One Breath Away

by M. William Phelps

  CHAPTER 57

  JENNI CHARRON TOOK off out the door while Jennifer Mee stayed behind inside the apartment by herself. Jenni could no longer wait, especially after what Jennifer had said while running into the apartment, out of breath, clearly in a frightened state over whatever had happened.

  But Jenni didn’t make it down the stairs entirely before she saw Laron running up the stairs toward her. He was wild and screaming.

  But where was Lamont?

  Jenni turned around and high-tailed it back into the apartment.

  Laron rushed in behind her. He was sweating, even more panicky than Jennifer Mee, his heart racing.

  Jenni looked at him. First thing she noticed, “Where are your damn shoes, Ron?”

  Laron looked down. He wasn’t wearing the same Michael Jordan flip-flop Slides he had left in. They were gone—as were the backpack and baseball cap he had on when he left.

  More shockingly, Laron did not have the gun.

  But Laron did not care about those items. He had one thing on his mind.

  Lamont.

  Laron screamed, “Bro . . . he was shot and is dead. . . .”

  Jennifer Mee and Jenni took this to mean what Laron believed at that time: Lamont Newton had been the one who got shot in what had turned very quickly into a melee in the darkness behind that newly renovated house. Punches were thrown. Words shouted. Gunfire. It had all happened within a few seconds in the darkness and Laron had no idea what had transpired, who actually got shot, or why Lamont wasn’t behind him. The only deduction Laron could draw from it all was that he had shot his best friend and killed him—which, right there, put the weapon in Laron’s had by his own admission.

  The last thing they expected when they confronted Shannon Griffin with a weapon was that the guy would fight back. But that was what Shannon had done. He swung at Laron, hit him, and grappled with Laron on the ground.

  “When Shannon realized it was a robbery, he tried taking the gun from Laron,” Lamont told me later. “By the time I was about to help Laron, that was when a shot went off. I didn’t touch Shannon or the gun. I didn’t take his money. His keys . . . It happened so fast I didn’t have time to do anything if I wanted to.”

  Laron was nearly in tears now, crying out, “Mont got shot.... He’s dead!” He walked over, in a fit of rage, and punched a hole in the Sheetrock inside the living room near the door. All of them inside the apartment were staggered by this revelation, scared and upset. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Nobody was supposed to die. The gun was for intimidation. It’s even clear that Lamont, according to what he told police, had no idea that Laron was bringing the weapon with them to the meeting with Shannon. The way Lamont put it, he and Laron weren’t a couple of thugs walking around town at night, looking to shoot and kill people. At best, they were two-bit, budding thieves stretching their wings to try and turn over a new gig: rolling people. Drug selling hadn’t been all that lucrative. Why not set up potential buyers and then roll them? It had seemed like such a great, easy-way-to-make-money idea.

  On paper—that is.

  But now this.

  Laron thought quickly. He went over and dead-bolted the door. Punching his fist through the wall again, he shouted, “Bro is dead! Bro is dead!”

  Lamont.

  Damn.

  A minute went by.

  Then two.

  Laron heard footsteps coming up the outside stairwell.

  Someone was outside the door and now heading into the apartment, banging . . . and banging.

  Laron looked at Jenni and Jennifer.

  Shit.

  The cops? Already?

  CHAPTER 58

  LARON BACKED AWAY from the door slowly. He had to figure out what to do. He was certain the cops were on the other side of the door and about to barge in any second and take him away. He had to make a move.

  Quickly.

  Jenni ran over and opened the door out of instinct.

  Lamont, holy shit!

  Alive and well.

  “Bro! . . . Motherf . . . you’re alive?”

  Lamont looked exhausted. Beads of perspiration poured off his face like a sweating glass of ice water. He, too, had been running. His chest heaved in and out. Lamont was in a state of absolute alarm.

  Holy shit, holy shit! What just happened out there?

