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

by M. William Phelps

  “I’m truly sorry for what happened to Shannon,” Lamont told me. “I ask for forgiveness from his family. Even knowing I didn’t do it or played a part, I didn’t do anything to stop it. . . .”

  Further, Lamont added, the “evidence” would prove that he didn’t have the gun in his hand that shot Shannon. “Evidence don’t show that I took [the gun] from Shannon—it is clear that I did not play a part in the robbery.”

  Earnest Smith had tried to stop Lamont from hanging around Laron: “Because I already knew what type of person Laron was.... He used to break into people’s houses and all that. I knew about this. I didn’t want my brother around it. But, you know, Laron and [Lamont] were like brothers, so what could I do? I couldn’t pull him away from Laron.”

  Late that Sunday afternoon, Shannon Griffin’s mother, Shanna, took a call from Doug Bolden’s wife.

  “I have some bad news,” Doug’s wife shared. “Um . . . it’s Shannon . . .”

  “What about Shannon?” Shanna asked.

  “He was shot and killed.”

  Shanna said her “heart just sunk,” adding later, “He was a good kid, trusting kid. He would have never expected anything like that (an ambush).”

  What would the forensic evidence prove? That it was an ambush by both men, Laron and Lamont? That one or the other actually shot Shannon? That there was a struggle and the gun went off? Was what Laron, Lamont, and Jenni first said—how Laron snapped after seeing Jenni with Shannon at the park—the truth?

  Moreover, the SPPD found a new condom wrapper near the scene that would soon prove to have Laron’s fingerprints on it.

  What did that say?

  Had Laron come upon a scene of his Jenni and Shannon, found the used condom wrapper, picked it up, and thought: What’s going on here?

  Did Laron kill Shannon in a fit of jealous rage?

  As Jennifer Mee sat in jail, facing one of the harshest charges on the books, Rachel Robidoux, as she learned of the so-called evidence, began asking herself all of these questions.

  CHAPTER 78

  DETECTIVE DAVE WAWRZYNSKI filed three first-degree felony murder warrants and sat before a grand jury on October 28, 2010. The lead detective testified to much of what SPPD Homicide detectives had uncovered during its rather thorough—albeit brief—investigation. From the SPPD’s position, the case was closed; the perpetrators were in jail awaiting the state’s prosecution.

  It did not take but a few hours for the grand jury to hand down indictments on all three suspects.

  With that done, Wawrzynski still had a lot of work to do in buttoning up the case: search warrants, subpoenas for phone records, telephone and text messages, cell towers, and all those intricate pieces of evidence (both forensic and circumstantial), which juries take for granted these days. Wawrzynski expected all of the records he was looking to get his hands on to back up what Laron, Lamont, and Jennifer Mee had admitted to, thus bolstering the state’s cases against each defendant.

  When Wawrzynski sat back and thought about the case, no doubt shaking his head at how senseless this particular murder had been, he couldn’t help but go back to that moment behind the vacant house when things went bad.

  “If I had to guess, he was winning,” Wawrzynski speculated—meaning Shannon. Which led to an important question in this case that would have many asking why Jennifer Mee and Lamont Newton were charged with first-degree felony murder. “At the end of the day, was there any intent to go and kill Shannon Griffin?” Wawrzynski added. “I don’t know if we could ever prove that or how we would prove that. They’re going to rob somebody and kill them. Well, I don’t think anybody ever discussed that or put that out there. He ended up dead based upon their intent to go rob somebody.”

  That was the crime the evidence proved, including three statements from three defendants there at the scene of the murder.

  “And that’s felony murder for us,” Wawrzynski concluded.

  The SPPD, Wawrzynski seemed to say of his critics, don’t write laws. They can only enforce laws.

  The bottom line here was that if a gun had not been brought to that robbery, Shannon Griffin would likely still be alive.

  Wawrzynski said he might be naïve, but he never once thought that the case would ever become anything but a “typical homicide.” He never suspected or expected it to blow up into a media frenzy—the way it was about to occur. The thought he had was that Shannon’s murder would wind up on page B-17, a small article in the corner of the police blotter page, and then it would disappear from the public’s judgmental eye.

