One Breath Away

by M. William Phelps

  The troops came out, including the SPPD’s Homicide Division.

  After yellow police tape was spooled around the scene and curious onlookers began to gather, Jason Brazelton walked out of his house and noticed there was far more activity at the scene than would normally be for a homeless guy rousted out of an alcohol-induced nap and then told to take a hike. So Jason walked over to the police tape fencing the entire area off to see what was happening.

  “I’m the guy who called it in,” Jason told a cop standing by the yellow tape.

  By now, Jason realized it was much more than a homeless man sleeping off a drunken night.

  Somebody was dead.

  CHAPTER 63

  THE SPPD CRIMES Against Persons Homicide Unit mans one shift: 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., Monday through Friday. This might sound like an ordinary office job, but each and every detective in the unit is on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There is no rest for those who investigate murder.

  Homicide detectives rotate cases as they come in, meaning one detective takes a case, and the next homicide that comes in goes to the next cop in line, and so on. It’s random. On Sunday, October 24, 2010, Detective Dave Wawrzynski was next up. It was early morning, as daylight began to illuminate the city streets, when Wawrzynski took a call and was first told about the death of Shannon Griffin. As for any observations from those at the crime scene already, Wawrzynski was informed that it appeared to be a robbery that had resulted in a death. Traditionally, St. Pete had between eighteen and twenty-five homicides per year.

  “Sometimes,” Wawrzynski said, “we’ve been as high as fifty, and . . . I believe one year we had it as low as nine.”

  Wawrzynski was the lead on this case, not by choice, but by luck of the draw. In what would become an issue for some later after Wawrzynski was accused of focusing his case strictly on Jennifer Mee because of her celebrity and her running in front of his car back when she went missing in June 2007, Wawrzynski perceptively pointed out that as far as him becoming the lead detective in the Shannon Griffin murder investigation, it had simply been his turn at the wheel.

  The first thing Wawrzynski did whenever he encountered a homicide scene was try to figure out if it needed to be expanded beyond what had been already established and cordoned off by first responders. At times, and by no fault of their own, those on patrol first arriving to assess a scene don’t realize that potential evidence might be scattered farther out from the parameters that have been contained by the yellow tape. As Wawrzynski walked up behind that vacant house on the morning of October 24, 2010, he looked around and made a call to extend the crime scene. There could be evidence as far away as the street out in front of the house, and possibly even on the opposite side of the street.

  At six feet, 195 pounds, with his shortly cropped salt-and-pepper hair and Floridian-tanned skin, Dave Wawrzynski cut an imposing, professional figure. He looked the part of detective: from his general blue dress shirts against dark slacks and sport coat to match, to the gold shield dangling from his neck and firearm strapped to his side.

  Coming upon Shannon’s body, Wawrzynski considered that the area wasn’t particularly a known drug hangout or dope-selling region of the city known to cops. It was sort of away from the main path and tucked away in back of a fairly nice home.

  “As much as the media wanted to make it out as one, it wasn’t,” Wawrzynski recalled, speaking to a later idea that Shannon Griffin had been murdered in a drug-saddled neighborhood. “Anywhere in the city can be a drug area today.”

  Standing over Shannon’s body, studying what they had, Wawrzynski made the determination immediately that Shannon wasn’t dressed as someone who had gone out to buy dope. Shannon wore nicely pressed, new jeans and a white tank-top T-shirt underneath a new Polo shirt. Moreover, he had on “clean white socks, because his shoes had come off during the struggle,” Wawrzynski pointed out, “and it appeared that his pockets were turned out . . . and his pants were unzipped and pulled down just below his undergarments.”

  That evidence by itself told the detective this didn’t seem to be a hasty robbery-gone-wrong situation. There was some organization to the crime—or at least the after party Shannon’s killer or killers had at the scene.

  He was going somewhere else became Wawrzynski’s first observation. Why he is behind this renovated, vacant building, it doesn’t add up.

