Rachel was devastated.
Three weeks later, it wasn’t a call this time, but Rachel had stopped by to see how her dad was doing since the death of his wife, and she found him on the floor, unresponsive, and had to call 911.
It felt to Rachel as if her family was taking a pounding, one blow after another. And all she could do to defend it was to sit back and accept that these were the cards and she had to make a hand of some kind out of them.
Rachel had been going over to the house every day to look after her dad since he’d lost his wife. She was even staying there during the week again, because her work was so close and her dad was alone.
As it turned out, Rachel’s father lived, despite having had a heart attack and a stroke. But life for Jennifer Mee’s grandfather would never be the same.
“This was the craziest time of my entire life,” Rachel said later. “My mom and I were . . . It was to the point where she would be thinking something and I would know what she was thinking.” That loss alone, on top of what was going on with Jennifer and then her father’s stroke, wore Rachel down. “It just tore me up.”
When she heard, Jennifer blamed herself for all of it.
“Jennifer felt because of her arrest and all that was happening,” Rachel explained, “she had killed my mother.”
For a lifeline, some sort of saving grace out of the black hole Rachel found herself falling in, she kept going back in her mind to that one thing Jennifer had said to her long ago on the telephone, on the night of her arrest: “Mom, it really was a date. . . .”
Rachel seized upon this. She felt there was something to it.
The theory Rachel put together in her mind, and began to believe, was that the “date” Jennifer referred to had been set up between Jennifer Charron (Laron Raiford’s girlfriend) and Shannon Griffin. Not Rachel’s Jennifer. After all, if it really was a date, how could Jennifer Mee justify it when she was supposedly in love with Lamont Newton? Why would Jennifer Mee be setting up a date with a man she met online, to begin with?
It was a part of the murder narrative that didn’t make sense to Rachel. But, as Rachel later explained, if you place Jennifer Charron into the same scenario, it made all the sense in the world.
* * *
In April 2011, Jennifer Mee gave a jailhouse interview to Today under the guidance and direction of her attorney, John Trevena, who had explained to Rachel and Chris that the right television appearance could help Jennifer’s case in the end.
“Mr. Trevena actually pushed it,” Rachel said. “Mr. Trevena is very close with [someone who works for the Today show], to the point where they go out together and so forth, so he set it up.”
Jennifer was being held at the Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater, Florida, where NBC News correspondent Amy Robach sat down with her for a formal, “exclusive” interview, as NBC billed it. The first Jennifer had given any media outlet since her arrest.
Jennifer was dressed in blue prison johnnies. Her greasy, unkempt hair was set in a tight ponytail, with two distinctive, thick bangs outlining her pudgy baby face. She was emotional and cried through much of the interview, often wiping away tears that dripped out of her eyes without warning, lending credence to the notion that they were genuine.
As Jennifer explained to Amy Robach, it wasn’t until she had been placed inside the back of a police car and on her way to jail that the weight of it all “hit” her and she was not living a dream—that her life had taken a complete 180-degree turn for the worst.
There were moments when Jennifer smiled during the interview and did not cry, mostly while describing her life, as Amy Robach put it, being the “it girl” after returning from Today as the Hiccup Girl. Everyone in school, Jennifer said, had now noticed her for the first time. It was clear that Jennifer enjoyed the limelight, the attention, and whatever she was able to glean from her brush with stardom. Yet, when it faded, Jennifer was left to deal with life afterward, all on her own.
“What did you do with that fame?” Robach wondered.
“I basically let it all go to my head and started doing what I wanted to do.”
With her eyes red and swollen, and those tears streaming down both cheeks, Jennifer talked about how her life went from fame to emotional and moral famine. She said, “I took the path of the Devil, I really did. Instead of keeping my faith with the Lord, I let the Devil overcome me.”
Without tears, Jennifer said she did think about Shannon Griffin, the victim, “every day . . . every day I do.” But her thoughts about him were centered on Jennifer herself possibly being the victim and how close she had been herself to death. “Because I think, what if that was me behind that barrel—that could have been my life taken. He didn’t deserve to . . . ,” she tried to say next, stopping for a brief moment, unable to get the next word out, instead adding, “He was very young. He was just only a couple of years older than I was. I think about it every day and it eats me alive.”