  His entire contact with Jennifer Mee, Wawrzynski wanted to point out, “was a microcosm, about ten minutes on that Sunday evening . . . other than seeing her through the windshield of my car as I almost ran her over. I was in her house one time . . . and I don’t even think I spoke to a living soul. For me . . . what made [Jennifer Mee] her is no different from other people that have lost their way.”

  The detective said he got the impression that as she admitted to her role in the crimes, sitting and speaking about it all, Jennifer “did not realize how significant a problem all of this was going to be in her life.”

  Part of what saddened Wawrzynski about Jennifer, Laron, and Lamont was how nonchalant they were after they had finished giving the SPPD the truth. How they all sat around eating pizza while waiting to be taken off to Pinellas County Jail. They seemed so relaxed and unaffected by the circumstances that had put them there. It was as if none of them “understood that they had taken a life.”

  Of course, they knew Shannon was dead and that they had killed him. But as Wawrzynski listened to each defendant talk afterward, and observed how they acted, joking around and laughing out loud at each other, he emphasized, “I don’t think they understood what that meant—the taking of a life!”

  Wawrzynski additionally commented, “I could not understand why this case was something the media felt they needed to pick up on—and, like a lot of these cases, the victim, Shannon Griffin, gets lost in it all. For the families involved, it’s a life-altering moment.”

  As Jennifer was brought before the judge and was refused bond, Wawrzynski was there to testify. Afterward, he chatted with someone from Today, a producer in Florida covering the fall of Jennifer Mee, aka the Hiccup Girl.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Wawrzynski said.

  “Sure,” the producer answered.

  “Why are you guys here?”

  “Because she’s news.”

  “No,” Wawrzynski intoned, “you guys make her news.”

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 79

  ASSISTANT STATE’S ATTORNEY Christopher LaBruzzo is a bookish-looking man, with curly, receding black hair and short sideburns. He generally wore black, thick-framed glasses and sharp and shiny, likely tailored, suits. A Tulane-educated lawyer, LaBruzzo was an analyst for Loews Hotels before becoming the lead trial attorney for the Felony Division of the Sixth Circuit of Pinellas and Pasco County. He has an articulate and matter-of-fact way of speaking, and there’s a nervous tone in his voice. As far as Jennifer Mee’s case was concerned, LaBruzzo knew from the moment he took it on that the state had some work to do.

  Back in March 2013, ASA LaBruzzo had entered into negotiations with Laron Raiford for a plea deal. The state had offered Laron somewhere near forty years for taking Shannon’s life.

  Laron declined.

  Thus, they were all called into court, where a judge explained to Laron that it was his right to reject the offer and take his case to trial. But he should consider the deal seriously before doing so—because if he took it to trial, he would be facing a life sentence.

  “When you’re twenty-two years old,” the judge explained to Laron as the accused killer stood smug and full of attitude, “sixty seems like you should be in the old folks’ home. But when you get there, um, you think, ‘Well, that isn’t so old.’”

  Laron reiterated and rejected the deal.

  After taking his case to trial, LaBruzzo and th
e state convicted Laron Raiford in just a few days; and on August 30, 2013, Laron Raiford was, as promised, sentenced to life in prison.

  * * *

  Heading into Jennifer Mee’s trial, ASA LaBruzzo didn’t see the same clear-cut case being tried before the court. There were definitely hurdles. Yet, somewhere near nine o’clock on the cool morning of September 18, 2013, after nearly three years of motions, pretrial hearings, and arguments from both sides, Jennifer Mee and John Trevena faced off against LaBruzzo and the state of Florida. Inside the Sixth Judicial Court, room number three, in downtown Clearwater, Judge Nancy Moate Ley sat on the bench and announced the start of the Florida v. Jennifer Mee trial.

  There was one problem as everyone sat and anticipated this long-awaited, high-profile trial: John Trevena was absent.

  Just great was the look on everyone’s face.