  “Either before or after he was dead, somebody went through his pockets,” Wawrzynski said to a colleague, standing there, trying to wrap his mind around a motive.

  “Rabbit ears,” cops call it when a victim’s pockets are turned inside out. It’s a common phenomenon in the city.

  “What would come up later,” Wawrzynski said, “during trial, was why did he have his pants down? Well, that’s a very common thing nowadays when people rob people.”

  As a perpetrator, you come upon a potential victim, you demand he take off his shoes and either pull his pants down or ask him to take them off completely, so when the robbery is over, the victim has to basically re-dress before chasing after you.

  “Could it be indicative of a sexual act taking place?” Wawrzynski asked rhetorically. “Sure,” he said, answering his own question, “but it’s just as indicative of a robbery.”

  Homicide cops have to look at all possible scenarios.

  Everything Shannon might have had on him was gone: phone, wallet, watch, and jewelry. He had been stripped of all his personal possessions.

  “And so, you look at this, and we’re back to robbery,” Wawrzynski concluded.

  Turning, checking out the scene around where he was standing and what was left behind, as Wawrzynski put it, “Somebody gave us a big gift.”

  The murder weapon.

  Wawrzynski walked over to the southeast corner of the building by a white fence, and there on the ground was the weapon sitting on top of the concrete walkway, a yellow evidence card next to it.

  How ’bout that!

  Next to the gun was a pack of Newport cigarettes, a “right shoe” (a red-and-black high-top sneaker), a “right slide” (flip-flop), a matching left sneaker to the other one, left closer to the fence, but still near the body, and an empty water bottle. Several yards north of those items lay a baseball cap. Heading directly west of the body and all of that evidence was a small alley, about seven feet wide, separating 511 Seventh Street North and the house to the right of the crime scene, 647 Fifth Avenue North, with a small garage between them. In that alley, around the corner from the body, maybe forty feet away, was a “condom wrapper” and a straw. Out on Seventh Street North, police located the left “slider” and a second water bottle.13

  The obvious note Wawrzynski took away from staring at all of this was that the victim had certainly been lured or forced back into this area of the vacant house, either under a ruse or he was overpowered. Otherwise, there would be no other reason for him to go back there in the first place.

  “It wasn’t a transient walkway or anything like that,” Wawrzynski commented. It wasn’t a place walkers would cut through, either. “It’s a fenced-in area with a decorative wall, and so there was no reason to be back there unless you went back there for a specific reason.”

  Moreover, it was a corner lot, with Earle Avenue North, running along the north side, and Seventh Street North, parallel to the east. It was unlikely someone would simply wander back there. But let’s say you wanted to bring someone back there and rob them; then it was the perfect space: dark and out of view from the main street.

  One of the flip-flops had been left close to Shannon’s legs; the other one in the street out front. Wawrzynski deduced from that evidence that the sneakers were likely Shannon’s, while the slides had fallen off as his murderer either struggled with him, fled the scene, or a combination of both.

  As far as homicides go, this one wasn’t planned or thought through all that much; it was clear from the evidence that it happened in the moment and had perhaps been a crime of opportunity.

&n
bsp; Yet, that being said, as Wawrzynski considered what evidence he had at this point, why was the victim here? He had to have come to this location for a purpose. Did he live in the area? Did he know someone from the neighborhood? What was it that brought this man here on this night at the time he arrived?

  The next move for Wawrzynski was to set the boys out to recanvass the neighborhood, knock on doors, ask questions, and see what they could come up with. Patrol had done a partial canvass right after arriving on the scene. But it’s one thing for patrol officers to walk around and find out what the neighbors saw or heard; it’s quite another for Homicide detectives, after studying the crime scene, to then go out and ask pointed questions.

