One Breath Away

by M. William Phelps

  By then, Rachel had filed for disability/Supplemental Security Income (SSI) on Jennifer’s behalf and it was just about to begin coming in. Interestingly, in the paperwork Rachel provided spelling out the application process, Jennifer’s “disability” is described as starting on January 23, 2007—the day she started hiccupping. If she received the subsidy, the state/federal government would share responsibility and pay for her apartment, give her Medicaid, food stamps, and also a check in the neighborhood of $700 per month (spending money, in other words). Jennifer loved this idea. She could move back to St. Pete and be off and on her own. It was scary for Rachel (and Chris) to have to think of Jennifer entirely on her own, but what could they do at this point? They had three small children to raise, and the move to Spring Hill, in order to make a good life for them, was still there.

  “Jennifer made her own decisions,” Chris later said.

  Rachel agreed.

  Jennifer moved into an apartment in downtown St. Pete. In what would become a worst-case scenario, Tyrone was out of jail and on the streets. Jennifer decided to have him move in with her.

  “He would take her state assistance check,” Chris said.

  Jennifer didn’t mind. She felt somebody loved her, she later told me. Tyrone treated her as though she was the only girl in the world who mattered to him.

  “I do believe there was a time when he did love her,” someone close to Jennifer later said.

  Ashley would stop by to see her sister every chance she could. Knowing what Tyrone and Jennifer were both involved in, Ashley was deeply troubled and concerned for her sister’s well-being. She’d seen how Tyrone treated her. He’d love her one minute, but beat her the next. Ashley was there on that day, both Jennifer and Ashley later claimed, when Tyrone backed Jennifer up against a door and punched her in the stomach, allegedly causing her to have a miscarriage.

  “I don’t know for sure if [Tyrone] knew she was pregnant,” Ashley said, “but he beat her ass.”

  Jennifer curled up on the couch and cried. Ashley told her, “You have to get out of here. You have to leave him. You cannot live like this.”

  “Get your ass in here!” Tyrone yelled from the bedroom.

  “I have to go,” Jennifer said through tears. “He needs me.”

  Jennifer got up and walked into the bedroom.

  CHAPTER 49

  CHRIS WAS UPSET. He kept beating himself up about Jennifer and how the two of them had taken a loving and caring father-daughter relationship and turned it on its head; they were enemies now. Chris continued to blame himself for much of it. He worried constantly about Jennifer being off on her own, knowing that she couldn’t take care of herself without help from him and Rachel. It had been so hard to let her go. But there was nothing they could do.

  One of the prickliest issues for Chris and Rachel had been Tyrone and his influence on such an underdeveloped, easily manipulated young girl out on her own for the first time. Chris despised Tyrone. He had no use for the boy. He was a criminal, and he spent Jennifer’s state money and dealt drugs. There was nothing neither Chris nor Rachel could say to change the way Jennifer felt about him. The harder they pulled to one side, the harder she pulled to the other: an emotional tug-of-war. Jennifer would turn over the racist card whenever Chris mentioned how bad Tyrone was for her, and all Chris could do was shake his head and walk away.

  On her own, Jennifer called the house “pretty much daily,” Chris and Rachel said. She lived in a little efficiency. Like vampires, Tyrone and Jennifer spent their days sleeping, living for the night. They never had any money; family sources later said both spent what little money they did have on drugs, cigarettes, partying.

  “He’s using you,” Chris would tell his daughter when she called. “It’s that simple.”

  Jennifer wouldn’t respond.

  As time passed, Chris heard that Jennifer and Tyrone had been kicked out of the apartment she had rented and were living in a sleazy motel hell somewhere in St. Pete. It was almost as if Jennifer’s life had followed some sort of scripted trajectory toward the final place she would end up: jail. She had traveled from home to a small apartment, which the state paid for, to a motel—all because her former landlord could not put up with her and Tyrone. Was living on the streets not far away?

