It’s quite clear when you speak with Jennifer Mee about her stepfather, Chris Robidoux, that there was a gulf there between them based on an event or series of events that had happened. Jennifer did not have many good things to say about Chris.
Rachel said that “they always butted heads.” This was part of Jennifer’s rebellious nature, Rachel suggested. It had to do with how much she wanted to spite Chris, especially when Jennifer started dating boys.
Her sisters, Jennifer explained to me, are “my little angels.” They’ve had issues in the past, like any siblings, but Jennifer said she loves them dearly and always has.
It is her childhood (or lack thereof), Jennifer claimed, that she looks back on now and sees where things went terribly wrong.
“I feel like I had to grow up way too fast.”
Part of it was being the oldest, she claimed. Many people didn’t realize that being the oldest in a large family came with responsibility. The younger kids always got away with more, Jennifer said of her home life, while she took the brunt of the punishment and accountability.
“My guess would be some of the things that happened to her at a young age,” Rachel said. “I just learned recently that [a family member was] buying her thong underwear and tried teaching her to drive . . . and let her smoke pot with her, at, like, ten or eleven years old. Maybe the fact that she was the oldest and needed to help with her sisters—be a ‘little mom’ in her mind while I was at work.”
Allison Baldwin became the one and only true friend Jennifer said she ever had.
“She was my li’l rider,” Jennifer recalled. “We did everything together. She took me in when I ran from my problems.”
It was not until she moved out of the Robidoux house and on her own that Jennifer said, “I became ruthless.”
That was the word she actually used: “ruthless.”
It said a lot about her.
She was buying and selling drugs. She felt she needed to “rebel” against Chris and Rachel, maybe just to hide who she was becoming and stuff down the pain she claimed to be feeling at that time. Part of her emotional distress, Jennifer explained, had nothing to do with becoming the Hiccup Girl. It was centered, she said, around not feeling loved at home while growing up.
“Sometimes I felt as if I was just taking up space,” she said.
CHAPTER 19
RACHEL MADE THE trip, as did Jennifer’s lawyer, John Trevena. Although they did not travel together, they both arrived in New York to speak with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today during the weekend of November 9, 2010, for a scheduled appearance on November 10. Introducing the story, Matt Lauer was more serious than he had been when Jennifer had made other appearances as the Hiccup Girl back in 2007. This was Rachel’s first full-length interview—an “exclusive,” Lauer promoted—since Jennifer’s arrest on murder charges.
“Mr. Trevena encouraged me to do it,” Rachel later said.
Rachel bore a striking resemblance to her daughter. When the camera first panned on Rachel as she sat on the couch alone and Lauer teased the interview with a brief setup videotaped prologue, Rachel looked dazed, with an obvious sheen of despondency consuming her. But more than that, she appeared confused and affected, as if she still did not have a handle on what was actually happening.
Jennifer had been in jail for three weeks. Her latest attempt at bond had failed. Trevena argued during a recent hearing that Jennifer “posed absolutely no risk of flight.” As Trevena spoke on Jennifer’s behalf to the judge, she stood by his side, her hair pulled back and tied into a tight ponytail. She was dressed in prison blues and looked like a hospital orderly. Perhaps as a nervous condition, every once in a while she hiccupped, adding what was an eerie, sobering reality to the situation.
That cursed condition had never really left her entirely—and never would.
As Trevena spoke, Jennifer broke down and cried.
“She has absolutely no prior criminal history, juvenile or otherwise,” Trevena explained. He was right. This girl was no flight risk. Where would she go?
Shannon’s cousin Doug Bolden stood at the lectern next and told the judge, “It’s just wrong, Your Honor. Just wrong!” Bolden, still quite in shock by the murder of his little cousin, shook his head, speaking elegantly and softly, saying: “He just thought he was going on a date. Here was the kid just grinning, ear to ear, about to go on a date . . . as happy as could be.”