Jennifer cried after Amy Robach asked her if she felt responsible for Shannon’s death. Then, answering, Jennifer hesitated, looked off to the side and clearly thought about what to say before uttering, “Ah, I cannot tell you the truth . . . because I”—and she smiled here a bit, perhaps out of nerves—“I didn’t do nothing wrong. I’m not guilty of anything.”
NBC reported during the interview that it had spoken to the SPPD and gotten “two versions” of statements Jennifer had given on that night she had been arrested. And for the first time the public got a small taste of the state’s case and what happened during those hours after Jennifer and the others had been arrested. At first, during an initial statement, Jennifer told detectives that Shannon Griffin was murdered as part of a love triangle between Laron and Shannon and another woman, presumably Laron’s girlfriend, Jennifer Charron.
“When Laron found out, I guess, that [Shannon] had some type of relationship with his girlfriend, he snapped. . . .”
That excerpt from an SPPD interview that NBC played was only half of the story, however. During a second interview later that same night, after admitting that she had lied during the first statement, Jennifer Mee broke down and told SPPD detectives that she had actually lured Shannon to that location so Lamont and Laron could rob him. And that the first statement was a story they had all concocted to try and get away with it.
“He was calling Laron’s phone, asking me where I could meet him,” Jennifer said in a tape of that interview, referring to Shannon.
With Amy Robach, Jennifer switched gears again and told the reporter that she had been “coerced into taking the blame.”
So Robach asked the obvious next question: “Why would you implicate yourself in a murder?”
“Um,” Jennifer responded, again with a nervous smile, “from . . . uh, I don’t know. It’s hard. It’s hard to explain. I made a mistake. I thought because I was quote/end quote”—and she used both her hands here to make air quotes with her peace sign fingers—“famous, so young, nothing would happen to me. So I went with a story I thought I wouldn’t get into trouble with. But in all reality, it put me behind bars . . . and I could be facing life.”
Jennifer talked about how “rough” daily life was for her behind bars. For three days leading up to the interview, she explained, she was on “lockdown twenty-three hours a day. . . .”
What broke her heart, Jennifer said as the tears came on once again, was that she had missed her grandmother’s funeral, again mentioning how she believed she played a “big part” in her passing because of all the turmoil and strife she’d caused the family with her behavior.
Robach wanted to know what Jennifer thought about the outcome of her trial down the road. Could she make a prediction?
Jennifer said she didn’t even want to think that far in advance, but she was “scared.”
As the interview wound down, Robach explained that Shannon Griffin’s family would likely be watching the interview when it aired and she wanted to extend to Jennifer the invitation to speak directly to the
m.
Jennifer became more emotional than she had been during the entire interview; it came across as sincere and honest as she began by saying she was sorry for their loss. She added, “I wish that everything would have been different from what it all proceeded out to be.” She paused. Sniffled. “He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t. He did not deserve to go and be shot.” She had a hard time getting those final few words out because her emotions took over.
What was clear postinterview was that Jennifer Mee had just changed her entire defense, maybe without realizing or even knowing what she was doing. John Trevena had been saying that his defense for Jennifer was going to be grounded in her diagnosis of Tourette’s and the idea that she did not have control over what she had done. Some were claiming that the Tourette defense was the basis for an insanity plea. Yet, Jennifer, all by herself, was now saying that the second statement she gave to police amounted to a false confession. Because based alone on what Jennifer had admitted to the SPPD, she herself claimed she lured Shannon Griffin to that location so Lamont and Laron could rob him. And under Florida law, if Jennifer Mee knew that Shannon Griffin was going to be robbed and she took part in the planning and carrying out of that robbery, and Shannon was murdered during the course of that crime, even if Jennifer ran away as Shannon was taken behind a building to be mugged, she was just as guilty of first-degree felony murder as Lamont and Laron were.
Not once during the interview with NBC that aired did Jennifer Mee hiccup.