  Chris decided he wanted to find the hotel and stop in to check on her. Chris loved Jennifer. She might have given up on him and their relationship, but he was not going to give up on her, or stop caring.

  Chris soon found the motel room. He knocked on the door and Jennifer let him in.

  She seemed okay. She was nervous and anxious, but otherwise better than Chris had expected.

  “[Tyrone’s] not here,” Jennifer said.

  That was probably a good thing.

  As Chris walked into the room, he noticed a bunch of Styrofoam-looking white material all over the table. There were small chunks of what Chris believed was crack cocaine.

  “What . . . the . . . hell, Jennifer?” Chris said, pointing to it.

  Right out in the open.

  “Don’t you touch that. Don’t think about throwing it away!”

  “What is it, Jennifer?” The closer Chris looked at it, there seemed to be something strange about the material. It appeared to be crack, but then again, it didn’t.

  “It’s . . . fake crack,” Jennifer said.

  “It’s called slapstick,” Chris said later.

  He was stunned.

  “Don’t touch it,” Jennifer warned.

  Tyrone had taken off-the-shelf sandwich bread and molded tiny portions of it into rocks of a crack cocaine–like material. He’d wet the outside of each “rock” with a numbing agent that many adults and parents of teething babies use for toothache pain. That way, if a user tasted one of the slapstick “rocks,” he or she would get a numbing sensation and believe in that moment he was buying the real thing. This was a dangerous business model—junkies don’t like to be tricked when it comes to their dope. If Tyrone couldn’t get real crack to cut up and sell, he was out there (according to multiple sources) selling fake crack made out of bread and teething gel.

  Jennifer too.

  (Important to note here: all before she ever met Lamont Newton.)

  “If he wasn’t doing that,” Chris said, “Tyrone would go out at night and do ‘hit and runs’—knock people over and take their cash.”

  Chris made a point later to say talking to Jennifer was like communicating with a twelve-year-old child. As she spoke, you got a sense that there was this little girl on the inside who had never grown up. She came across as someone who could be easily told what to do. When she had said to Chris not to touch the fake crack, she meant it. The comment was coming from a place of experience. Chris sensed that she’d been threatened by Tyrone that if anything happened to his project on the table, while he was out, then when he got back, she’d better watch out.

  Chris didn’t know how to respond. He had found his little girl. She was living in a motel with a crack dealer.

  Could it get any worse?

  Driving away from the hotel, Chris turned the focus inward. Nearly in tears, he wondered, What have I done? Where did I go wrong? How can I fix this?

  “I started to hate myself. I started to hate Rachel’s parents. I started to hate my brother,” Chris said. “Why? Because I knew partly where we all went wrong.”

  It was the move to Florida, Chris felt. Rachel had to move to Florida to take care of her parents and Chris now hated them for it.

  “I blame myself for everything that happened to Jennifer in her entire life.”

  Chris felt they should have moved out of St. Pete sooner. He also went back to the rape, a time in Jennifer’s life where, he believed, “Jennifer lost faith in everything. It changed her completely.”

  It was as if Jennifer’s soul had been left behind in that place where she was allegedly assaulted and the two males systematically extracted her self-esteem, self-confidence, dignity, and any will she might have had
to live a happy, healthy, complete life, one devoid of the trappings and emotional confusion the trauma of PTSD can bring later.

  As the fall of 2009 was on the horizon, Jennifer Mee was headed for a collapse, one she never saw coming.

  CHAPTER 50

  RACHEL WAS HOME one day when a producer from Today called and explained that the Hic-Cup Ltd. company, which had paid Jennifer to mention the Hic-Cup cup, had taken several screenshots of Jennifer from her appearances on Today and posted them on its website. The assumption, from Rachel’s viewpoint while looking at the site, was that Jennifer had been taken on as the company’s spokesperson, who would be doing sales pitches for them.

  Rachel was stunned. This was something they had not agreed to. According to Rachel, she and Jennifer had signed a deal to take the cup on the Today show and mention it. They had not signed on to do anything else.

