One Breath Away

by M. William Phelps

  He did as he was told.

  “Name?”

  “Laron Raiford.”

  “You know why we’re here, Mr. Raiford?”

  “Yes.”

  Laron was taken into custody without any resistance or fight. The dance was over and Laron knew it.

  Wawrzynski took Laron by the cuffs, helped him up off the ground, and led him to a patrol car. As he was doing that, officers escorted Lamont out of the apartment.

  Jennifer Mee walked out by herself and sat on the trunk of a detective’s vehicle in the lot nearby while everything went on around her. She chain-smoked cigarettes. It took about three hours to get everything sorted out. The tipster had told the SPPD that the “second male inside the apartment was the shooter.” Laron was there when it happened, but “it was the other male that shot the victim.” Wawrzynski presumed that second male to be Lamont Newton. Although, as Lamont was being walked out of the apartment and was asked for a name, it was the first time Wawrzynski had heard Lamont was associated with this case.

  As officers walked Lamont toward a waiting vehicle, Jennifer jumped off the trunk of the cruiser and asked if she could say good-bye. “He’s my boyfriend.”

  “No problem,” said one of the detectives.

  Jennifer kissed Lamont and told him not to worry.

  Lamont had $26 on him, which he asked the cop if he could give to Jennifer.

  After Laron and Lamont were taken away, Wawrzynski conversed with his colleagues and they agreed that Jennifer Mee might be helpful in their investigation. After they asked, Wawrzynski said, Jennifer volunteered to take a ride down to the station and talk to them.

  “We still have no idea of her involvement,” Wawrzynski later explained. “All I know at that point is that the second guy, Lamont Newton, who I don’t know anything about yet other than his name, who is also alleged to be involved, has a girlfriend who is Jennifer Mee.”

  The reason they wanted to talk to Jennifer, Wawrzynski added, was because if she had been Lamont’s girlfriend, “maybe he told her something—that is our only interest in her at that point.”

  Jennifer Mee, same as Jenni Charron, was considered a witness—someone who might be able to help cops solve a homicide.

  CHAPTER 71

  JENNI CHARRON WOULD not stop talking as she sat in that interview suite inside the Burglary Division of the SPPD. She and a patrol officer waited for the detectives to come in and formally interview her as a potential witness. As Jenni sat, she looked out into the hallway and watched as Laron was escorted past the interview room, an officer walking him toward another room nearby.

  “I feel much better,” Jenni said, “knowing that Laron is okay. Can I strangle him now?” she asked, somewhat laughing.

  “I’m gonna call my lawyer as soon as I get out of here,” Jenni said next.

  The cop was curious: “Your lawyer?”

  “Not for me,” Jenni said. “No. For Laron.”

  No sooner had a detective arrived to sit with Jenni and chat was Jennifer Mee walked into the same room. As Jennifer sat down, she looked at Jenni and said, “Just tell the truth about what happened. . . .”

  They sat for a few moments. No one really said much. Then Jennifer Mee—whom Jenni referred to as “Jen 2”—was escorted to a separate interview room. Soon after, Jenni Charron was asked to take a walk to yet another interview room, where a detective was sitting with Laron Raiford. Laron looked rather beaten. Not in a sense that someone had hit him, but that he’d lost a race. About an hour had passed since Jenni had watched them escort Laron by the room where she had first waited. She now believed she knew why she had waited so long. They had wanted to put her and Laron together.

  “Look, your boyfriend has already told us what happened,” the detective explained to Jenni—Laron sat, listening, not saying anything—“and now we need to hear the truth from you so we can see if it matches up to what your boyfriend here has already said.”

  “Jenni, just tell them the truth, okay,” Laron encouraged.

  Jenni started crying. She was “visibly upset,” according to a report of the conversation.

  “What happened?” the detective asked.

  “Blood . . . went bad,” Jenni said. “Dude started fighting back. All I know is they—Laron, Lamont, and Jen—was going to rob someone. I wasn’t there.” She was crying harder, looking down, looking at Laron, searching the detective’s face for an answer. “I didn’t hear the gunshots.”

