One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer

by M. William Phelps

  Still, if you ask Jennifer, she and Tyrone hit it off. “He thought I was beautiful . . . ,” Jennifer said. “Little did I know he was nothing but trouble.”

  Losing her virginity to the guy, she explained, “was the worst mistake ever.”

  It was this relationship, Jennifer claimed, that introduced her to the world of drugs and sex and everything that her parents had taught her not to get mixed up in. She referred to it as a “life I never thought I would have experienced.”

  What’s clear here is that Rachel never understood—or maybe comprehended—the depth of this relationship as it was going on, because Jennifer kept it hidden, for the most part, from her parents.

  “First, I’ll say moving to Florida and a big city was a shell shock,” Rachel later commented. “I saw good in all people unroll about a year after that, [but] then got a reality check dealing with city life—thugs, the hood, and streetwalkers were all new to me. Until then, I didn’t see people of color as different. That being said, I didn’t judge one way or another until [Tyrone O’Donnell] gave me a reason.”

  Rachel went on to say she knew when the two met that Tyrone “was already in and out of the system.” For the three years Jen and Tyrone dated, because he was in and out of juvenile detention centers so often, they wouldn’t speak or see each other for six months or more, but then would start to talk again as soon as he got out. Obviously, it wasn’t until Rachel and Chris found those letters that Rachel realized the relationship never really slowed down when he was locked up.

  “I didn’t like him because of his lack of respect,” Rachel remembered. “They started living together.... I hated the idea, but, of course, I didn’t know the real [Tyrone] until later on—the drug dealing, women beating, stealing.... I truly believe that’s where her life took a turn for the worst—being exposed to the ghetto thug life.”

  As far as an overall change in her daughter, Rachel said she didn’t notice anything different about Jennifer until “about six months or maybe a year before she got locked up” due to the felony murder charges. Thus, despite that road in which Jennifer traveled with Tyrone, it wasn’t until early 2010 that Rachel said she realized Jennifer was in over her head.

  With Tyrone, Jennifer fell hard. She was just a teenager, Jennifer said, contradicting an earlier statement that she had been well versed in “weed” and “sex” before meeting Tyrone. But Tyrone brought an entire new level of understanding of that drug life into Jennifer’s world.

  Cocaine.

  Tyrone led Jennifer into a life of smoking crack and snorting coke, she later alleged in a letter to me.

  I remember I sold my first piece of crack at thirteen years old, Jennifer wrote, referring to a time just after meeting Tyrone. He showed me the fast life and from there, that’s all I knew.

  After admitting this to me, Jennifer wrote (for about the third time) : The only thing I wish that could have been different would have been that my mom could have been home more.

  As she explained that her life after meeting Tyrone took on a criminal, dark path, in the same breath, Jennifer wrote: I’m not trying to be funny, but people put me in a category of goin’ “hood.” In reality, I was a follower, when I should have been a leader.

  Jennifer said she has done bad things in her life, but she’d “never been a violent” person. Indeed, there is no record of Jennifer becoming violent with anyone. Before her arrest on felony murder charges, there is no record of Jennifer ever being arrested. Yet being charged with felony murder didn’t require a history of violence. To be clear, Jennifer was charged as someone who knew there was a robbery about to take place, knew there was a weapon involved in that robbery, and took part in planning and carrying it out. The fact that a murder took place within the framework of that initial crime made the charge against her felony murder. It didn’t mean she planned to murder Shannon Griffin. It meant a murder took place under the commission of another crime, and Jennifer Mee had knowledge of it and took part in it.

  I’m very calm and laidback, Jennifer continued, unless you piss me off, and even that takes a lot.

  She went on to write how she didn’t understand how she got caught up in a mess like this: Now [I’m] goin’ to prison I am afraid I’ll let this place get the best of me. . . . I’m really trying to show everyone I’m not the type of person they [emphasis mine] made me out to be....

  The types of people Jennifer meant by “they”—the “media, police, and prosecutors”—were trying to portray her as just a “ghetto thug” after her arrest. Her mom, Rachel, agreed: “I know what type of person she is. [Jennifer] would give a person in need her last dollar even if she didn’t know them, if she knew that they needed it. She always wanted to make people happy and to be a friend.”

  There’s evidence to support that statement about Jennifer Mee by her mother. On the other hand, there is plenty of additional evidence, including what Jennifer herself told me, to indicate that when she was away and beyond the confines of parental boundaries, Jennifer Mee was a completely different person—very close, in fact, to that person “they” had made her out to be. You add to that what Jennifer wrote on her Myspace and Facebook pages, the way she talked, the people she hung around with, the lifestyle she led at the time of her arrest and in the years before, and the person Jennifer Mee claimed she wasn’t had been the exact person she had become.

  “With Jennifer,” Rachel said, “she and I [were] very close. She had another life I didn’t know about, maybe out of shame and disappointment of not wanting to hurt me. It seems she was able to be what people wanted her to be, depending on who she was with at that time.”

  Her boyfriend at the time of her arrest, Lamont Newton, was a guy Jennifer described in her letter in glowing terms: Wow, we dated for about [five months and] he was amazing. He treated me like a queen. He was perfect.

