in jail.”
“Okay,” Jennifer said. “Me, Laron, and Lamont, all right . . . A dude . . . was talking about he wanted a half, right, so I told him to come meet me at the park where I . . . and the boys run him into a little alley thing.... Then Lamont pulled a gun out on him. The guy went to go reach for the gun and pulled the barrel and . . .” As Jennifer tried to continue, voices could be heard in the background. Jennifer said she had to get off the phone. “Mom?”
“What?”
“I’ll call you when I can, because I have to go.” She broke down. “Mommy, try to visit me. Please.”
Rachel asked how.
Jen told her to call the jail in the morning and sort it out.
“Where you at, Clearwater Jail?” Rachel asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jennifer answered.
“All right, Jennifer. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
“Bye.”
CHAPTER 5
HOW DOES A parent hang up the phone with a child in tears, sounding desperate and somewhat confused about what is happening to her, all in the context of a murder charge, and then go back to bed?
Doesn’t happen.
Rachel sat down at the dining-room table, rubbed her face, and took a deep breath.
Murder?
This was the last phone call she had ever expected to receive.
Jennifer arrested for first-degree murder? What in the hell?
The call was likely recorded, Rachel thought as she tried to figure out her next move and how she could help Jennifer.There must be some mistake here, Rachel told herself. Jennifer, a murderer? It didn’t sound right.
“Because I set everything up,” Rachel heard Jennifer say. That was the reason why she had been arrested, Jennifer had told her mother.
“Because I set everything up.”
Set what up? A drug deal? Or was the drug deal a ruse to rob some dude and kill him?
None of it made sense. Rachel knew her daughter. Jennifer was a lot of things, but a murderer? No parent wanted to think his or her child could commit a morally corrupt, morally reprehensible act as murder. Further, Rachel believed Jennifer did not have that type of malevolence within her soul, nor had she enough intelligence, essentially, to pull it off. In addition, Jennifer had been raised under a strict Christian upbringing. She understood there was a price to pay eternally for breaking one of the Commandments and committing an act of evil, such as murder.
As Rachel sat, thinking about what her daughter was being accused of, the phone rang.
Jennifer?
Caller ID said it was the jail.
Jennifer!
Maybe it was all some sort of misunderstanding?
“Yes?” Rachel said eagerly.
A female guard was on the other end. “Listen,” she said, “if I had a daughter eighteen, nineteen years old, and I had just been given that kind of news, I would want more details than she was able to give you in the very short phone call you two just had.”
“Thank you,” Rachel responded.
Indeed. What in the world had happened?
The guard began by explaining why Jennifer had been brought in and booked.
“Come to find out,” Rachel explained later, “the guard got a lot of the details wrong, but I was able to get the gist of why Jennifer was locked up. [The guard] told me a drug deal had been set up and a girl was murdered.”
* * *
That murdered “girl” was actually Shannon (pronounced SH-NON) Griffin, a twenty-two-year-old male Florida transplant from Hurricane Katrina–ravaged Petal, Mississippi. Shannon was part of a migration of people on the move after the storm devastated the southern coast, and those left without homes had nowhere to set their pillows. Shannon’s much older cousin had brought him to St. Pete and set him up with a job at Walmart, where Shannon had just recently celebrated his first-year anniversary with his first paid weeklong vacation. Shannon, a good-looking kid with short-cropped hair and a glowing smile everyone noticed, was planning to go to college. He wanted to get out of Florida eventually and travel. To Shannon, Florida seemed so confining. It was also a place where things happened to people that would, otherwise, never happen anywhere else.
A family member later said Shannon was humble and understood what he had because he’d come from a poverty-stricken community in Mississippi, where there was nothing to do and no work. As he integrated himself into the St. Pete community, where he was living, Shannon realized opportunity was all around him.
“From all aspects of his life,” said one person closely connected to this case, “Shannon Griffin seemed like a really, really nice person.”
Shannon’s cousin Doug Bolden later explained that after he was given the news “nobody should ever have to receive,” which informed him that Shannon had been murdered, he wondered what could have happened and where things could have gone wrong? It didn’t seem possible the way people were saying. Doug described Shannon as a “loner” and the type of young adult who stayed inside, surfed the Internet mostly, and then went to work. He wasn’t some gangbanger wannabe hanging around the street corners of St. Pete, looking for trouble.