  “Who had the gun?” the detective asked.

  “I don’t know which one had the gun in the backpack.... Lamont said he was the one who had it.”

  “All right, what did Lamont say when he got back?”

  Laron sat in silence.

  “‘The dude’s dead,’” Jenni said Lamont had told her. “They wrestled over the gun and it set off, and Lamont was worried that if he didn’t shoot, then he was going to be the one dead.”

  From this first statement Jenni gave, it was clear she and Laron had talked about what to say—and both were now blaming Lamont, the same person they had called Bro.

  “Take her back to Burglary,” the detective told the officer.

  Jenni was still bawling as they walked her out of the room and back to that same interview suite in Burglary she had first waited in.

  CHAPTER 72

  THE SPPD NEEDED a formal statement from Laron Raiford. Detective Dave Wawrzynski had spoken to Laron and gotten an admission out of him, but Laron hadn’t given them a complete narrative, locking himself down to facts (as he saw them, naturally). In a separate interview room nearby, Lamont Newton had told his version, giving up Jennifer Mee and Laron as co-conspirators and partners in the crime, but adding that those two were the driving force of the operation.

  With that in place, the SPPD needed a recorded statement from Laron.

  Laron was a wreck. He was “visibly shaken”; he had expressed several times after arriving at the SPPD that he had to vomit. Wawrzynski removed his handcuffs and asked Laron if he needed a drink of water.

  Laron waved him off and, before answering, ran to the garbage can, leaned over, and dry-heaved into the bucket several times. This was a good sign for Wawrzynski. With Laron so scared and nervous that his body was physically reacting to what was coming, he was ready to talk and probably make a complete confession. It wasn’t food Laron was trying to vomit out of his system, but guilt. He needed to dump whatever weight he’d been carrying since Shannon Griffin was murdered.

  At times, Laron would weep like a child, tears streaming down his face; at others, he’d calm himself, be okay for a time, only to start crying all over again. When he wore his glasses, Laron had the look of a bookish professor type. He dressed fashionably per the times. He spoke in terse sound bites, not complete sentences. He used street slang a lot. It was just after six o’clock on Sunday night, October 24, 2010, when Laron sat with Detective Joe DeLuca, who ran the interview, and Detective Dave Wawrzynski, who sat back and listened. For the most part, Wawrzynski piped in when he felt Laron was getting off track. It had been some time since they had picked up Laron. It was clear by this point that Laron had composed himself enough in order to be able to go through the murder step-by-step.

  Shortly after he arrived, Laron had given up his rights to have a lawyer present, and he did it again on record and also signed a waiver.

  He needed to do this and do it quickly.

  DeLuca asked if Laron felt he had been treated fairly, up until this point.

  Laron was calm. He had stopped crying and had gotten hold of himself. He balked: “No . . . ,” he said softly, stretching the word out.

  “What do you mean?” Wawrzynski asked.

  “’Cause the one that’s talking now,” Laron explained, meaning DeLuca, “is trying to accuse me of killing the dude that I didn’t kill.”

  Wawrzynski took a breath. When the detective had talked with Laron after Laron had first been brought in, Laron had already admitted to him that he was part of this. Was
he now, on the record, going to make this difficult and deny it all?

  “Other than that,” DeLuca clarified, asking Laron if he had been “physically hurt” by any cop at any time.

  “Ah, no.”

  They then went through the normal rigmarole of cop lingo and rights.

  DeLuca encouraged Laron to explain what happened to “the guy . . . Shannon,” and asked if Laron was willing to do that.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Go ahead.”

  Laron brought “the girl Jen” into the crime right away. He could not have meant Jenni Charron, or he would have referenced her as his girlfriend. “[Jen] met him (Shannon) off of MocoSpace. She gave him my phone number. He calls my phone. Jen talks to him. Said he wants a half an ounce. So we decided that we was going to take the money from him.”

  We.

  Not me. Or they.

  But we.

  As he continued, Laron explained how his girl came home before the robbery, meaning Jenni. When she walked in, Laron said he took her phone and “gave Jen [Mee] my phone.”