CHAPTER 23
THE SPPD’S RESPONSE to Jennifer Mee going on national television and proclaiming she had nothing to do with luring and/or killing Shannon Griffin was immediate. New evidence in the case was released to the media and with it came some rather shocking allegations by law enforcement, explaining at least part of the state’s case against Jennifer.
The evidence was in the form of text messages between Shannon Griffin and the person on the other end of Laron Raiford’s cell phone, which the SPPD suspected to be Jennifer Mee (because she had told them it was, in fact, her). There was some indication that the meeting between Jennifer and Shannon was not a “date,” after all, which had been previously reported, but was a setup by Jennifer Mee to sell Shannon a “half ounce” of marijuana. Initial contact between the two had been made on MocoSpace (a social media website for networking, chatting, and game playing); but on the night Shannon was murdered, according to the SPPD, Jennifer communicated with Shannon via Laron’s cell phone, texting him as he made his way toward a location Jennifer had given him.
Just across the street and around the corner from where Jennifer, Lamont, Laron, and Laron’s girl, Jennifer Charron, lived was a vacant, renovated home. Jennifer Mee had told Shannon to meet her in front of that building. The first text message the SPPD released had taken place at seven twenty-two that night, October 23, fewer than three hours before Shannon Griffin was murdered.
I WIL DO 55, Jennifer allegedly texted Shannon, leading law enforcement to believe that $55 was the price they agreed on for that small amount of weed.
ALRIGHT, Shannon texted back.
There was a break for a few minutes.
Then Shannon indicated he wanted to confirm the address: IT WAS 5TH AVE, 6TH ST?
NAW CUM TO GROOVE N 7TH ST NRTH, Jennifer supposedly texted back.
Six minutes passed and Jennifer did not see Shannon where they had agreed to meet. So she texted him: DAMN BROWEAUAT?
Shannon answered right away: OK IM ON 7TH AN GROVE.
AM CUMIN, Jennifer said. Then: CALL ME.
The SPPD made it clear that Shannon received a final call on his phone—allegedly from Jennifer Mee, who was using Laron’s cell phone—at 9:44 P.M. And when Shannon arrived at the scene where they had agreed to meet, just in front of that vacant house at 511 Seventh Street North, Jennifer greeted Shannon and led him “behind the vacant house . . . knowing Raiford and Newton were waiting” in the shadows to rob Shannon at gunpoint.
There was more evidence, plenty more, but the SPPD did not want to release it at this time, seeing that the SAO was building a case against Jennifer Mee, Laron Raiford and Lamont Newton. The feeling was that Laron and Lamont were going to plead out their cases separately and had given the SAO what it needed to prosecute Jennifer on murder charges.
CHAPTER 24
“BEFORE SHE STARTED dating one particular boy, you have to understand something,” Rachel Robidoux later said, “Jennifer was very clean-cut, pretty much a normal teenager.”
Rachel didn’t know it, but that statement was not entirely true. It was an idyllic image that a mother, Rachel, and a stepfather, Chris, had of Jennifer. As Jennifer herself later explained to me, she was a different person from that “clean-cut” girl inside the home once she stepped outside and entered her own world beyond the family.
Whether they didn’t realize it, or chose not to accept who Jennifer was becoming, there were glimpses of this other Jennifer obvious to both Chris and Rachel. For one, they had intercepted several letters a boy named Tyrone O’Donnell (pseudonym) had sent Jennifer while he was incarcerated in a juvenile detention center.
Tyrone was Jennifer’s first serious relationship. Or, as she later explained to me, “My first love and crush.”
Jennifer was a mere twelve-year-old child, just about to turn thirteen, when she and Tyrone started “dating.” Later, it was clear that Rachel did not even know Jennifer was dating Tyrone until she and Chris seized those letters.
What became obvious in the letters between them, Rachel explained, “was that he had taken her down a clear path to hell.”
By the time Jennifer moved in with Tyrone in the months before her eighteenth birthday, they had been dating for many years already, which could have made it all right in her fragile, young mind.