  It seemed like a blur. They had set out to roll some dude and were now certain they had killed him. How quickly a situation could turn deadly when a gun was brought to the party.

  “If I knew it was going to be a robbery,” Lamont said to me, “Shannon would have never gotten shot.” And that, in and of itself, Lamont suggested, proved he had no idea Laron was planning to rob Shannon Griffin, indicating that any plan to roll Shannon was between Jennifer Mee and Laron. He explained further how it was two against one. “We didn’t need a gun. . . . Laron took it upon himself to have a gun and rob Shannon. I didn’t know he had the gun in the bag.”

  If Laron and Jennifer planned this robbery together, what Lamont said would become very important.

  Jenni took a look at Lamont as he lay on the floor and noticed he had “cuts and bumps on him.”

  Shannon had given the boys quite the fight, apparently. Laron and Lamont were both banged up fairly well. Laron lost his shoes, his hat, the backpack, and the weapon.

  “When both the boys came in and you took a good look at them,” Jenni said later, “it looked like both of them had gotten pretty physical at some point with someone. It looked like they kind of had their butts handed to them.”

  Lamont took a few steps into the apartment and was so fatigued—emotionally and physically—that he collapsed on the floor. His condition scared Jenni so much, she thought maybe he had been shot, which was why she rushed over and searched Lamont to see if he had any bullet wounds. There was some blood, but she learned that was from the scuffle with Shannon and a later fall Lamont took while running back to the apartment.

  Laron paced. What were they going to do? They needed to leave. Go somewhere else. Get out of the neighborhood.

  Still, none of them later reported hearing any sirens or cops rushing to the scene. As it was, Shannon was gravely injured from being shot multiple times. He was lying on the ground in back of that building, possibly still alive and bleeding to death. A simple call to 911 might have saved the guy’s life at this point, but time was running short.

  Of course, no one called 911—the four of them inside the apartment were more focused and certainly more concerned about themselves. In fact, as Lamont lay on the floor trying to catch his breath, Jenni stripped him of his clothing and tossed all of it, along with whatever Laron was wearing, into the bathtub. She then filled the tub with water, pouring bleach over everything.

  Jenni said later, “[It was to] get rid of any physical evidence that may have been on the clothes.”

  The cover-up had begun for them.

  After putting on fresh clothes and talking it through with everyone, Lamont determined that the cuts and bruises he had were from falling on the tar as he ran toward the apartment away from the crime scene. He had also scraped the side of his face on a fence near the apartment as he made his way up the stairwell.

  “I think I shot him,” Lamont later reported Laron saying inside the apartment as they stood around and talked about what had happened and what the hell they were going to do next.

  “I think I shot him. . . .”

  CHAPTER 59

  AS JENNIFER MEE stood inside the apartment, listening to the others, she had to realize that what she was involved in, beyond any crime she had ever committed before that night, was about as serious as things could get. A man had been shot, and there was a damn good chance he was dead. Jennifer had been there and had a view of this murder. She’d witnessed the attack, even set it up, and heard gunfire cut through the clanking of the city night as she ran away.

  Lamont was a guy, Jennifer later explained, who had not steered her in any wrong direction since they had met
and (arguably) had fallen in love.

  Where do I start? she wrote to me after I asked her to explain her relationship with Lamont. He just was . . . damn . . . he was so sweet and sexy. Yes, I loved him with all my heart. He claimed to love me. He never showed or said anything to make me think differently. This was written years after the Shannon Griffin incident.

  Jennifer then added that the child she used to take care of, Lamont’s kid whom she loved “like he was my own child,” as it turned out: [Lamont] got a DNA test and it came back that the baby wasn’t his—we were both really hurt, we loved him dearly.

  “She kept a lot of things from me,” Lamont said of his time with Jennifer. Ultimately she would take Lamont away from his son, he claimed. Also, Lamont believed that Jennifer was the driving force behind planning the robbery. “I would say nobody coached her.... Only a woman knows what to say to a man to get him to come up [town]” to meet her.

