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

by M. William Phelps

  Lamont grew up in a family of two boys and three girls. There were never any problems in the house, Earnest said. “My mom always took us out. We had family get-togethers.”

  Lamont later talked about a family split apart by death and other problems he did not go into detail about. As for goals, Lamont said he once saw himself playing football. “But I didn’t really have goals. I just wanted to make it in life, give to the poor, get my family back together, have kids. . . .” His family had not always gotten along and Lamont dreamed of that quintessential, maybe even clichéd, Southern family image of having barbeques, Sunday dinners with everybody around the table, and big holiday celebrations. Normal things that every human being desires, perhaps.

  When they were children, Lamont would always tell his big brother that he was going to be a rapper someday.

  “He looked up to me because I am in the music industry, and anything having to do with music, Lamont was into. He loved rap.”

  As far as Earnest could tell, whenever he saw Jennifer and Lamont together, “the bond they had, I really do think he did love her. I mean, he was always with her.”

  * * *

  Jennifer now lived in a second efficiency apartment in downtown St. Pete with Lamont. It was another small, one-room residence with little to no space. The only door inside the residence was for the bathroom. Allison went over at the apartment a lot, she said, and was able to watch as the relationship between Jennifer and Lamont progressed. What she felt later was that, at best, it was one-sided.

  “Lamont did not love her. I know he didn’t.”

  Again, it was as if Jennifer was being used, she knew it, but had accepted it as a by-product of being in a relationship. Because Lamont did not hit her, Jennifer viewed this as a loving gesture.

  “Jennifer never thought she deserved any better,” Allison said, nearly in tears as she looked back on her friend’s life. Like many who knew Jennifer Mee, she was frustrated that she was unable to stop what was a fast-moving train from going off the rails.

  The first time Allison met Lamont and hung out with him and Jennifer, it was spring break, 2010. Jennifer and Allison had picked up Lamont and drove out to the beach. They met up with some other friends, including several of Lamont’s.

  “Everything seemed cool,” Allison remembered. “They were nice,” meaning Lamont and his friends. “They were boys, of course,” which meant they were a bit crass and sexual in their comments and overall attitude. Besides smoking some weed and drinking alcohol, which Allison said she herself did not take part in, Lamont and his boys were okay. Everyone got along. Jennifer was beaming, Allison recalled, when she was with Lamont on that day. Just the look in her eyes: Jennifer believed she was in love.

  According to Lamont, he met Jennifer through a friend who had hooked up with Jennifer on MocoSpace. “He went on one date with her, the second date, he did not go,” Lamont shared. “So he told me to get with her, because she wasn’t his type of girl.”

  Lamont soon learned that Jennifer was loose. She’d slept with lots of guys Lamont knew, even one of his cousins.

  As he got to know her, Lamont claimed, he became “attracted to her personality.” He was not the “type” that “cared about looks.” And as he and Jennifer grew closer, he couldn’t understand why she had gone back with Tyrone again and again. Lamont would hear from Jennifer’s own sisters that every chance she got, she would bed down with Tyrone. What unnerved Lamont most was that Tyrone would hit her, he said, and sleep with other girls around town, yet she’d still take him in.

  After Lamont and Jennifer moved in together, Jennifer’s life took on an entire new level of smoking weed, popping pills, doing X and alcohol, according to several former acquaintances. Lamont never hit her, Jennifer and several others reported.

  The state paid for Jennifer’s apartment and she continued to get her monthly disability check. Although the apartment was close to downtown, and some might consider the area a bit “ghetto,” as Rachel called it, “in Florida, you could be in the ghetto driving around, and one mile down the road are million-dollar homes. Just beyond that are suburbs. A mile from there, you’ll see prostitution and drugs,” Rachel explained.

  No sooner had Lamont and Jennifer moved in together than they began to have the same problems with the landlord that Jennifer had when she lived with Tyrone in the other apartment. They were “playing music too often and too loud in the middle of the night,” Rachel later said.