  Shannon only had that one number—Laron’s.

  The SPPD could back this statement up with phone records they already had.

  So far, so good.

  Laron said they left the apartment and walked “toward Seventh Street and Grove.” There was some confusion when they got there about where they were going to rob Shannon. “So me and Lamont walked back behind the house.... We’re waiting, and Jen and the dude comes around the corner. Jen walks off. I have the”—unintelligible, but it sounded like “gun”—“and then me and the dude go at it.... Me and the dude break up. . . . I run. I hear the first gunshot. So I run . . . and hear more gunshots.”

  Laron said he ran fast, and he quickly found himself back inside the apartment.

  “I’m telling my lady and the other Jen that Lamont done got killed. Then, like two minutes later, Lamont runs through the door.”

  Beyond that, Laron told a very similar story to that of Jenni Charron as she later described what happened inside the apartment. The way Laron talked through it, however, gave detectives the indication that if Lamont had not been shot, then Lamont must have been the one who shot Shannon—because Laron put himself away from the scene as the shots were being fired.

  Then, pointing directly at Lamont, someone for whom Laron routinely referred to as his “blood brother,” Laron added, “[Lamont] said after I run off, him and the dude was fighting with the gun. The dude shot the first shot, and [Lamont] was saying it grazed his face . . . and he said that on the ground they was tussling and that he ended up shooting the dude.”

  Laron spoke of them leaving the apartment. Then, interestingly enough, Laron said that while they were at Jenni’s friend’s apartment uptown, “Lamont’s girl shows us the wallet. . . .” So Jennifer Mee had Shannon’s wallet, according to Laron, the entire time. Jennifer took out Shannon’s driver’s license, his credit cards, and his bank cards (all of which would be later verified by Jennifer’s fingerprints). As they sat and talked about what to do next, since he did not have “a lot of charges on” his record, Laron told detectives, “They decided they was going to pin it all on me so I can hopefully get less time.”

  When Jenni and Jennifer went off to the store, Laron explained, he called his ex-girlfriend and asked her what he should do next. He was scared. She told him to turn himself in and explain to the police what had happened.

  Not once as Laron talked his way through the entire night, and what they did afterward, did DeLuca or Wawrzynski ask a question or interrupt. They simply allowed Laron to tell his story the way he saw it.

  Finally, after Laron paused and then asked himself if he was leaving anything out, Wawrzynski wanted to know about “the dude’s belongings.” Where did all of Shannon’s personal possessions go?

  Laron said Jennifer Mee had them in a bag. “They was trying to burn it, but they couldn’t burn it.”

  For the first time, it was then revealed how much money Shannon had on him when he was murdered.

  “There was, like, fifty-five bucks, but then they found like five more,” Laron said, adding how they took that blood money and Jenni and Jen bought marijuana with it.

  Shannon Griffin was murdered for $60. So little value was placed on human life these days, it was sickening for these detectives to sit and listen.

  DeLuca asked: “When he was coming there, it was Jennifer, right, you’re saying it was Jennifer Mee, right, which is Lamont’s girlfriend? And your girlfriend is the other Jennifer.”

  “Yes, sir,” Laron stated.

  “What’s your girlfriend’s last name?”

  Laron shrugged. “Um, I don’t know. . . .”

  Guy was living with the woman, had purportedly knocked her up, and he did not even know her last name!

  Real catch, that Laron.

  “So Jennifer Mee was the one that made contact with this guy?” DeLuca wanted Laron to verify that. This was the first time that detectives had heard of Jennifer Mee’s active involvement, essentially.

  “Yes!” Laron said.

  “She’s the one that called him down there. . . .”

  “Yes!”

  “He was being called down there, and he thought he was buying marijuana?”

  “Yes . . . yes.”

  There was no discussion about Jennifer Mee meeting Shannon for a date. The dope buying was, apparently, part of the “story” Jenni, Jennifer, Laron, and Lamont had all concocted to tell police.

  “What was the intention when he came down?” DeLuca wanted to know.