Shannon left the house to meet a girl and wound up dead, Bolden proclaimed. Now the girl who had allegedly lured him to his death wanted to walk out of this courtroom. Doug Bolden didn’t understand why they were even discussing this matter.
Rachel stood next to her daughter. She explained to the judge that Jennifer had several learning disabilities and did not comprehend the severity of all that had taken place. She needed to be home. She needed to begin to prepare for the fight of her life. After all, the charge Jennifer faced could land her in prison for life if she was found guilty.
Since the time of her arrest, police had come out and said that based on their investigation, they knew Jennifer was not likely at the scene when the murder took place. However, under Florida law, because she had purportedly lured Shannon to that location under a ruse of some kind and knew that he was going to be robbed, she was just as guilty as the shooter.
The judge seemed harsh in his ruling that “the family” had been unable to “control” Jennifer and her behavior up until this point, and so why should he allow them another opportunity? There was no good reason why he should release Jennifer now to those same people who could not contain or control her in the past.
Jennifer’s bond was denied. She would stay in jail.
CHAPTER 20
ON THE TODAY couch, Rachel sat next to John Trevena. She had one leg crossed over the other, her foot bouncing nervously, both hands crossed over her knees. Her being there at this raw stage of the game seemed awkward, to say the least.
Matt Lauer asked if she had seen Jennifer lately and how she was doing.
“Holding up,” Rachel said after indicating she had just visited Jennifer before flying to New York.
Lauer made a point to say Rachel had said Jennifer didn’t comprehend what had been going on and had failed to understand things for what they were, based on Jennifer’s low IQ and her grade level of an eleven-year-old. So he wanted to know if Jennifer had any indication that she was facing one of the most severe charges on the books.
“I honestly don’t think so,” Rachel said. “She mentioned to me the last time I saw her that she hoped to be home for Christmas. . . .”
Lauer made a good point, and perhaps spoke for much of America, when he said that he and the rest of the Today team had always remembered Jennifer as a shy, innocent little girl with hiccups she couldn’t get rid of. As he spoke, a video montage from Jennifer’s several appearances on the show played. She looked so young at fifteen and sixteen, so happy, despite fighting the hiccups, so focused on beating her condition. There was a subtle indication on Jennifer’s face that she not only had the support of viewers, but it was that support that empowered her for maybe the first time in her life. Rachel, too, appeared relaxed and grateful that someone had cared enough about her daughter’s odd condition to make it a pop culture phenomenon, which, in turn, could lead them to serious help. Jennifer’s round and plump face was full of life, her smile radiant, and her attitude positive. Fast-forward to the video of her latest court appearance, juxtaposed with these past images, and America was looking at two different people. Now Jennifer appeared gaunt and passive, perplexed and confused, as Rachel had suggested, and also shaky and fragile. It appeared as though she’d break down if someone said the wrong thing.
When Lauer asked Rachel about her reaction to the charges when she first heard them, Rachel’s voice cracked. “Absolute state of shock . . . I thought it was a nightmare.”
Lauer seized on that moment to get into what Jennifer’s life had been like since the hiccups had made her an internationa
l “reality”-type, disposable celebrity.
Rachel explained that Jennifer moved around a lot and stayed in “different places, but that she always had a roof over her head.”
Matt Lauer termed Jennifer’s existence then what it was: a “transient lifestyle.”
Rachel agreed. Then she added, “Kind of running with the wrong crowd.”
Matt Lauer asked if by running with the wrong people, Jennifer had maybe given the family an indication that she was headed down a slippery slope of what could be a criminal path. Maybe her life on the street, he suggested, had been a clear sign of what was to come.
“Not with me,” Rachel said, speaking to a specific concern that Jennifer might have let on that she was heading for trouble. “She wouldn’t want to let me down. . . .”
Clearly, Jennifer kept a lot of things from Rachel.