  There was that, but other issues became relevant, too. Soon Jennifer was being kicked out of this new apartment because of “suspicious behavior” by her and Lamont. The building’s owner, Art DeCosmo, approached Jennifer on October 1, 2010, and asked her to leave. “She just didn’t really want to conform,” DeCosmo later told reporters. “We were getting calls because of loud music, her sitting out front with different people. It appeared they were not doing the right thing. . . .” A few days would go by and DeCosmo would let it slide and try to look the other way, but he’d receive additional calls about the sketchy behavior and loud music. Jennifer was always cordial, he claimed, and “she always apologized” for the behavior, but she refused to change her ways. So DeCosmo was forced, essentially, to kick her and Lamont out.

  * * *

  Lamont wasn’t living with Jennifer officially; he was more or less hanging his hat at her apartment on most nights. Lamont had introduced Jennifer to an entire new group of people, one of whom was Jenni Charron, a rather pretty twenty-one-year-old with brown hair and curly bangs, brown eyes, and sharply painted-on eyebrows, distinctive and check-mark-like. At five feet five inches tall, 185 pounds, Jenni was a strong, tough, streetwise chick, a girl to be reckoned with. Jenni Charron’s boyfriend was Laron Raiford, Lamont’s best friend, hence the connection. Laron was the biggest of the bunch at six feet four inches tall, a skinny 165 pounds.

  “Charron was a good person in my eye,” Lamont recalled.

  When Jennifer and Lamont were finally tossed out of Jennifer’s efficiency during the second week of October, Laron and Jenni stepped up. They lived together at 610 Fifth Avenue North, a little place between man-made Round Lake and Mirror Lake. There was room, Laron told Lamont, and so Jennifer and Lamont moved in.

  From the first moment they lived together, someone close to the four explained, “They (Lamont and Laron) had Jennifer selling drugs.” Further, this source (who hung out at the apartment) added, “It was Jennifer’s job. They had Jennifer, at all these weird hours of the night, walking around downtown St. Pete, by herself, selling drugs for them.... She’d be hustling on the street—alone.”

  This is, at best, an exaggeration; Jennifer was selling drugs on her own at this time, she later admitted openly. Jennifer had taken to the job congenially, as if she had found a street calling of some sort. It turned into a release for her. It was a way to spread her “bad girl” wings and fly a little bit on her own. Perhaps she unconsciously did this more because she knew how bad it was going to make Rachel and Chris feel if they found out—a sort of punishment for the way she believed she had been treated due to the problems between her and Chris.

  As for Lamont putting her out on the streets, this, too, sounded like it was something Jennifer Mee told the people in her life because the opportunity was there to blame someone else for her own choices and misfortunes.

  LOL, Lamont wrote to me when I asked about this. I don’t know any woman that’ll sit on the block and sell her man’s dope for him.

  Lamont said Jennifer was “into a lot of things” when he met her. He wrote that [it was] not like when she met me this all started to happen! . . . I didn’t make a “good girl” go bad, that is not the case.

  All of the available evidence supports this.

  In addition, Lamont wrote about his intention: [I wanted to] show Jennifer love, something she didn’t have from any of her boyfriends. Now it’s true I did go to the club and make her stay home, but I didn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do.

  Furthe
r, Lamont could not stop her from dealing the drugs she had been dealing since before meeting him (and according to Jennifer since she had been thirteen). Lamont seemed to be a scapegoat on whom Jennifer could blame a shitty, criminal life.

  One of Jennifer’s biggest “problems,” Lamont said, was that Jennifer never liked “chilling with girls.” Instead, she “liked to chill with guys.”

  The reason why, Lamont said, people would claim he might not have loved Jennifer was because he never committed his heart completely to her for the sole reason that he knew as soon as Tyrone was on the block, Jennifer would run out and sleep with him.

  Later, Lamont claimed, he learned Jennifer was even “sleeping with Laron” when he and Jenni Charron were not around.

  Even more telling, Lamont learned, as he and Jennifer began living at the apartment, “Jennifer and Laron was setting up dates and robbing people.”