  In the next statement, which sums up that perfection within a relationship Jennifer accepted in the place of love, she wrote: He never put his hands on me. The only thing that I can say would have been better would be him [not] selling drugs....

  Jennifer Mee’s life was a contradiction: she was a known drug dealer.

  Jennifer was already selling crack before I met her, Lamont wrote to me. She was selling when she was with [Tyrone].

  CHAPTER 26

  RACHEL’S FATHER DEVELOPED dementia after suffering that terrible, life-altering stroke, a condition that made all of their lives even harder to deal with as the spring of 2011 brought in balmy Florida temperatures and Jennifer sat behind bars. The only silver lining out of it all had been that Jennifer was being housed at Pinellas County Jail and had not been transferred or moved far away. So the family could see her when time and the prison permitted. Yet all they could do was wait and hope, wondering what the future was going to bring: a deal with the prosecution or a murder trial? Rachel and Jennifer did not know.

  As Rachel went about her days, trying to deal with what life was throwing at her nearly on a daily basis, she couldn’t help but think that Jennifer had gotten mixed up in being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe that was her hope, anyway. Rachel had no idea, of course, that Jennifer had admitted to police by this time that she knew they were going to rob Shannon Griffin. For Rachel, the evidence she had heard explained a scenario that did not involve her daughter at all.

  “I kept hearing her saying, ‘It really was a date . . . , ’” Rachel said later, referring to that first phone call she and Jennifer had after Jennifer’s arrest. To Rachel, this meant Jennifer Charron had set up a date with Shannon. And when Laron found out, he followed her there and snapped, killing Shannon in the heat of a jealous rage.

  “Mr. Trevena had told us by then about [my daughter’s] first statement,” Rachel recalled.

  That first statement Jennifer gave police, beginning at 5:45 P.M. on Sunday, October 24, 2010, not yet twenty-four-hours after the murder, was rather telling. Jennifer sat with Detective Gary Gibson. It’s important to note that the SPPD had been
investigating the case around the clock since Shannon’s death and the evidence investigators collected led them to bringing Jennifer in on that day for questioning. She hadn’t been targeted in any way, and, truthfully, Laron and Lamont had been arrested hours before the SPPD even realized Jennifer Mee was part of it all.

  Jennifer had been inside the SPPD for “several hours” by the time Detective Gibson sat down with her to talk. Right away, Jennifer agreed with the detective that she had been treated “fairly” and was now ready to give her version of the events that led to Shannon’s murder.

  “We’re talking about a homicide,” Gibson said into the recording device.

  Jennifer said she was speaking with police under her own free will and there were “no problems” with the SPPD and her talking. In other words, she waived her right to an attorney.

  Her first mistake was to sit and talk without an attorney. Whether she was guilty of anything or not, it didn’t matter. The fact that Jennifer was talking (and purportedly lying) became a hole Jennifer Mee would have a hard time digging herself out from during the coming years.

  Rachel and Jennifer later said that in Jennifer’s delicate mind-set at the time, she did not think she had done anything wrong.

  Before they started to chat, Gibson showed Jennifer a photograph of a revolver and then asked if she had ever seen the weapon before and if she knew who might own the gun.

  “Laron,” Jennifer answered without hesitating.

  Gibson wanted a last name.

  “No, sir,” she said, indicating that she had no idea what Laron’s last name was.

  But she had recognized the gun in the photograph.

  Gibson encouraged Jennifer to explain what happened.

  Jennifer told Gibson she was at the park up the street from the apartment the previous night when everything went bad. As Jennifer talked through what would be her first explanation of the events (there would be a second version later), she referred to Shannon as “the suspect” several times.

  Until, that is, Detective Gibson corrected her, calling Shannon “the victim.”

  “I mean ‘victim,’” she said. “That’s what I meant . . . I apologize.”

  At first, Jennifer told her story in one long breath, saying Shannon was “supposed to meet us or whatever the case may be. Let me rephrase it—was trying to meet Jen, the other Jennifer.”

  Jennifer Mee was talking about her roommate, Jennifer Charron. Mee said she had no idea that Shannon Griffin and Jennifer Charron “had any type of relation going on, and then when Laron had, I guess, found out that [Shannon] had some type of relation going on with his girlfriend, Laron snapped, grabbed the man up, choked him, and pulled the gun out of the bookbag and put it to the man’s head and told the man not to say anything and brought the man to the back of the house and shot and killed him.”

  She also admitted knowing the gun was inside a bookbag.

  As seemingly straightforward and simple as it sounded, that entire explanation felt much too cut-and-dry to the detective, although he did not let on that he felt this way. Now was not the time to badger Jennifer Mee and throw evidence of the contrary in her face. Gibson wanted to let Jennifer talk. See what type of role she placed herself in regarding this crime. If he could then go out and back up Jennifer’s statement with evidence, well, they were onto something.

  Within Jennifer’s explanation, there was motive and opportunity present for Laron. Love, money, and revenge are the three major motivations for murder. In a jealous rage, apparently, Laron carried out an execution-style murder.

  It seemed to fit.

  Jennifer said she heard “two” gunshots, but she did not see the “actual shooting” take place.