“He was very abusive to her,” Rachel said. “He had even knocked her out one time. She showed up with a black eye. I questioned her. She told me [Tyrone’s] nephew threw a toy car at her.”
Jennifer later said Tyrone “beat me and introduced me to drugs.”
According to Rachel, Jennifer had gotten pregnant while living with Tyrone; and when he found out, “he punched her in the stomach and caused her to have a miscarriage.”
Tyrone had been in and out of youth detention centers (and, after turning eighteen, jails) since the age of eleven. His record is enormous. One of his most vicious crimes was that during the time he was with Jennifer, Tyrone had beaten and robbed an elderly woman. He had a foot and fifty pounds on Jennifer; he was five feet ten inches tall, 175 pounds, most of it muscle—an explosive, intense, uncaring, cold soul, who could walk into the apartment while living with Jennifer and erupt into a hurricane of violence for no reason other than Jennifer saying the wrong thing or looking at him the wrong way.
Jennifer first told me she met Tyrone at a nearby park one day while she was hanging out with friends, watching the boys play basketball. Taking all of what Rachel and Jennifer said about Tyrone, the obvious questions become: Why would Jennifer choose such a person for a lover? Why hadn’t she seen the signs? Why hadn’t she taken the warnings of his explosive temper, not to mention the beatings she received, and run from the boy? Why would she stay in this abusive, toxic relationship for years?
Jennifer had grown up in a Christian household with reportedly no violence, according to Rachel and Chris Robidoux. She had never been abused, Rachel said, by Rachel or Chris. She had been given the proper amount of discipline and moral guidance. Thus, how does a girl grow up in that seemingly stable environment and then go out into the world and choose the polar opposite for a companion? Was it as simple as Jennifer made it out to be later on: “My mother was never around.”
In Rachel’s view, it started for Jennifer in early childhood, when she was allegedly raped.
“And I didn’t know it,” Rachel said, “and we . . . weren’t told about the abuse until later.”
It was several months after Jennifer had been (allegedly) raped, when she was outside in fron
t of the Robidoux house playing with her sister one afternoon. Jennifer had on these shorts that were too big and they kept falling down. After it happened several times, and wasn’t so much of a joke anymore, Jennifer’s sister ran into the house and found their mother.
“Jennifer doesn’t like her shorts falling down, Mommy—she’s scared that what happened to her . . . will happen again, Mommy.”
This piqued Rachel’s interest.
“What are you talking about?” Rachel asked.
The sister explained best she could.
Rachel and Chris questioned Jennifer. She told them what her attackers had been doing to her.
They called the police.5
“There was never a time when she came to me and Chris with this and we did not believe her,” Rachel later clarified, answering a later allegation by someone that she and Chris told Jennifer it was all in her head after Jennifer mentioned being abused and, at first, did not believe her.
If true, this violent and altogether self-esteem-draining sexual assault experience, which was Jennifer’s introduction to sex at an age when a kid should not even hear the word, Rachel later said, set Jennifer up for many personal problems that had arisen from the abuse.
“. . . We would have rather wanted her to date within her own race,” Rachel explained at the risk of sounding racist, “but it was her choice and Jennifer chose to start dating only black men.”
CHAPTER 25
THE SECOND STORY of meeting Tyrone O’Donnell, which Jennifer shared with me (perhaps forgetting the first), went like this. She was standing outside a friend’s house waiting for the “church bus” to pick her up and take her home. It was the spring of 2003. Jennifer was twelve, almost thirteen. They had recently moved to Florida. Tyrone O’Donnell just happened to be there, waiting for that same bus, according to what Jennifer later explained in a letter. So they started talking. It was the beginning of a multiyear relationship that, after she turned fourteen, led to her losing her virginity, Jennifer said. And for those first few years, she explained, Tyrone was a “nice” guy—though it’s hard to rely on a then-fourteen-year-old girl’s judgment of what constitutes “nice.” One could argue that Jennifer’s entire perception of good and bad had been skewed. She had no idea how to make healthy decisions for herself within the context of a relationship. She was too damn young to be dating, anyway, and had no idea what was unhealthy for her emotional well-being.
One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer Page 8