Christopher Jemery
Christian Cruz and Justen Charles
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Killers kidnapped wrong man from Deltona apartment, prosecutor tells jurors in death penalty trial
Christian Cruz and Justen Charles decided one night 6 years ago to rob a drug dealer who they thought lived in the Bell Tower Avenue apartments in Deltona, a prosecutor told jurors on Monday.
The drug dealer, though, had moved out. The apartment was now occupied by 25-year-old Christopher Jemery, a young father who didn’t use or deal drugs. On the night of Aug. 26, 2013, Jemery was alone, sitting on his couch eating a late dinner and watching television.
That’s when Cruz and Charles burst into the apartment, bound and gagged Jemery with duct tape and speaker wire, shot him in the head and, near death, dumped him in an industrial area in Sanford, the prosecutor said during opening statements in the first-degree murder trial of Cruz. He faces the death penalty if convicted.
“Presumably they were there in search of drugs. The only problem is Christopher Jemery isn’t a drug dealer,” Assistant State Attorney Ryan Will told jurors. “Christopher Jemery isn’t a drug user. He merely lived in an apartment where the former tenant used and smoked and sold small quantities of marijuana. Christian Cruz and Justen Charles made a terrible mistake.”
Only Cruz, who lived in Lakeland but has been held in the Volusia County Branch Jail since his arrest in 2013, is on trial before Circuit Judge Raul Zambrano at the S. James Foxman Justice Center. Charles, 30, will be tried separately at a later date.
Cruz, 25, was indicted on charges of 1st-degree premeditated murder, burglary while armed, robbery with a firearm and kidnapping. A jury of 8 men and 6 women, including 2 alternate members, began hearing testimony on Monday for the trial which is expected to last several weeks. A 3rd alternate was dismissed Monday morning because he was ailing with a cold.
Cruz looked significantly different from the mugshot of his arrest as he sat between his two defense attorneys, Clyde Taylor Jr. and his son Clyde Taylor III. Cruz looked a little heavier. 2 long, thick dreadlocks were gone and his hair was cut short to his skull.
Taylor Jr. made the opening statement for the defense telling jurors that they would find reasonable doubt in the evidence. He said that no one saw Jemery being taken from the apartment or heard anything going on in the apartment.
“All of the evidence, and we will be here for a month, will not show you or prove to you in any way who shot Jemery,” Taylor Jr. said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe the evidence will show actually when the young man was shot or even where he was shot. ”
Cruz wrote occasionally on a legal pad and sometimes leaned over to talk to one of his attorneys. He yawned widely several times during testimony.
Cruz looked up without emotion at an overhead screen showing a picture of Jemery’s bruised, bloodied and bandaged head.
Even though Cruz and Charles had the wrong person, they did not stop their attack, according to Will, who is prosecuting the case along with Assistant State Attorney Tammy Jacques.
“The 2 men continued to use force and violence pushing this terrifying scenario to its extreme and unnecessary end,” Will said. “Bound and gagged, injured and bleeding Christopher Jemery was en route to the scene of his murder,” Will said. That scene was the end of 2291 W. Airport Blvd in Sanford, an industrial commercial area.
They left him barely alive in some bushes off a parking lot. That’s where a man coming to work found him the next morning and called 9-1-1. Jemery was taken to Orlando Regional Medical Center where he died three days later.
Investigators found that Jemery’s apartment had been ransacked, a pool of blood and an unfired .22-caliber bullet near a door.
“When the beating and threats did not yield acceptable answers they took him as their prisoner,” Will said.
Investigators also found fingerprints and DNA for one or both of the defendants in the victims’ apartment. Both Cruz and Charles’ DNA were found in Jemery’s car, which he had rented only 2 days before the murder after he was involved in a traffic accident.
And investigators also found Cruz’s left thumb print on a piece of duct tape removed from Jemery’s body.
A video shows Cruz making a withdrawal from Jemery’s account early on April 26, 2013.
Will said: “The defendant took several hundred dollars from the account minutes after firing the shot that ended Christopher Jemery’s life.”
(source: Daytona Beach News-Journal)
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