Youngest suspect in Sean Taylor murder case ‘didn’t do anything

A few days after the shooting death of NFL player Sean Taylor last year, one Fort Myers mother was unsatisfied with the answers her 16-year-old son was giving her.

Valerie Harris, the mother of Timmy Lee Brown, had heard about Taylor’s shooting on the news Nov. 26.

She hadn’t seen her son at all since Nov. 20, and she had also heard from Brown’s grandmother that police had come by asking about him.
When she next saw her son, on Nov. 30, Brown wouldn’t give her a specific answer about where he had been that weekend, other than to say he was with a friend. He didn’t say who the friend was.

“I asked him what was going on,” Harris said during an interview with investigators the following month. “His grandmother said the police was over her house looking for him. I said, ‘We need to go and turn you in and see what is going on. Why they keep bringing your name up?’ He said, ‘I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t there.’ So I said, ‘Well, for my mind’s sake we need to do this.’ ”

A transcript of that conversation between Harris and investigators was released this week by the State Attorney’s Office in Miami-Dade County, now that Brown has become the fifth suspect from Lee County to be arrested in the case. Brown will turn 17 years old in about a week.

The other suspects — Eric Rivera, 18, Charles Wardlow, 18, Jason Mitchell, 20, and Venjah Hunte, 20 — were arrested late last year. They all had been scheduled for August trials after being charged with first-degree murder and armed burglary, but Hunte took a plea deal earlier this month.

Brown, who is Wardlow’s cousin, was arrested May 14 in Lee County — a few days after the plea deal was agreed to — also on charges of first-degree murder and armed burglary. He transferred to a pre-trial detention center in Miami late last week.

Wardlow, Hunte, Rivera, Mitchell and Brown are all connected to each other by a mix of friendships, school, sports and family ties. There were also loosely linked to Taylor through the romance one of Wardlow’s relatives had with Taylor’s half-sister, and Mitchell had been to Taylor’s Palmetto Bay home before for a party where he saw Taylor’s wealth firsthand.

Investigators believe the men drove from Lee County the night of Nov. 25 in a rented SUV and attempted the burglary and shooting early Nov. 26.

Taylor, a 24-year-old player for the Washington Redskins, died from his injuries Nov. 27.

In Florida, suspects committing a felony that results in a death can be charged with murder, whether or not they were the ones to pull a trigger.

The death penalty has been waived for Mitchell, Rivera and Wardlow, and with Hunte’s plea deal, he is expected to serve 29 years in prison for second-degree murder and will cooperate with prosecutors.

(naplesnews.com)