  “That Jennifer Mee was supposed to take the money. But it didn’t go that way. It ended up being totally different... ’cause the dude ended up fighting with us.”

  With or without realizing it, Laron had put it all on Lamont. He claimed again near the end of the recording that he was running away as he heard the first shots ring out in the hustle and bustle of that deadly St. Pete night fewer than twenty-four hours earlier.

  Wawrzynski asked if they ever had any weed to begin with. Was their entire “intention” the whole time to take whatever cash Shannon had on him and not provide him with any drugs?

  “Yes, sir,” Laron said, meaning they never had any dope. The entire plan, from conception to birth, was to smash Shannon in the head and grab his cash.

  They discussed where Jennifer Mee was and how she had communicated with them as she waited for Shannon to show up. Jennifer had called Laron to let him know what was going on from his cell phone, Laron explained. Laron had his girlfriend Jenni’s phone.

  Several more questions by Wawrzynski centered on details back at the crime scene that could not be argued. These were things about that scene that could never change. He centered on those hard facts of the case: shoes, the gun, where they were located.

  Laron named each piece of evidence and where it was located at the scene.

  Corroboration.

  That’s what the SPPD wanted to hear. Within any case, there is always an unchallenged truth that could can never be impeached. Laron was speaking to that end of the case and nailing it.

  Wawrzynski asked Laron if at any time during the altercation that resulted in Shannon’s death if Shannon ever said anything to them.

  “Um, all he said was, ‘Pussy niggas . . .’ That’s it.”

  The interview ended at six-fifty in the evening. Not once during the interview, same as Lamont’s interview in a separate room nearby, did Laron Raiford bring Jenni Charron into the robbery, the planning of the robbery, the planning of luring Shannon with a “date,” or saying that she knew any of it was going to take place. Yet, he did—same as Lamont—seal Jennifer Mee’s fate by telling detectives that she had lured Shannon to that site, walked Shannon around that corner into the back of the building so they could rob him, and then, after doing her job, walked away. Later, both men stated, it was Jennifer who went through Shannon’s belongings and, with the others, tried to burn those possessions in back of the Eighty-Nint
h Avenue North apartment building, thus helping to cover up the murder.

  It was the law that mattered to the SPPD: a homicide during the due course of a robbery—even if none of them had planned it—was a felony charge of first-degree murder, punishable in the state of Florida by life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  CHAPTER 73

  AFTER SPEAKING WITH Laron, Detective Wawrzynski went over and sat down with Jennifer Mee. She was quite nervous. Jennifer appeared dirty, tired, and unkempt, as though she had been awake all night and day.

  “I’ve been staying in a covered bus bench for the past several days,” Jennifer told Wawrzynski. “I really don’t have a home. I’ve been staying in several area hotels and apartments.”

  “You working?” Wawrzynski asked casually.

  “No.”

  “Where have you been staying recently?”

  “With Jenni.”

  Wawrzynski took a breath. In a nonthreatening manner, rather sincerely, he said: “You know you’re involved deeply in this matter, and it would be best to tell the truth.”

  With that, Jennifer wept. She looked toward the floor and wiped her runny nose on the inside of her shirt. Through all that emotion, as tears ran down her cheeks, Jennifer told Wawrzynski, “I called him. . . . I met him on MocoSpace four or five days ago. He sent me a friend request and we shared several messages. I had never met him face-to-face before Saturday night.” She paused. Then, between hyperventilating breaths: “It . . . was my idea to meet him . . . and . . . and . . . get money. I used Laron’s phone to text him, and [Shannon] agreed to meet near Grove Street.”

  Jennifer Mee had just admitted to an SPPD detective that she had masterminded the entire robbery.

  As she spoke, Jennifer’s demeanor fluctuated between her breaking down and bawling and pulling herself together. Wawrzynski wasn’t putting any pressure on Jennifer to come clean about everything. More than anything, he simply was trying to tell Jennifer, without coming out and saying it, that she would be much better off in the end if she was honest. Jennifer had no idea, of course, that she was actually admitting to setting up a first-degree murder, regardless if she knew or not that Laron was bringing a weapon with him.