  The implication from Lamont was that Jennifer Mee would go online and lure a guy by promising him a romantic meeting. When he showed up, Laron would be there waiting to roll him.

  CHAPTER 52

  JENNIFER MEE COULD not run from the fact that she was a country girl from Vermont, who became an internationally known, fifteen-minute, disposable celebrity. In a brief amount of time, she had changed radically. She had morphed from a sixteen-year-old child with the hiccups, who smoked some weed, into a streetwise teen who dealt a bit of cocaine and had sex with Tyrone and other guys. From there, she further transformed into a nineteen-year-old hard-core, street-hustling drug pusher, who was sleeping with Laron Raiford and, according to Lamont Newton, planned and staged robberies. Was this all part of Jennifer’s “gangsta” mentality and the life she shared on her social networking pages?

  What’s clear about Lamont and Jennifer’s relationship was that it had been open. Both were “seeing other” people, Lamont said. Both knew it. And both respected the other enough not to “text” and “call” their other lovers while spending time together.

  “Jennifer made me look like a bad person,” Lamont said. “She made it look like I was the one that had been doing the things she was already doing.”

  Regardless, Jennifer was now out by herself, walking the streets with drugs (cocaine, pills, X), and users would come up to her and buy. It was extremely dangerous, and so unlike anything most who knew Jennifer would have expected from her. When Allison Baldwin heard what was going on, she immediately told Jennifer she needed to stop it and get herself a different life: dump Lamont, move out of that apartment, forget about Tyrone O’Donnell, and change her ways.

  “Attention,” Allison Baldwin assessed, looking back. “This girl just wanted attention.”

  Something Jennifer Mee was about to get—once again—in a big way.

  CHAPTER 53

  ONE OF THE most difficult things for Allison Baldwin to face was how dangerous a life her friend was leading. Nothing seemed to scare Jennifer anymore. And as Allison watched Jennifer slip further away from the young and naïve girl Allison once knew, Allison took several steps back and disengaged from not only the friendship, but the world in which Jennifer was so deeply involved.

  Allison said she never saw Lamont “get violent” with Jennifer. “But I have seen him get violent with other people.”

  What Jennifer explained to Allison one day, talking about what she and Lamont wanted to do, seemed so out of touch with reality (even for Jennifer), that Allison wondered after the words came from Jennifer’s mouth if she was hearing them correctly.

  “We want to build an empire,” Jennifer told Allison. She was referring to her and Lamont selling drugs (though Lamont was not there and had never acknowledged this same dream). It was as if she had watched Scarface one too many times and believed that was how the real world of selling dime bags of weed and $10 rocks of crack cocaine worked.

  The crowd Lamont hung around was absorbed in the “rap lifestyle,” as though they were going to become big recording stars one day. Lamont was playing small gigs at some of the downtown clubs on occasion.

  “Jennifer thought that was the lifestyle she should be living, because that was the lifestyle her boyfriend was living,” Allison explained.

  Only, Jennifer was taking it to the extremes.

  One interesting point Allison made was that she believed Jennifer never really wanted the fame she received from the hiccups “in general.” And that she was “absolutely not” disappointed when her star crashed and burned out. “Once it started happening (that fame), she was going to have to get used to it, either way. I honestly think she would have done it all without the fame, if that had been an option. . . .”

  At one time, Allison lived with Lamont and Jennifer inside that little efficiency that they were booted from before they moved in with Laron and Jenni. It was hard for Allison to have to sit and watch from such a close viewpoint. Seeing up close how Jennifer’s new life unfolded had given Allison an entire new perspective regarding how deeply Jennifer had become immersed in the streets.

  “It was the worst decision of my life, moving in there for a couple of weeks,” Allison explained. “A lot of bad things happened to me. I witnessed the drug selling and realized how people get caught up into that life so fast.”

