One Breath Away

by M. William Phelps

  Sounded like a major breakthrough.

  And wouldn’t you know it—out popped one name for Homicide investigators when they tracked it all backward.

  Laron Raiford.

  More important, the SPPD now had an address to go along with that name.

  “Obviously, we cannot say [at that time] it was Mr. Raiford on the phone with the victim, but it was his phone,” Wawrzynski recalled.

  Which was as good a place to start as any.

  Detective Wawrzynski’s focus was now on one suspect.

  CHAPTER 66

  WHILE AT WORK on that Sunday afternoon, Jenni Charron took a call from someone in Laron’s family. At some point before that, Laron and his friend had started to once again text back and forth, picking up their conversation from the previous night. This time, there was a bit more urgency and panic.

  THEY LOOKIN 4 ME CALL MY UNZ PLZ, Laron texted his friend at 9:29 A.M. on Sunday.

  HW U KNW THAT

  THEY CALLIN ME N CAME MY UNKS LOOKIN 4 ME

  DAMN

  Then Laron admitted for the second time: I KILLED SUMBODY

  Laron’s friend didn’t respond.

  TXT BCK PLZ AM NT LIEIN . . . DID U CALL MY UNK, Laron texted, obviously nervous and concerned, wanting to make it clear that he was serious about what he had just shared.

  No response.

  Laron’s uncle called Jenni and explained what was going on.

  After she hung up with Laron’s uncle, Jenni took a second call.

  “This is [a detective] from the St. Pete PD, Homicide.... We got your number from our investigation . . . and—”

  “I’m working right now,” Jenni said, “I have to go.” She quickly hung up and called for a ride back to her friend’s apartment, where the others were still hiding. She then opened the back of her phone and took out the battery.

  “I gotta go,” she told her boss. “Sorry . . .”

  Along the way back to the apartment, Jenni had the car stop so she could purchase a TracFone, giving her a new phone number unassociated with any of them, allowing Jenni, a girl who had been schooled in how to survive on the street, to communicate without anyone knowing who or where she was.

  In Laron Raiford, the SPPD now believed it had a solid, potential person of interest (POI)—or, if not, someone with whom they needed to speak to immediately and could then lead them to a POI.

  “Laron was our focus,” Detective Dave Wawrzynski made clear.

  Homicide’s number one goal from that moment on was to find Laron Raiford and question him.

  CHAPTER 67

  BACK AT JENNI’S friend’s apartment uptown, Jenni and Jennifer decided to go out to the corner store and get a few items. The boys wanted new underwear, T-shirts, socks, blunts, and a few packs of Newports. There was no way they were going anywhere near the apartment back down by the crime scene to grab any of their belongings. Laron or Lamont did not even want to go out in public.

  Detective Wawrzynski was riding uptown with Detective Joe DeLuca in an unmarked cruiser near this same time. Both cops were driving around a neighborhood about two blocks from where Jenni and Jennifer were walking. Wawrzynski just happened to turn, looked down a side street, and then saw “Miss Charron with another, unknown female.”

  Jenni had a bag of items in her hand as she and Jennifer reached the corner of the apartment complex parking lot, where they had all been holed up since the previous night.

  Wawrzynski had a printout of Laron Raiford and Jenni Charron in the car, which included their photographs. Jenni had been arrested in the past, as well as Laron. After they got Laron’s address from his phone records, Wawrzynski and Homicide had gotten Jenni’s name from someone in the neighborhood where they lived, and also from a police report.

  “That’s her,” Wawrzynski said, staring down, looking at the photo of Jenni attached to the printout.

  The cruiser pulled up in front of both girls as they walked.

  “Jennifer?” Wawrzynski yelled out his window. Jenni was dressed in all pink, sweats, and a T-shirt. She looked toward Wawrzynski after hearing her name.

  “Yes?” Jenni responded.

  Jennifer Mee kept quiet.

  DeLuca and Wawrzynski popped out of the vehicle. Wawrzynski took the printout with him.

  Both Jenni and Jennifer knew why they were there, of course, but they had made a choice not to say anything.