  Although others who knew her and hung around with Jennifer claimed Lamont (and Laron) had sent Jennifer out on the block to sell dope, Jennifer disagreed, explaining to me, “Really, I wouldn’t go anywhere. I sold dope out of my house or . . . a hotel room. I really never had to run the street to sell dope. I left that up to the boys.” If a “junkie” was in desperate need of a purchase, Jennifer explained, and couldn’t make it to her place of residence, only then would she embark out into the wild streets of St. Pete to meet him or her, but it was rare. “No, [Lamont] never made me do anything. If there was something I wasn’t comfortable doing, he would do it.” Then this: “I never really ever faced any trouble with Lamont.”

  One important fact Jennifer mentioned was that she would often, before meeting Lamont, engage in sex with men for money. I had asked if either of the boys had ever asked her to prostitute herself. There was some indication from a source that this might have occurred. (It definitely did not.)

  “Lamont was never down with the pimpin’ or trickin’ shit,” Jennifer told me. “I remember when I told him about me doing it. He was like, ‘You don’t know what type of shit these muthafuckers carry.’ Hell no, I would never trick for anyone.”

  CHAPTER 60

  LAMONT NOTICED THAT Laron was becoming more aggravated and maybe even desperate as time passed inside the apartment and the inevitable happened: the cops busting in through the front door and taking them all away.

  “We have to go! We have to go!” Laron said a number of times. “You have to take me somewhere.”

  Jenni mentioned going back to the crime scene to look for those items Laron had left behind. Her reasons were pragmatic and rather simple, Jenni later claimed: “To retrieve items that the boys left behind, including the gun [and] anything that would have put them there. . . .”

  Help cover up a murder, in other words.

  “I have no idea where the gun is,” Lamont said.

  “You are not going back there,” Laron told Jenni.

  Jenni asked them where it happened.

  They wouldn’t tell her.

  Jennifer Mee kind of stood off by herself during this time, not saying much of anything, not offering any advice those there could later recall. Jennifer, the consummate follower and people pleaser, was going to go along with whatever the others decided. That was her nature. That was her routine. That was her role within this foursome.

  After calling a friend, Jenni later said, a car showed up. Who it was the boys had called for a ride was someone she did not know.

  They all got into the car and took off to “South St. Pete,” heading toward an apartment a few friends of the boys lived at. Jenni said later she had never been there before that night.

  Jenni got scared. She didn’t want to hang out anywhere the boys could be tied back to, because of the obvious heat that was about to be cast upon them as soon as Shannon Griffin’s body was discovered. By now, all of them felt and agreed Shannon was dead.

  So Jenni called a cab and decided to take everyone to her friend’s house. No one would suspect they’d be hiding there.

  Something bothered Jenni: her fingerprints on the gun. She had handled the weapon while it was inside the house. All of them (with the exception of Jennifer Mee, Jenni later testified) had held that gun at some point. She was worried the gun would be recovered and she would be brought into a murder she’d had, by her admission, nothing to do with. What’s more, her so-called fiancé had been involved in an armed robbery that had resulted in a murder—she wanted to protect him. He was the father of her child. She had no idea, of course, that behind her back, Laron was having sex with Jennifer Mee whenever the opportunity arose.

  Jenni called her friend on the way to her apartment. She lied: “Hey, is it okay with you if I bring the boys over with me? We got into a little argument with the landlord and we kind of need a place to stay for the night until everything calms down.”

  “Yeah, sure, I’m leaving, anyway . . . going over my boyfriend’s. My house is your house, Jenni.”

  Jennifer Mee, Jenni, Lamont, and Laron stayed at Jenni’s friend’s apartment on that Saturday night, while her friend stayed at her boyfriend’s house. While they were there, Jenni later said, all of them, at some point, talked about what they were going to say to the police if and when they came around asking questions.