  “They even wrote us an official letter after [Today] saying they didn’t need her anymore,” Rachel told the Tampa Bay Times.

  In that same interview with the Tampa Bay Times, Rachel claimed they had been compensated for those appearances and that was supposed to be the extent of Jennifer’s connection to Hic-Cup Ltd.

  Rachel said the TV producer gave her the name of a lawyer and told her to give the attorney a call. She did.

  After Rachel spoke to the lawyer, the firm agreed to take on the case.

  “We found out about the lawsuit from a local reporter and the Associated Press,” Michele Ehlinger later told me. “The reporter called me and told me about it, and I was stunned because I had not heard anything about it.”

  Hic-Cup Ltd. removed the screenshots from its website immediately. It was not a big deal to them. They never once felt Jennifer was any type of spokesperson for the company—in fact, the opposite was true. Since the cup had not worked on Jennifer while Michele was in Florida, and Jennifer and Rachel mentioned it only in passing on Today, why would they ever contemplate the notion that Jennifer could help their company? It was an absurd assumption as Michele thought about it later.

  In the lawsuit, which “the matter in controversy exceeds, exclusive of interests and costs, $75,000,” Rachel and Chris alleged that [Hic-Cup Ltd.] contacted [Jennifer and Rachel] . . .and received correspondence from [Michele and her husband] offering a free Hic-Cup along with an offer for a “generous and lucrative contract for a television commercial” including “a large and immediate cash signing bonus.”

  According to the lawsuit Rachel and Chris filed: The Robidouxs would “retain complete control over Jennifer’s participation and script.”

  Beyond that, Rachel and Chris were suing because they believed there was “no agreement” in place with Hic-Cup Ltd. to use Jennifer’s name or image in “any other form of advertising or marketing of the Hic-Cup.” The company, however, the lawsuit alleged, used Jennifer’s name and photographs in sales brochures, advertisements, the Internet, and commercials on radio and television. Rachel and Chris felt this was an “invasion of privacy” and a “misappropriation of name and likeness, and breach of contract.” They also perceived it as “unjust enrichment from using Jennifer’s name and image.”

  Hic-Cup Ltd. released a statement after the lawsuit went public, stating: [Rachael had] “explicitly” permitted the business to allow Jennifer “to provide television and media product testimonials for the Hic-Cup cup that would be used in marketing and advertising.”

  Michele and her husband spent “thousands of dollars” hiring a lawyer to fight the lawsuit and it nearly bankrupted the company. She met with a lawyer several times.

  “We did not think we could afford to get out of it,” Michele recalled.

  Michele handed the entire case over to the law firm they hired and forgot about it.

  “The lawsuit,” Rachel said, “ultimately went nowhere.”

  CHAPTER 51

  ALLISON BALDWIN HAD stood by and watched her friend go through serious changes. To Allison, these transformations consumed any goodness Jennifer had left in her otherwise warm, caring, and generous soul. Allison saw various people walk in and out of Jennifer’s life, many of whom “were not good for her.” Some of those people, Allison added, “changed who Jennifer was. . . .” There was little Allison could do, however, in talking Jennifer out of this life she was now totally immersed in. Jennifer Mee was her own person at this point, which was what she had always wanted to be. Nobody was going to convince Jennifer that what she was involved in was anything other than her own choice.

  It was the hiccups, too, and all of the attention Jennifer had gotten used to, Allison went on to note. That period of Jennifer’s life had taken a young and blameless child and totally destroyed any purity she had in her. Jennifer was defenseless and weak against all that came her way during and after her star rose and fell. When it came to urges and choices, she lacked any type of self-control. She seemed not to understand there would be serious consequences for the choices she made.

  “Not a good decision,” Allison told Jennifer one day after Jennifer explained how she and Tyrone had broken up and now she was romantically involved with a twenty-two-year-old man, Lamont Newton. Tyrone had gone to jail after another arrest, this time on charges of robbery and possession of a deadly weapon (a gun). He was going to be down a long time, and Jennifer was telling everyone in her circle she was finally through with him.