  Wawrzynski held up the printout with Jenni’s photo and some information about her and matched it to her face.

  “Your last name?” Wawrzynski asked Jenni.

  She told him.

  They separated Jenni and Jennifer—and, according to what Jenni later said, they handcuffed her. At first, Jennifer Mee told them she had just met Jenni outside the corner store and decided to walk with her.

  “I want a lawyer . . . ,” Jenni Charron said immediately.

  “Whoa,” Wawrzynski replied. He walked her toward his unmarked car.

  Later, Jenni explained that Wawrzynski and DeLuca played the “whole good cop/bad cop routine” with her. “I had one telling me that I was going to jail for five to ten years for accessory after the fact and hindering and obstruction, throwing all kinds of terms and different charges at me. Then I had another detective come and actually sit in the backseat with me, and he told me he was just trying to locate Laron. . . .”

  “Where is he?” Wawrzynski wanted to know, meaning Laron.

  “I don’t know,” Jenni said as she began to “cry heavily and sob with deep gasps,” Wawrzynski’s report indicated. Then she said, “My life is always so fucked up. . . . I love Laron. . . . I think I’m pregnant. . . .”

  “You have no idea where he is?”

  “I don’t know where he went or what he did last night,” she said next.

  Wawrzynski stepped out of the car and walked away. DeLuca had talked briefly with Jennifer Mee. Then he went and spoke with the corner-store owner and a neighborhood guy standing around. Both of them claimed Jennifer had walked with Jenni in and out of the store—she was lying. As DeLuca confronted Jennifer Mee with the difference in the stories she was giving him, Jennifer decided to change her story. Now she claimed she had met Jenni on Eighty-Ninth Avenue North, on the west side, and followed her into the store.

  Wawrzynski called his boss and explained that he had found Jenni Charron, but there was no sign of Laron.

  “I’m on my way,” Wawrzynski’s boss told him. He was bringing another detective, Gary Gibson.

  Gibson arrived with their boss and told Jenni why Wawrzynski and DeLuca had stopped her and Jennifer Mee.

  “Can I talk to you for a few minutes about this?” Gibson asked Jenni. It was nonthreatening. All volunteer.

  “Sure,” Jenni responded.

  Gibson made it clear that she was not under arrest. “And she agreed to go back to the station to answer some questions.”

  As a patrol officer who had arrived on the scene to transport Jenni back to the SPPD was placing Jenni into the backseat of his patrol car, he later noted in his report that Jenni “said something unintelligible about guns” as she got in.

  “Look, Miss Charron,” the cop explained, “I am not familiar enough with the case to discuss it or interview you myself. Could you wait, please, to speak to one of the case detectives? I’m merely here to transport you to the department.”

  Wawrzynski, Gibson, their boss, and DeLuca now had to deal with Jennifer Mee. At this point, Wawrzynski said later, he did not recognize Jennifer Mee, even though he’d been part of the team looking for Jennifer when she ran away from home years before and had since become known as the Hiccup Girl. To Wawrzynski in that moment, Jennifer Mee was just another girl with Jenni Charron, someone they ran into while looking for Laron, the main target of their investigation.

  “This is Jennifer Mee,” Gibson said after he had huddled with Wawrzynski and the others and they talked about what to do with her.

  The name now rang a bell with Wawrzynski.

  “T
hat was the whole total that we knew that Jennifer Mee was involved—that she was with Jennifer Charron,” Wawrzynski later explained. “When she’s found with Jennifer Charron on the street, that’s it—but she’s still not a suspect. Still, nothing. It’s like, ‘Okay, oh yeah, I know you.’ And that was it.”

  It was an accurate statement; up until this moment of the investigation, the entire focus was on Laron Raiford. The only reason they had been looking for Jenni Charron in the first place was to find Laron.

  Jennifer Mee was free to go. The SPPD had no interest in her. To Gibson and Wawrzynski at that particular moment, she was some girl walking along the street with Jenni Charron, nothing more.

  Funny thing was, if they had followed her, Jennifer Mee would have led them directly to Laron.

