afterword by Patrick H. Moore
After deliberating for four hours, a Pinellas County, Florida jury has found Jennifer Mee, 22, the famed Hiccup Girl, guilty of first degree murder in the death of 22-year-old Shannon Griffin. The conviction carries a mandatory life sentence. The jury had the option of convicting her of accessory after the fact or manslaughter but opted for the most serious charge. A few of the jurors, all women, were crying as they were polled after the verdict was read in court. Mee also sobbed, her eyes red. She continued crying as she walked to the podium to be sentenced, and her tears did not cease as she was fingerprinted and led away to begin serving her life sentence.
Although the prosecution has said all along that it does not believe that Ms. Mee pulled the trigger (co-defendant Laron Raiford was responsible for that), under Florida law her involvement in a robbery that led to a homicide made her subject to a first-degree murder charge.
The prosecution gained a huge advantage based on a tape it obtained of Ms. Mee confessing to playing a key role in the murder in a recorded jailhouse telephone conversation which was played for the jury on Thursday. When Mee’s mother asks her why she has been arrested and charged, instead of keeping her mouth shut, Ms. Mee, who is clearly not the most controlled and contemplative of souls, blurts out:
“I didn’t kill nobody. …I set everything up. It all went wrong, Mom. It [expletive] just went downhill after everything happened, Mom.”
According to the investigators, after communicating with Griffin on MocoSpace.com, Mee arranged for him to meet two of her roommates — her boyfriend, Lamont Newton, and the shooter Laron Raiford – in a dark alley in St. Petersburg to buy marijuana. When the two men tried to rob Griffin, Griffin fought back, and Raiford shot him four times in the chest.
In his closing argument, Assistant State Attorney Christopher LaBruzzo encouraged jurors to listen to the confession tapes while they deliberated.
“Listen to the level of detail she gives to detectives.”
In a similar vein, Assistant State Attorney Jan Olney asked rhetorically during her closing:
“Do you know who our star witness is?” Long pause… “Jennifer Mee.”
More damning evidence was the fact that after Griffin was discovered dead in the alleyway, investigators found his belongings in a plastic bag, hidden in a bathroom vent, in a north St. Petersburg apartment to which Mee and her co-defendants had access. In the bag were Griffin’s wallet, which contained his driver’s license, and his cell phone.
Mee’s fingerprints were discovered on the driver’s license.
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Although he was clearly fighting a losing battle, Mee’s defense attorney, John Trevena, rather ingeniously portrayed a different sequence of events and tried to deflect the blame away from Mee. First, in his closing arguments, Trevena noted Griffin’s autopsy did not turn up any marijuana in his system, indicating he didn’t use the drug on a regular basis. Trevena then stated that according to Griffin’s cousin, a man named Bolden, Griffin told him he was going to go out on a date with a girl.
“He’s getting out to see a girl,” Trevena said. “Nothing about purchasing marijuana.”
Trevena also suggested that in a prior recorded interview, Mee implicated Laron Raiford’s girlfriend, Jennifer Charron, a prostitute who lived with the three suspects.
According to Trevena, in the earlier interview, Mee said Charron was the one who was to meet Griffin in the alley, apparently for the purpose of performing a sex act. This theory is supported by the fact Griffin was found with his pants pulled down below his crotch, lying next to an opened condom wrapper. In the recorded conversation, Mee said that when Raiford came upon them in the alleyway in a compromising position, he flew into a rage and killed Griffin.
Trevena argued, somewhat persuasively, that the manner in which Griffin was killed suggested a crime of passion, not a robbery that went awry. Six shots were fired from the murder weapon, a .38-caliber special. Four of the shots struck Griffin, three in the chest, one in the shoulder.
Furthermore, Trevena noted Charron, unlike Mee, didn’t initially cooperate with the police. Instead, she hung up on an investigator when first contacted, relocated her three roommates to a different apartment after the homicide, invoked her right to an attorney, and suggested the threesome eliminate all physical evidence with bleach.
Trevena, however, made little progress with Charron on the witness stand Friday. All she admitted to was that she performed sexual acts for money at the spa where she worked, and that she suggested the three co-defendants destroy the evidence with bleach.
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Naturally, the prosecutors rejected Trevena’s argument.
“There was no inkling this was a sexual crime,” State Attorney LaBruzzo said. “Don’t force yourself to speculate about those things.”
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The whole thing is peculiar. The fact Griffin was found with his pants down with an opened condom package nearby certainly suggests that a sex act occurred or was occurring when Raiford came upon the scene. Since the third co-defendant, Mee’s boyfriend, Lamont Newton’s case hasn’t been resolved yet, and 
since he must have been in the alleyway with Raiford (otherwise where does his guilt lie?), he probably would have taken the Fifth if he’d been asked to testify. With Raiford who’s already convicted, however, it’s a different story. If Trevena had subpoened him, and if he had testified, he could certainly have shed light on whether the shooting was a crime of passion based on a sex act or the result of the robbery gone wrong. Of course legally it might not matter anyway since as long as the robbery was part of the plan, under Florida law, grounds for a first-degree-murder conviction are triggered when a robbery spirals out of control resulting in a homicide. And it stands to reason that robbery was part of the plan because otherwise there was no reason for Raiford to have shown up in the first place. And, of course, the whole “pants pulled down below the crotch” bit could have simply been a ruse to make it look like a sex act gone awry.
Still, the facts don’t add up in a satisfactory manner. Mee, however, seems unlikely to win on appeal because of the damning nature of the second recorded conversation. Meanwhile, no one seems concerned that this is — in a sense — yet another social media murder.
Click here to view our earlier post on the Jennifer Mee “Hiccup Girl” murder case:
Famous Hiccuping Woman Charged with First Degree Murder in Latest Social Media Murder