  Allison made an articulate observation later when she spoke of Jennifer’s overall outlook on relationships: “You know, when you’re young and think you’re in love, you are not going to change your mind for anybody.”

  That certainly summed up Jennifer’s attitude toward the men she dated.

  “Don’t go back with [Tyrone],” Allison had told Jennifer more than once after he beat her or stole her money and Jennifer decided to take him back.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Jennifer would respond. “He’s changed. He loves me. I love him.”

  “She’d go back and things were even worse,” Allison recalled.

  So when Jennifer was finally finished with Tyrone, it was a step in the right direction, Allison assumed. But here was Lamont Newton, someone Allison felt was ultimately going to disappoint Jennifer in every way, though Allison admitted she did not know Lamont until Jennifer began dating him.

  “We believed Lamont was better than [Tyrone] for Jennifer,” Rachel said later. “That much we thought, anyway.”

  “A lot of people might claim to know Lamont, but few did,” his brother, Earnest Smith, explained. “Lamont was not someone to hang around big crowds.”

  * * *

  Lamont Newton had worked at a local Subway sandwich shop at that time. He earned his way. “He was quiet and stayed to himself. He spent most of his [free] time in the studio.” Rap music was Lamont’s love. Although St. Pete was not known as a mecca for new artists within the rap industry, Lamont fashioned himself as a fairly decent rapper who might have a career ahead of him one day. “He was not someone who messed around with guns or anything.... He was a working man.”

  Lamont found out later, according to Earnest, that when he had first started dating Jennifer, Tyrone was still coming around when Lamont wasn’t with her. So she had never really severed ties with Tyrone—that is, until the prison got hold of him and he was gone for good.

  Earnest saw his brother as a “loving, caring person who had gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd.” Part of that “wrong crowd,” Earnest explained, was Lamont’s BFF, Laron Raiford, a twenty-year-old St. Pete native.

  Moreover, Earnest added, “Lamont never messed with crack cocaine—he sold a little weed, but that was before he met Jennifer. . . . If Jennifer was selling crack, she was doing all of that before he even met her and after, selling it on her own.”

  True, it was Tyrone who indoctrinated Jennifer into the world of selling crack cocaine. Jennifer later admitted this herself.

  His growing up in St. Pete, Lamont later told me, was “both good and bad.” Lamont never had his “real dad” around, though he ye
arned for a connection of some kind with him. “I always wanted [a relationship with] him, but he had other plans.” This was not in any way a diss, Lamont intoned, on his stepfather, who was a caring soul who “showed me how to be a man, mentally and physically.”

  Lamont described himself as someone who didn’t “talk a lot.” But he balanced that by being a “good listener” with a “good personality” and a “good heart.” Like most kids, he’d seen his share of heartache, having been close to his grandmother only to watch her pass away. If that wasn’t traumatizing enough, Lamont explained, “Down the line, my heart [broke as] the love of the family, my mom, at thirty-four years old, [died].” Lamont was there. “I seen my mom pass right before my eyes and I still think about it today.”

  After losing his mother in 2004, Lamont said, it was then that he looked up to and depended on his brother, Earnest, to fill that void of a role model and close family relative to lean on during times of distress.

  It was 2008 when Lamont met Laron, who lived next door to Lamont’s brother at the time, and they became best friends.

  “We got tight, going to clubs together and making music together—we chilled a lot.” It was Jennifer, Lamont said, who did not want Lamont to hang out with Laron every day, as Lamont would have liked. And Lamont said he respected Jennifer’s wishes.

  As time moved forward, and she got to know Lamont, Allison made several obversations about Lamont and Jennifer’s relationship that showed how close they became. She watched as Jennifer, for example, “tried to raise Lamont’s child as her own,” Allison said. “She was absolutely in love with Lamont. They had the child all the time.”