  CHAPTER 68

  JENNI CHARRON WAS on her way to the SPPD, sitting in back of a patrol car, watching a row of St. Pete palm trees pass by. Jenni and the cop began a conversation as he drove. She seemed to want to talk. But her true motivation was to ask questions and try and figure out how much the cops knew.

  They discussed the TracFone Jenni had on her. She said she didn’t even know the number, admitting, “I tossed my other phone after I knew the cops were looking for me.”

  Asked what she did for a living, Jenni said “self-employed, a housecleaner.”

  That was one way to put it, perhaps.

  “I actually own about four or five different phones,” Jenni said.

  The ride from Eighty-Ninth Avenue, near Riviera Bay, where Jenni had been picked up, to the SPPD was about eight miles due south on the 275. As they pulled into the SPPD parking lot, Jenni asked if she could smoke a cigarette before going to the second-floor interview suite inside Burglary to chat with detectives.

  “Sure,” the cop said. “You need some water? Want to use the bathroom?”

  Now was the chance to do all that.

  When they finally made it upstairs, before she was led into an interview suite, Jenni said, “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll soon find out.”

  This made Jenni a little nervous. She asked: “Was there two guns or what? Is he laid up in the hospital? Did the dude have a knife and cut him? I just want to know if he’s okay! Is Jen [Mee] here?”

  They walked into the room. Jenni was told to sit down. “Look, the detectives will be in here soon to interview you. I do not know enough about the case to discuss it,” the cop repeated.

  Jenni was tired. She wore lots of makeup and had been sweating. She appeared to be worried and, at the same time, somewhat composed, as though she’d been through this drill before. It was hard to gauge how she came across, how she was feeling.

  The officer waited with Jenni for about an hour and they talked.

  “Does this normally take a long time?” Jenni asked, wondering why the detectives weren’t there yet to interview her.

  “Yeah . . .”

  It was close to four o’clock. Jenni was becoming impatient.

  “I have Crohn’s disease and need to take my medication,” she said.

  “Give me a minute,” the officer told her. He called Gary Gibson, who was working closely on the case with Dave Wawrzynski and Joe DeLuca.

  “I’ll be there shortly,” Gibson told the officer over the phone, who then relayed that information to Jenni, making sure it was okay with her if they waited just awhile longer. He did not want to keep her from taking her medication.

  She shrugged. “I can wait a little bit longer, I guess.”

  As they sat, the cop later reported, Jenni made several “spontaneous statements.” She seemed to state things randomly that seemed to pertain to the case.

  “I don’t know if he shot someone or someone shot him . . . ,” she said. It was unclear if this was a question or a statement. “I hope you all find him before I do, because I’m going to strangle him.”

  She never said whom she was referring to regarding “him.” The cop assumed it was Laron Raiford.

  Ten minutes went by.

  “Am I under arrest?” Jenni asked.

  “No,” said the cop.

  Jenni became passive and seemed to be weakening emotionally. She said: “I want my mom—that’s all I want right now.”

  CHAPTER 69

  AS THAT OFFICER kept Jenni company until detectives arrived to speak with her, Dave Wawrzynski and his colleagues had good reason to be running a bit late. Once they sent Jenni off to the SPPD and Jennifer Mee back on her way, they developed a solid bead on Laron, who had been tracked by Homicide back to an apartment on Eighty-Ninth Avenue North, near the Pinellas and St. Pete–Clearwater International Airport region of the city, right near where Jenni and Jennifer had been walking when detectives stopped them. They didn’t know then, but that apartment was rented by a friend of Jenni’s.

  Hours before they had stopped Jenni and Jennifer on the street, DeLuca and Wawrzynski had gone to Laron’s father’s house. Laron’s dad said he wasn’t there. “He might be over at his uncle’s place, though,” Laron’s dad had said, giving them the address.

  The uncle had no idea where Laron was, he claimed. “He has a girlfriend. But I’m not sure of her name or where she lives.” He could not offer anything more.

