Dav'Neisha Bryant
Death penalty trial begins for man arrested in 2015 domestic homicide
By Hannah Winston
Palm Beach Post
WEST PALM BEACH - Dacoby Wooten told the mother of his two children, Dav’Neisha Bryant, and her family what he was going to do.
In the weeks leading up to the fatal shooting of the 24-year-old woman he had known since middle school, Wooten’s text messages escalated in intensity each time she refused to answer.
“Stop trying to play hard. Just ask yourself do I really want to cause my parents that much pain? Do I want them to have to bury me?”
In some he said he’d wait outside her apartment and follow her to work. In others he said he can’t wait to hear her beg for him not to do it, Assistant State Attorney Aleathea McRoberts said to the jury Thursday afternoon, reading from Wooten’s texts to Bryant.
“I want you to show these messages to the police because I’m going to do it to you,” McRoberts said. “This is not a threat. It’s a promise.”
The 14-person jury heard opening statements in the first-degree murder trial of Wooten, 29, after five days of jury selection in the death penalty case. If convicted, the jury will decide if he should be sentenced to life in prison or be sentenced to death.
Public Defender Carey Haughwout, who represents Wooten alongside Assistant Public Defenders Scott Pribble and Courtney Wilson, said the threatening texts are not all of the communication between Wooten and Bryant before she was killed.
She told the jury of six men and eight women that the texts were childish and demanding at times. Then the next day there would be a “Good morning, dear. How are the kids?”
There would be times Bryant picked up the phone and they had lengthy conversations, and other times when she’d ignore him and Wooten would start sending threatening texts, she said.
“It would be hateful and mean, then loving and caring,” Haughwout said.
She said when he was waiting in her apartment during the early morning hours of Nov. 23, 2015, he wasn’t “lying in wait to kill her. He’s lying in wait to talk to her.”
Investigators and prosecutors say otherwise.
On that day, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office investigators said Bryant and her mother, Sharon, drove to her apartment in Belle Glade to pick up some clothing before they both went to work. Sharon Bryant waited in the car as her daughter went upstairs. Realizing several minutes had passed, she went to see if her daughter was OK.
Inside the apartment she found Dav’Neisha Bryant and Wooten with a gun in hand.
For several minutes she pleaded with Wooten to let her daughter go or to take her instead.
“I have nothing to lose. I told you I was going to do it,” Sharon Bryant told investigators Wooten said to her before he shot her daughter.
Eventually, Wooten shot Dav’Neisha Bryant twice in the back, and prosecutors say her mother dodged a bullet from Wooten as she fell down the stairs out of the apartment. As she stayed on scene with investigators, Wooten fled.
He later was tracked to a residence in Fort Pierce, hiding in a closet with a gun in his mouth. McRoberts said it was the same weapon used to kill Dav’Neisha Bryant.
Haughwout told the jury her client was immature and unrealistic. As Bryant wanted to end things with Wooten, he lost his job, and Haughwout said he was hoping he could at least keep his family together.
Was the shooting premeditated as prosecutors claimed, or was it a desperate frenzy of emotions as Wooten was trying to keep his life together?
“By the end of this case, you will have no doubt that Dacoby Wooten shot and killed Dav’Neisha Bryant,” Haughwout said. “The question for you is to look at the evidence carefully ( ... ) and determine whether he had the premeditated intent to do so.”
Wooten’s case garnered attention after search warrants revealed sheriff's office deputies and U.S. Marshals got approval to use a secret cellphone tracking device, called Stingray, to locate him at the Fort Pierce residence. The devices mimics cell towers to intercept information from an individual’s phone and in doing so, those nearby.
Wooten’s case is the second death penalty case to go to trial this year after Christopher Vasata, who was also represented by Haughwout and Pribble. He was found guilty in the 2017 Jupiter triple murder, but a jury spared him the death penalty on June 27.
The last person to be sentenced to death in Palm Beach County was John J. Chamberlain in 2002. Later, he was re-sentenced to life in prison.
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/2...estic-homicide
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