  As they did that, almost immediately, something became apparent: the scooter that had been parked on the opposite side of the street throughout the entire night and into sunup did not belong to anyone in the neighborhood. The SPPD could account for all the vehicles parked up and down the street. However, this black-and-white Peace Sports VIP scooter, standing up on its kickstand across the sidewalk, its front tire actually in someone’s driveway, did not have an owner.

  So whose was it?

  “I bet that’s how our victim got here,” Wawrzynski said.

  CHAPTER 64

  JENNI CHARRON WENT to work the next morning “like it was another day,” so as not to draw any attention to her or her boyfriend, Laron Raiford. Laron had been up most of the night, frantically trying to figure out his next move.

  Jennifer Mee, Laron, and Lamont were still at Jenni’s friend’s apartment, where they had spent the night after the murder. Hedging their bets that there was no way the homicide could be tied back to them, they decided to wait it out there. Just before the early hours of October 24 had broken, Laron had second thoughts about staying in town and texted a friend, hoping she could help.

  I GOT GET OUT OF ST. PETE MAN, ASAP

  Y, the friend texted back.

  KILLED SUM1 . . . LETS DO IT

  Almost ten hours passed before Laron and the girl exchanged texts again; it was now after nine o’clock on that October 24 morning. The crime scene was bustling with Wawrzynski and detectives from Homicide already making great strides in putting together a victimology on Shannon Griffin to determine the final hours of his life, what he was doing, and, most important, who it was he had gone off to meet.

  The SPPD had run the tag on the scooter and had come up with a hit: Shannon Andre Griffin, a twenty-two-year-old man from the opposite end of St. Pete. Just as Wawrzynski had thought, Shannon was far away from where he lived and had no reason that they could immediately determine to be in the neighborhood where he had died.

  So the SPPD had a name and an address. Wawrzynski would have done it himself, but he was busy working another lead, so he sent another detective from the team to make contact with Shannon’s family and let them know Shannon had been the victim of a homicide. But also, the officer should find out any preliminary information that could help the case. It was obvious this would be one of those forty-eight-hour cases: solve it quick and lock up your man, or wait it out and suffer the consequences of it going cold.

  Doug Bolden, Shannon Griffin’s cousin, had lived in St. Pete for the past ten or more years on the day the SPPD knocked on his door and relayed the grave news. Doug was stunned by the death of Shannon as he cried his way through the initial pain and shock. For Doug, those tears mourned a cousin who was known as someone who never messed with anyone, someone for whom doing the right thing was the only choice, and giving the shirt off his back to help another human being was how the man had lived his short life.

  After the initial shudder of hearing for the first time that his cousin had been found murdered on the opposite end of the city, Doug explained how happy Shannon was just about twelve hours before as he celebrated his one-year anniversary to the day of working for Walmart and had plans to go out. That Saturday was the start of his first fully paid one week’s vacation. Shannon had worked his ass off all year for it.

  “He was real bubbly, really excited about earning his first week off,” Doug said. “He was planning on going out. We were talking about going to the mall. And then he told me that he had met someone online.” Shannon had a smile on his face as he told his older cousin about the online girl he had met. He was enthusiastic about the “date” he had set up with the girl. “I’m going out to see a young lady,” Shannon had joyously told Doug.

  “So you’re blowing me off?” Doug said jokingly.

  “And from there, he got dressed and put on his best gear,” Doug explained.

  What made Doug so certain that Shannon was leaving to go meet the girl he had been speaking to online—someone with whom Shannon seemed to think he wanted to begin a romance—was that Shannon, as he left, “[smelled] like a bunch of cologne—my whole house had cologne in it,” Doug recalled.

  Shannon stood by the door. “Hey, I’m going out.” Again, he said: “I met a young lady!”

  He was happy. He was like a high-school kid going to the prom.

  Doug Bolden was elated for his cousin, quite excited to see Shannon getting out on the town and meeting new people. Shannon was a guy who never missed work. He was a dedicated employee.