  From there, they went back to the SPPD and did some additional research on who Laron Raiford was and where he had lived throughout his years. One address stuck out to the detectives. An old police report the guys dug up had listed Jenni’s and Laron’s names. The report was maybe a month old. So DeLuca and Wawrzynski decided to follow up on the address Laron and Jenni had given—which just happened to be across the street and down the block from the homicide scene.

  After banging on the door to that apartment, it was clear no one was home. So they canvassed, asking questions about Laron and Jenni to anyone they ran into around the area. Several people in the neighborhood gave them information.

  According to Wawrzynski, he then got Jenni’s cell phone number from someone she knew and he had one of his investigators call her.

  “We had a fight last night,” Jenni had said. “They left,” meaning Laron and a friend. Jenni didn’t sound as though she was trying to raise any alarms. “They went to a hotel.”

  The SPPD had no idea where Laron was or who he was with. But as luck would have it, as DeLuca and Wawrzynski were back inside the SPPD planning their next move with Gary Gibson, an anonymous tip was called in. The tipster noted that she had seen Laron at that uptown apartment, near Eighty-Ninth Avenue North, thus the reason why DeLuca and Wawrzynski headed up that way and were cruising around the neighborhood where they had spotted Jennifer Mee and Jenni Charron walking back from the corner store.

  “You are close,” the tipster had said. This led them to believe the caller knew that Wawrzynski and DeLuca had stopped Jenni and Jennifer. “Those two guys involved in the shooting are still in my friend’s apartment,” the caller shared. “The police are close by. . . .”

  The female tipster gave them the apartment address, and it was not far away from where Jenni and Jennifer had been stopped.

  After sending Jenni back to the station with a patrol officer, DeLuca and Wawrzynski let Jennifer Mee go and then called in backup and put several officers on the Eighty-Ninth Avenue apartment complex. Concurrently several investigators went door-to-door, knocking, in search of Laron. There was a good chance that Jennifer Mee had gone into the apartment and explained to Laron and whoever else was inside what had happened as she and Jenni made their way back from the store.

  A call was then made to the tipster to find out which apartment, exactly, they needed to search for Laron.

  The tipster said once again, “You’re close.... Go just to the west of Fifth Street North—that’s where my friend lives, to the left of the first breezeway.”

  Wawrzynski and his team knocked on every door on the west side of the building. Every resident answered and allowed them in to search for Laron—that is, except apartment number seven.

  They found ou
t the name of the person renting that apartment. It was Jenni’s friend. They called the female tipster back and asked if she knew a person by that name.

  “I guess you just figured it out,” the tipster said.

  But there was no answer when they first knocked.

  Wawrzynski assembled a team around the perimeter of apartment number seven. They had their guns drawn and the door covered. Another detective went and got a set of keys to the apartment from management. While that happened, Wawrzynski made contact with Jenni’s friend who rented the apartment; she gave verbal consent for them to go in and conduct a search.

  The gun had been left at the scene of the crime—but that didn’t mean Laron would not have a second weapon inside the apartment.

  Once they were all set up, Detective Gary Gibson—keys in hand—knocked on the door one last time, announcing, “This is Detective Gibson from the St. Petersburg Police Department—we need anyone inside to exit the apartment immediately, with their hands in the air.”

  As he listened closely, Gibson could hear movement on the opposite side of the door.

  Something was about to go down.

  CHAPTER 70

  GIBSON HEARD A voice from beyond the door: “We are coming out!”

  “Make sure your hands are up and come out slowly. . . .”

  Anything could happen. An ambush might be waiting for these cops on the opposite side of the door.

  The door creaked open and out walked a “tall, thin black male.”

  Wawrzynski recognized him as Laron from the photo printout he’d had with him most of that day. He held his weapon on Laron: “Walk toward me. . . .”

  “I don’t want to die,” Laron said, with his hands above his head. He began to cry. “I don’t want to die.”

  As Laron walked out, he turned his head and spoke to Lamont, who was standing directly behind him, a few yards away. “I love you, man,” Laron said to Lamont. “Stay together.”

  “Lay on the ground—now!” Wawrzynski told Laron.