  “He’ll be about five minutes,” Trevena’s co-counsel Bryant R. Camareno told the judge. Trevena’s second co-counsel was a man by the name of—no kidding—Jesse James.

  When Trevena finally arrived, he addressed the court and spoke of an eleventh-hour revelation regarding his client, who had announced to him during jury deliberations the previous day that part of her disability might include her being schizophrenic.

  As far as murder trials go, that would be considered a major game changer.

  When the judge questioned Trevena about any paperwork he might have to support the new claim, Trevena said he did not have any. It had been only one day since he had found out himself, and he wanted some time to have Miss Mee checked out.

  The judge questioned the timing, as likely everyone else in the courtroom did, save Rachel and the rest of Jennifer’s family. Trevena had represented Jennifer, the judge smartly pointed out, for “what, for three years,” and he was just discovering this incredible, often obvious, psychological disclosure about her now? It wasn’t as though a person suffering from schizophrenia could hide it.

  After a long discussion, including several recesses and a meeting between Jennifer and a court psychologist, it was determined that Jennifer might suffer from a bit “lower than average” intelligence, but she clearly understood what was going on, what the possible outcomes of her trial could be, what sentences she could receive, and why she was on trial, to begin with. In the court’s view, Jennifer was no more a schizophrenic than Trevena was.

  The judge signed an order finding Jennifer “competent” to stand trial based on the “stipulation of the parties.”

  Both the state and John Trevena agreed.

  Shannon Griffin’s family had waited three long years for justice; it was time to move on.

  CHAPTER 80

  WEARING A PURPLE blouse, with an utter look of oh-my-god-this-is-suddenly-very-real on her ashen face, Jennifer Mee sat next to Trevena and his co-counsel. There was a single piece of paper and a blue Bic pen sitting atop an oak table in front of her. Her long, flowing, full-bodied black hair had grown out, thick and healthy. She kept a serious look on her face, indicating that if she had not known in the past that her life was at stake, she certainly did now. Jennifer was a twenty-two-year-old woman at this stage of her life, no longer the innocent teen with the hiccups, or even the “gangsta” wannabe out peddling dope on the street corner. She had gained some weight, but she wore it well. She looked fit, with her face a little chubby in a cute sort of way.

  As opening statements began, Jennifer developed a gaze, an almost surreal look of shock and awe that overtook any other expression she might conjure. She stared straight ahead in a stoic gaze, mostly looking at the ground, unflinching, statue-like, her hands at her sides, still as rocks.

  ASA LaBruzzo walked to the lectern, with his yellow notebook, wearing a concrete-gray suit. He bit his lower lip, moved the microphone into position, pushed the lectern out in front of himself a bit, then put his hands together into a praying gesture and let Jennifer Mee have it with one simple, riveting opening sentence, quickly and effectively setting the tone of the state’s case into action: “She set everything up.”

  He paused. Jennifer Mee and her table were directly in back of the lectern, so LaBruzzo had to turn completely around to address Jennifer, which he did as he repeated himself while pointing at her: “She set everything up.”

  It was the first image jurors were given of Jennifer from the ASA. Sitting before them was the mastermind behind a murder—at least that was the message. LaBruzzo didn’t say that she set the robbery up and a man was murdered during the carrying out of that crime. The way LaBruzzo left it ringing in jurors’ ears, it initially indicated that Jennifer Mee had set up and carried out a murder.

  An aggressive, damaging accusation right out of the box.

  Jennifer Mee, mastermind.

  Jennifer Mee, cold and calculated.

  Jennifer Mee, murderer.

  LaBruzzo went on to tell the story of Shannon Griffin’s life and tragic death in an A-to-Z narrative format, speaking about how “they”—“a man named Laron Raiford and a man named Lamont Newton and Jennifer Mee”—“lured” Shannon down to that renovated house under a ruse of selling him a “half ounce of weed.”

  And during that manufactured drug deal, well, they killed him.