  “How can you walk miles like this with drugs, knowing something bad could happen?” Allison asked Jennifer one night as Jennifer prepared to head out and sell dope. Allison had gone with Jennifer because she didn’t want Jennifer out alone. She was scared something might happen. “And so, while I was living there, I wasn’t about to allow her to go out there by herself.”

  Jennifer didn’t respond. What could she say?

  “Your boyfriend is in the club chillin’, and you’re out doing . . . drug-dealing work?” Allison said.

  The only answer Jennifer could offer was a shrug.

  As they walked the beat that night, a “weird car” began to follow closely behind them, so they ran back to the apartment and stayed in.

  “Are you actually making money from this?” Allison asked Jennifer. She figured that had to be part of the allure, the main reason why Jennifer was doing it. You look at her Myspace and Facebook pages during this period and Jennifer had photos of money and talked of how much she was making.

  “Kind of, I guess.... I’m making enough to pay some bills.”

  Allison shook her head. What was the point? If she wasn’t making all this money she had bragged about, why do it?

  Allison soon had an epiphany. Sitting one night inside the apartment, she told herself: I know what I deserve in life, and it is not living in this little apartment, watching all that is going on. . . .

  She took one last look around.

  “It was scary and so I left,” Allison said.

  * * *

  Sometime after Allison had moved out of the efficiency, Jennifer called and explained how she had “moved out, and with Lamont moved in with Laron and Jenni.” She didn’t mention, of course, that she had been thrown out.

  “Where’s my stuff?” Allison asked. She had left so quickly and under duress that she hadn’t taken all her belongings with her.

  “It’s with me here [at Jenni’s and Laron’s],” Jennifer said.

  “We’re gonna come and get my stuff,” Allison said. She had, in the interim, gotten back together with her boyfriend and alluded to the fact that she was bringing him with her. Allison didn’t want a hassle or any trouble. She just wanted her stuff. There had been a falling-out between Allison and Jennifer when Allison left, and she wanted Jennifer to understand she didn’t want any trouble.

  “Okay,” Jennifer said. She sounded unsure. There was hesitation and doubt about whether Allison should come over or not.

  Allison and her boyfriend drove over to the apartment Jennifer was now living in with Lamont, Jenni, and Laron. It was October 20. By now, Jennifer had changed so much. Her online social presence of that “gangsta/hustla” chick was so vastly different from the person she had been back in the day, Allison didn’t know what t
o expect. She also wanted nothing to do with Jennifer and that life anymore, as long as Jennifer was staying involved. She’d help her friend anytime she needed it, Allison made clear, but that was about the extent of the relationship from this point on.

  Laron answered the door. He looked upset and angry. Jennifer might have said something to him, Allison speculated.

  “Fuck do you want?” Laron asked angrily, walking out of the door and pushing Allison. “You, motherfucker,” he added, directing his attention to Allison’s boyfriend. “Fuck your punk-ass gonna do?”

  Laron and Allison’s boyfriend pushed and shoved each other back and forth, insults and vulgarities coming out of both of them. Allison’s boyfriend wasn’t about to allow Laron to disrespect her and talk to him that way without giving it back to Laron. All they wanted was Allison’s personal property. It was supposed to be simple.

  Jennifer walked out and saw what was going on.

  “What the hell, Jennifer?” Allison asked.

  Jennifer started acting like a badass, spewing venom at her so-called best friend.

  “We actually got into it,” Allison said later.

  “I don’t want any problems here, Jennifer. What the hell . . . I just want my stuff. I just want to go back to my life.”

  Laron stepped aside for a moment and, without warning, pulled out a .38 revolver handgun. He then proceeded to empty the chamber of its bullets in a slow and methodical manner. While he did that, Laron gave Allison and her boyfriend a clear warning: “Next time you motherfuckers come over here like this . . . talking shit . . . I’m gonna shoot both of you in the motherfucking head—you got that shit?”

  “Whatever,” Allison said. “You can keep my stuff, Jennifer!” She wanted to get her boyfriend out of there. “But I’m telling you this, Jennifer. . . . Something is going to end up coming your way . . . karma, something like that. You hear me?”