Then the point of Jennifer being diagnosed with Tourette’s after her bout with the hiccups came up. Matt Lauer asked John Trevena if he was considering using her condition as a defense. There had been reports of Trevena perhaps dabbling in those murky waters of blaming whatever Jennifer did and the lifestyle she led on her Tourette condition.
“Well, it certainly adds to the extent that it is a mitigating factor,” Trevena explained quite articulately. He said they were going to have Jennifer examined. “A whole battery of neuropsychiatric-type tests needed to be conducted. But yes . . .”
Rachel dabbed at her watery eyes as Trevena spoke to how Tourette’s was a condition that was generally accompanied by additional psychiatric conditions.
Matt Lauer was ready for that statement because he had in his hand—which he then read aloud, word for word—a statement from the National Tourette Syndrome Association, in which the association blasted any claim that Tourette’s could have been a motivating or mitigating factor in the criminal and murderous ways Jennifer might have acted. The association said in the statement that Tourette’s, under those circumstances, was “no more the reason for, or an excuse for, such offense than other medical diagnoses—such as asthma or rheumatism.” Moreover, the association went on to state, under the banner of science there was “no evidence of a causal relationship between having Tourette syndrome and criminal behavior.”
The official statement was a major blow to any case of Trevena arguing that Tourette’s had made Jennifer act a certain way in allegedly luring Shannon Griffin to that death location on the night he was blindsided and murdered.
“I think to pure causality that is an accurate statement,” Trevena agreed. “But certainly, for example, if a young lady is pregnant at the time of sentencing in her case, that’s a factor that the court’s going to consider. That doesn’t mean that pregnant women are killers. It just means that it’s an issue that’s taken into consideration.” He went on to clarify that Tourette’s, in Jennifer’s case, “not only explains the hiccups, but could also explain some of her poor judgment.”
Alcohol would also explain poor judgment, however. But was alcoholism a defense for getting behind the wheel intoxicated and then driving down the road the wrong way and taking out a family of four?
If this was his strategy, Trevena was fighting an uphill battle.
“And I knew it,” he later told me.
Rachel had always called Jennifer’s celebrity and her condition “the curse of the hiccups,” not the “case of . . .”
Matt Lauer picked up on that explanation and asked Rachel to explain.
“I kind of felt like she was more and more trying to withdraw,” Rachel said through her broken and emotional voice. This was so difficult, talking about Jennifer in that capacity. Also, the idea of sitting on the Today couch without Jennifer by her side had been devastating to Rachel, who had sat with Jennifer on the same couch several times under more manageable, seemingly constructive circumstances. Out of the corner of her eye, on the stage monitors, Rachel could see the video they were playing for viewers of Jennifer trying every old wives’ tale imaginable to get rid of the hiccups back when she was more the butt of jokes and a sympathetic victim to a condition rather than an accused murderer.
Part of that “withdrawal,” Rachel concluded, centered on Jennifer hopping onto many of the social media sites and wading in waters Rachel said she had “no business” being in “because she was so naïve—and it just escalated.”
And that was it. The interview was over.
If there was one thing that came out of the interview, it was that the future did not look good for Jennifer Mee.
CHAPTER 21
AS A CASE against Jennifer Mee, Lamont Newton, and Laron Raiford was built by the SPPD in conjunction with the state’s attorney’s office (SAO), the public began to learn some of the facts surrounding what happened on the night of October 23, 2010. The entire narrative of the murder was still very much unknown and uncertain as the SPPD kept many of its cards close to the vest, but certain facts trickled out during those early days after the murder.
At home, Rachel and Chris were trying to piece together what happened, with bits of information from Jennifer, who could not say much on the prison phone, along with John Trevena, who himself was not sharing much of what Jennifer had been telling him during prison meetings. The one fact, however, which could not be denied as Shannon Griffin’s family came out and spoke publicly, demanding justice for Shannon, was that this was not some sort of ghetto murder surrounding a drug deal gone bad, as some might have suspected and suggested in the media. According to his family, Shannon wasn’t some sort of hoodlum or “gangsta” wannabe, out in the middle of the night, lurking on the streets of St. Pete. He was a grown man on vacation from his job, rebuilding a life that had been destroyed by a hurricane.