  As he continued, using his hands to articulate certain points, LaBruzzo, who could carry his voice rather well, using an authoritative, striking tone, kept going back to “You are going to hear” as a preface in order to put a stamp of evidentiary approval on his case. It was one thing, of course, for LaBruzzo to stand there and bark allegations at Jennifer Mee. It was quite another for him to promise jurors that the evidence he was going to present would ultimately convince them of her guilt in planning and carrying out the senseless murder of a young man just getting started in life.

  The ruse was the weed, LaBruzzo implied, but “instead of marijuana,” he added convincingly, “they had a loaded thirty-eight-caliber handgun.”

  He called Shannon’s death scene a “dark alleyway.” He said it several times, giving the impression that they had lured this man into a deadly setup he never saw coming.

  One extremely important piece of evidence LaBruzzo brought up as he got going and fell into a groove was the evidence collected at the Eighty-Ninth Avenue North apartment where the four spent the night after the murder. Here LaBruzzo was smart to bring into the fold the word “forensics,” as he knew juries desperately wanted what they saw on television each week: that rock-solid, scientific evidence that screamed,“Aha! She was there! Her fingerprints are all over the evidence.”

  After spelling out where law enforcement had located that bag of Shannon’s belongings, LaBruzzo said, “And you’re going to hear how forensic techs came and collected . . . all the other evidence in this case, and you’re going to hear when they collected the wallet, they fingerprinted this item . . . and they were able to develop a fingerprint that was ultimately identified to Miss Jennifer Mee on the Florida driver’s license of Shannon Griffin.”

  Jennifer had handled Shannon’s license. This connected her to him.

  And then LaBruzzo answered a criticism that would surely come up during the trial and even in the media trial waged by both sides during press conferences and surprise stoop speeches: Did the SPPD go after Jennifer Mee?

  “Initially law enforcement wasn’t a hundred percent sure of what Miss Mee’s involvement in this case was.... You’re going to hear she voluntarily went down to the police station and that she met with law enforcement and she gave a statement.” And in that first statement, LaBruzzo added, Jennifer claimed there was a love triangle—same as Laron, Lamont, and Jenni—among Laron, Shannon, and Jenni Charron. But as “law enforcement then continued their investigation” and spoke to Jennifer Mee a bit more, and put together what all of the others were saying, they realized it had all been part of a tall tale the four had made a promise to tell.

  The facts, LaBruzzo intoned, were the facts. They would not change. He asked jurors not to be persuaded by anything other than those facts of t
he case that the state would present. And when push came to shove, the DNA evidence that the state was going to present would back up those statements Laron, Lamont, and Jennifer Mee recorded for law enforcement. After the lies were tossed out and all three told the truth, the case came together rather perfectly; everything seemed to fit. Before that, of course, law enforcement kept coming up with questions that did not make sense because the information they were receiving had been littered with lies.

  Finishing up, laying out the law for jurors so each would understand it in layman’s terms, LaBruzzo carefully and persuasively explained: “The case that is in front of you is one of felony murder. The court is going to instruct you on the law, but basically what it’s going to say is there are certain crimes in the state of Florida by design and by enumeration by the legislature that if you engage in such acts, such as a robbery, that if someone is murdered or killed in the course of that robbery, then you are, in fact, guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  Jennifer Mee did have “the intent that [a] crime be committed.... In her own words, she set everything up . . . ,” LaBruzzo concluded, ending where he had begun.

  LaBruzzo thanked the jury and walked back to his table.

  “Mr. Trevena,” the judge said, “do you wish to give an opening?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Trevena said while standing and walking toward the lectern.

  CHAPTER 81

  JOHN TREVENA IS a man who owns and “loves” fast and luxuriously expensive cars—“Bentleys, Mercedes, Corvettes, BMWs, Porsches, Cadillacs”—along with those superfast, “cigarette-type speedboats.” He fashions himself a “hardworking” and “hard-drinking” man, living his life to the fullest when not in a courtroom facing off against prosecutors and attorneys out to bury his clients, either financially or criminally. Yet, John Trevena’s life growing up was anything but a window looking into the glamorous worlds of the rich and famous, which Trevena would come to embrace later on.