  After the murder, she recalled, “I didn’t stay around. I left. I fled from everything. I didn’t know what to do.”

  After being asked, Jennifer said it was “me, Jennifer [Charron], Lamont, and Laron” at the park—a flagrant lie, which would be proven false.

  She referred to Lamont as a “friend.”

  Jennifer Mee and Detective Gibson then began to talk about possible evidence at the scene. Gibson wanted to know if Jennifer could explain to him anything she might have seen that had been left at the crime scene.

  “A pair of Jordan Slides,” she said. They were Laron’s. And she knew this because Laron was “the only one that came back with no shoes on.”

  Right after the shooting, Jennifer told Gibson, Laron was frantic.

  “Make phone calls,” Laron said to no one in particular. They were all standing in the park, perhaps thinking: What in the hell just happened? “We need to leave,” Laron continued. “I think I killed the man. I think I killed the man.”

  So they ran from the park at that moment and wound up back at the apartment they shared.

  Jennifer explained how she “thought they were just going to try and rob the man and leave him alone. Then when the man tried to grab for the barrel, Laron thought . . . the man was trying to take Laron’s life. Well . . .”

  Although he did not come out and explain it to Jennifer, Gibson had a major problem with this. Jennifer had started off saying it was a quarrel between two men and a girl, a sort of love triangle that went bad. Now she was saying it was a planned robbery gone bad. Which was it?

  In any event, despite whatever the motive might have been, Gibson had important pieces of a case against Jennifer Mee in place: an admission from her that she “knew” there was a weapon involved and “knew” beforehand there was going to be a robbery.

  Gibson asked Jennifer where she was getting this information from—had someone told her, or had she witnessed it for herself?

  Jennifer said she was there; she saw the entire incident unfold: “I seen it. . . .”

  Then she explained that sometime after Shannon arrived, Laron took out his weapon and put it to Shannon’s head. According to Jennifer, Laron said: “Don’t. Say. Nothing.”

  Shannon reacted instinctively and grabbed the gun by the barrel.

  Laron moved quickly and “snatched it back,” Jennifer recalled for Gibson. And once he had the barrel pointed at Shannon’s head, Shannon was a hostage, willing to do whatever Laron asked. “And then [he] brought him all the way to the back and that’s when I heard the gunshots and I left.”

  Some other facts supported by Jennifer, which came out during this first interview, included how Shannon, according to Jennifer, became aggressive when he showed up at the park and realized Laron and the others were there. He didn’t expect anyone but Jennifer Charron to be there, Jennifer Mee explained. “He was coming over there to chill with [Jenni], I guess.”

  Gibson wanted to know which of the two men became hostile first.

  “Laron did,” Jennifer said, “because he seen—he asked for Jennifer [Charron] and he also was asking me because I was sitting next to [Lamont].”

  Detective Gibson asked Jennifer if she could give him some insight into Laron’s demeanor and if it changed when Shannon showed up looking for Jennifer Charron.

  Jennifer said it definitely did. She used the word “snapped” for a second time.

  And that was it. They concluded the interview around 5:50 P.M.

  Jennifer had given the detective a narrative of what happened, placing herself in the role of supporting the robbery by taking part in it, and potentially knowing Laron was bringing a weapon with him.

  This would not be the last time the SPPD spoke to Jennifer Mee about the murder of Shannon Griffin. When they once again shined that interrogation light in her face, for a second time, boy, would her story change!

  And so one had to wonder: What happened that night and in those days leading up to the murder of twenty-two-year-old Shannon Griffin? Who was truly involved? And was it a robbery, or was it a jealous man in a rage murdering a man he thought was hooking up with his lady?

  The answers to those questions began years before Shannon Griffin rode a scooter down to a vacant house in South St. Pete on the night of October 23, 2010,
parked the two-wheeled motor vehicle on its kickstand, and walked across the street toward a death trap.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 27

  UNSUCCESSFULLY TRYING TO manage a life that Jennifer Mee later described as nothing short of disappointments amid depression and other emotional conflicts, Jennifer fell into a routine of school, going to the movies on Friday nights, hanging over friends’ houses, and walking down to the nearby park to see who was around. It was late 2006 and the early part of January 2007. On the surface, her life seemed to fall in line with what many fifteen-year-old kids consider the daily grind. Unlike many of her peers, however, Jennifer and her friends would smoke weed, laugh, cry, maybe take some pills, have sex with specific boys, and complain about being teens in such a judgmental world, especially when you’re considered among the unpopular. Jennifer indicated that she despised school and everything about it then.

  “I thought it was for punks.”

  On a typical day during this period of her life, unbeknownst to Rachel or Chris Robidoux, Jennifer would arrive home around one-thirty in the afternoon from school. Instead of studying or maybe watching some television, having an afternoon snack, Jennifer would sneak boys into the house to party and have sex. It was as if she lived in a bubble where anything she wanted to do was okay: no parental supervision, no rules, and no one to answer to.

  This routine was disrupted, however, when Jennifer’s life dramatically changed one morning. And from that moment on, things would never be the same for her. It was a time during her high-school days that Jennifer recalled as if it had happened the day before.