For one, Walmart and drug use generally didn’t fall within the same category. Like other major retail corporations, Walmart conducted random drug tests after an initial hiring drug screen on all employees, no exemptions. Why would Shannon be out buying drugs if he knew he’d eventually lose his job? Furthermore, Shannon was a recluse—why would he even be out at night?
Family members in St. Pete were dumbfounded by the accusation that Shannon was out cruising for dope. It didn’t sound like him at all.
* * *
Rachel found out from that same guard that Jennifer was somehow the “bait” to get Shannon Griffin to show up at a park, but the guard couldn’t really say much else about that aspect of the crime.
Bait? What does she mean by that?
After the phone call, Rachel went to her room and sat on the edge of the bed. Heavy stuff. The Robidoux family wasn’t used to this type of distress. They weren’t people in and out of court, always in trouble with the law or family services. For the most part, their lives had been somewhat “normal” since Jennifer’s bout with the hiccups landed them on NBC’s Today, not to mention Inside Edition, and news outlets from Florida to Russia, along with hundreds of thousands of Internet links. At one time, Hiccup Girl was a worldwide nickname associated with Jennifer Mee. Everyone had seen and heard Jennifer’s story, and most had felt compassion and empathy for her condition.
“I was trying to wake up from a nightmare I literally felt like I was walking around in,” Rachel explained.
Those moments after the call were so surreal, Rachel concluded, she hoped to watch the sun rise and realize it was a dream.
“And then I could have a good laugh.”
CHAPTER 6
AFTER TOSSING AND turning throughout the night, Rachel called her boss. She didn’t know how she was going to make it into work after what had happened.
“I don’t know what time or even if I’ll be in tomorrow,” she said, explaining what was going on, saying how she needed to focus on her daughter and find an attorney.
“Look, Rachel,” her boss said, “I need you to come in until I can find someone to cover for you.”
Great.
Rachel forced herself to wake up and drive into work like a disciplined soldier. She was exhausted, of course. As her morning went on, the local media picked up on the story, which was gaining plenty of traction considering Jennifer had become an international, fifteen-minute celebrity for having those hiccups. The hiccups, Rachel and Jennifer had learned since her star rose and fell, had actually been a symptom of a more serious, underlying medical condition.
As she went about her day, Rachel didn’t realize how tight a grip the story had taken on pop culture because she had not paid attention to the television or radio as she worked. Her mind was focused on her kid. Wh
at were they going to do? They did not have the funds or the assets to hire an expensive, high-profile attorney who could get Jennifer out of jail on bond (if the court allowed it).
A disc jockey for one of the local radio stations out of Tampa who had spoken to Jennifer back when she had the hiccups called Rachel at work. She didn’t know it, Rachel later alleged, but the station recorded the conversation with her that day and put it on air. The quote that was played and replayed all day long, and would continue to be in the weeks and months that followed, was Rachel saying: “I don’t think she knew what was going to happen because that’s not Jennifer. She’s not out to hurt anyone. She is a lovable, sweet little girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
The problem now, however, was that as Jennifer’s life was being dissected by journalists and bloggers, the same “sweet little girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly” had recently described herself on her Myspace page as the “female version of a hustla.”
Jennifer, it appeared, was one person to her mother and family, and quite another out in her world of “hustling.” The media was picking up on the “bad girl” side of Jennifer and running with it. Many assumed that the innocent fifteen-year-old who had battled intractable hiccups, and whom the world had felt sorry for, was a very different person now.
CHAPTER 7
JENNIFER MEE WAS a confused, mixed-up, undereducated problem child with learning disabilities and health concerns. There can be no denying those facts. In early 2014, Jennifer wrote to me and talked about how her life back then had changed so suddenly, literally overnight, from the time she became America’s hiccupping sweetheart—and someone to feel sorry for—to one of the most hated, debated, and ridiculed pop culture celebrities Americans have seen since “celebrity” and “reality” have become engrained in society.
Life had not started out for Jennifer with all of these problems. She had always lived a quiet existence, devoid of much trouble, controversy, major problems, or issues other than her own educational challenges and health concerns. Jennifer actually dreamed of one day “playing in the WNBA,” professional women’s basketball. This, mind you, coming from a girl who is five feet tall, 145 pounds—not your typical starting forward or guard on the court in women’s basketball. A second dream she had, if basketball fell out of her reach, was to own a hair salon.
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