“He was a good kid,” Shannon’s brother told reporters. “He didn’t hurt nobody. It just doesn’t make any sense for a good kid like that to be murdered for no reason—just to be set up and murdered! He was only twenty-two years old.”
Shannon Griffin’s family struggled to deal with such a devastating, disrupting loss. Shannon was enjoying his first paid leave from his job at Walmart. He was a young man with a prosperous, bright future. He had dreams. He had set goals for himself. He was planning on making a life in Florida. He wanted a family of his own. He had left his house that night, thinking he was meeting a girl.
As far as a “playa” mentality, Jennifer Mee seemed to fit into that mold quite effortlessly, a fact that became clear as the press dismantled her life and dug into her social media sites, publishing what was Jennifer’s online presence during those days leading up to Shannon’s murder. On Facebook, back on September 4, 2010, six or so weeks before the murder, Jennifer wrote: DIS WEEKEND IS FINA BE A GREAT WEEKEND. BAE GOT A SHOW THEN A AFTA PARTY. THEN ME N MY BAE GETEN A RENTAL N GOING 2 DA STRIP CLUB.
Jennifer’s boyfriend, Lamont Newton, fashioned himself a rapper—that “show” was a gig Lamont had.
Reading this later, Jennifer’s family wondered if they ever knew her at all. It surely didn’t sound like the Jennifer in the years before she left the house and went off on her own.
That strip club Jennifer referred to was, of course, Bottom to the Top, where Lamont had purportedly hung out while Jennifer sold drugs on the streets around the club.
A few former friends of Jennifer’s spoke to reporters in those days following her arrest. While many could not believe what she was being accused of, others had seen it coming for a long time. One boy said Jennifer was texting him recently and all she ever talked about was “getting drunk and high.”
Jennifer’s Myspace pages told a similar story. The photos she had posted and the things she wrote would lead one to believe Jennifer was getting in over her head, but she was also embracing and even enjoying a life she had created for herself away from the family.
The wallpaper on her Myspace page depicted stacks of pink money. Her status of where she lived was “St. Pistol, Florida.” She referred to herself as “Diva,” bragging in a bodacious manner about her new lifestyle, sharing
one of her most common sayings during those days: [I am the] female version of a hustla, maken so much money idk what 2 do wit it.
“Some of those things,” Rachel explained, “were posted on her sites by [others]. But Jennifer allowed them to stay on the sites, I know that.”
In jail, all Jennifer could do at this point was wait it out. There was no chance of her getting out on bond. A trial date would soon be set as John Trevena declared he needed time to figure out what type of defense to lodge in Jennifer’s case. Yet, as the New Year holiday came and went, and Shannon Griffin’s family members were left to celebrate what would be his twenty-third birthday on January 23, 2011, tragedy struck the Robidoux household.
CHAPTER 22
ONCE AGAIN IT was a phone call in the middle of the night. Rachel was at her own home this time around, sleeping. It was February 4, 2011. She awoke near 3 A.M. to the sound of her phone ringing.
“Yeah . . . hello?”
The person on the other end explained what was going on.
Rachel dropped the phone, woke up Chris, and got dressed. Soon, both were out the door and on their way.
As they drove from Spring Hill down to St. Pete, Rachel thought about how ill her mother had been. She’d spent some time in rehab lately, but Rachel had been under the impression that she was getting stronger and working toward going back home.
Now, this.
It took about an hour for them to make it into town, but they were too late. When Rachel and Chris arrived, they were told immediately that Rachel’s mother, a woman Rachel called “the best friend I ever had,” had passed away from congenital heart failure. She was relatively young, just sixty-eight years old.
One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer Page 7