  “I was so proud of him,” Doug said. “I brought him over here not as just a relative, but as a mentor [for him]. And he came over here—before he came over here, he was pretty much . . . We have a farm in Mississippi . . . and ever since Hurricane Katrina he was shell-shocked. He really went into hisself. He left school. And when I brought him over here, I was real excited to give him the opportunity for a fresh breath of air.”

  Shannon had been devastated by what he saw during and after Katrina: the homelessness, the suffering of his fellow neighbors, the loss of life and property. It all weighed heavily on this caring young soul. He had given up on most things, becoming quite disillusioned by what life and Mother Nature could throw at you without warning. But once he moved to Florida, under Doug’s loving guidance and cautious teaching and genuine encouragement, Shannon had gotten his GED, began working at Walmart, and his outlook on life had changed. For Doug, who was quite a bit older than his cousin, it was “like watching my own son” flourish in life.

  Then Doug mentioned the scooter. Shannon had bought it for himself. He took a loan. He worked for it, Doug acknowledged. And so this one night of him leaving, going to see a girl, had made Doug even happier because Shannon had never gone out and treated himself that much.

  “I was just so excited,” Doug said, again beginning to cry, “to see him . . . meet a friend.”

  CHAPTER 65

  DETECTIVE DAVE WAWRZYNSKI jumped on what seemed to be an encouraging lead early that morning after Homicide investigators realized a business near the murder scene had a security camera pointed at the house where the crime had taken place. What a lucky break it would be if they had video of the murder.

  “Actually, we had a lightning strike a few days ago,” the woman inside the office explained, “and it wiped out all of our security.”

  That’s the way investigations go: hot and cold. Wawrzynski walked out of the office disappointed, but he knew that even with this setback the murder they were looking into was not going to take weeks or even months of investigation to solve. That was clear from the evidence left behind at the scene.

  The more frustrating murders to solve—at least those similar to this one—involved high-risk victims (which Shannon certainly was not), such as prostitutes, drug addicts buying dope, drug pushers selling dope, or the johns frequenting prostitutes. Those types of victims are difficult to pin down because they have access to so many people who are participating in the same types of behaviors that they are. Because of that, the pool of suspects grows exponentially as the case opens up, and generally no one on the street wants to get involved or talk. When you have an upstanding citizen with a good job, a young man who has never been in any trouble and lived with a good family—a man otherwise minding his own business—the list o
f people he could have come in contact with throughout the course of his night was very small. Not only that, but Doug Bolden already had reported to SPPD detectives that Shannon was a recluse. The deceased had kept to himself.

  And he had a cell phone.

  “Who they are and what they did in their lives never changes how we approach or treat the victims of a homicide,” Wawrzynski made clear. “But it does change our approach as to how we go about investigating and open other alternative options and avenues that make closing the cases more likely, in my opinion.”

  Wawrzynski was optimistic. The fact that Shannon Griffin was found in a place nowhere near where he lived, in an area of the city where he normally did not visit, gave Wawrzynski some sense that they were going to be able to find someone that knew why Shannon was there on that specific night at that specific time.

  And then the first big break: Doug Bolden provided the SPPD with Shannon’s phone number. Homicide did not have Shannon’s phone, but Doug told investigators that Shannon had it with him when he left the house and was obviously going to use it to communicate with the girl he had made plans to meet.

  So Homicide had department communications contact the phone company and see what they could come up with on short notice.

  “And every once in a while, well, you get lucky,” Wawrzynski noted.

  Within a few hours, the SPPD had a plethora of data to sift through, including the last phone number Shannon Griffin had called, who owned that phone number, the address of that person, the location where Shannon actually was on the street when he made the call, where the other person he spoke to was located when the call had been received, and what time he had made the call or calls.

  Basically, the SPPD had a timeline of Shannon’s night, on top of the person he was talking to—or, rather, at least the name of the person who owned the phone that was used for the conversation with Shannon.