  They needed to get their stories straight.

  They needed a narrative they could all agree on.

  And they also needed to get rid of all of Shannon’s belongings that one of them had taken from the crime scene (though no one ever later took responsibility for grabbing the items), all of which Jennifer Mee had placed inside a supermarket shopping bag back at the apartment and had brought with them to Jenni’s friend’s home.

  CHAPTER 61

  HE LIVED IN a section of downtown that local St. Pete residents referred to as historic uptown, right around the corner from 511 Seventh Street North. He had moved into the apartment just a month before that tragic night of October 23, 2010.

  A lawyer with his own practice, Jason Brazelton had been up later than usual on this night. He was out taking his girlfriend’s toy poodle for a casual walk around the neighborhood. It had been such a pleasant night, so peaceful and serene. The weather was nearly ideal by native Floridian standards. And yet, Jason later noted, he felt something odd that night—something different and even strange.

  After walking into the house, after walking the dog, as Jason got settled, he had heard what sounded to him like fireworks coming from a direction nearby, sounds that Jason later described as a “rock . . . hitting a tin roof.”

  Who thinks gunshots when they hear pops in the dead of night in the city? Our brains are trained to go right to car exhaust backfire or fireworks—casual, everyday noises we’re used to hearing—but gunshots?

  Not a chance.

  After going over what just occurred in his analytically trained mind, Jason reasoned that someone was trying to break into a garage he had disconnected from his house and that person had possibly broken a piece of wood, hence the popping sounds.

  So Jason ran out of the house and had a look around.

  “But I didn’t see anything,” he said.

  Thinking back to that noise, Jason added, “It was very . . . loud, obviously, and I remember it because the repetition of it sounded like gunfire, but the noise itself sounded like something else.... My first instinct was I thought someone was trying to break in. So . . . I went outside and kind of walked around the house.”

  Jason decided to take a close look around the building and immediate area. He was curious and needed to know where the noise came from.

  He grabbed a flashlight and began searching. Having already experienced what Jason thought to be a “weird night altogether,” it wasn’t long before he pointed the flashlight toward the back of a nearby vacant home for sale and came upon “somebody laying there.”

  Homeless person, Jason thought immediately. Some poor soul, with nowhere to go, passed out on the ground, sleeping off his latest Mad Dog 20/20 binge. The hou
se the man was behind had been vacant, Jason knew, so it was likely a hot spot for area homeless to frequent.

  With his light directly pointed at the guy, Jason turned it off quickly, not wanting to startle him awake.

  When Jason got back home, he told his girlfriend what he had seen.

  “Well, you should probably call the nonemergency police line and report it,” she suggested.

  So Jason called the police to report a homeless man sleeping off a bender behind a vacant house near Millennium Youth Park.

  Fifteen minutes later, Jason looked out his window and saw lights flashing around the scene.

  The police had arrived.

  CHAPTER 62

  THE FIRST COP on the scene used his department-issued flashlight, and, with another cop in tow, both made their way to the back of the building on Seventh Street North. The rear of the home was cave dark and a tight squeeze around the fences and concrete barriers if you didn’t know where you were going. As they approached what one of them later referred to in his report as “the sleeping man,” they nearly stumbled over “two sneakers” and a “sandal on the ground,” along with a “firearm (revolver) that was pointed in the direction” of the man.

  The man was lying on the south side of what appeared to be a concrete retaining wall. He had no shoes on and his hands were “extended over his head.” His eyes were “glazed over and half open.” A small amount of blood inside his mouth and nose was visible. He wore a red Ralph Lauren Polo shirt. The cop with the flashlight shined it on the center of the man’s chest and detected what was a circular bloodstain pattern. So he lifted the man’s shirt to see if he could verify any wounds.

  There they were: three small entrance wounds in the center of [his] chest.

  The cop knew for certain that “the subject” was dead and called for backup.