ORANEG COUNTY, Fla. — The state attorney has dropped charges against the teenager arrested in a deadly shooting outside of a local high school football game.
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The teen’s attorney said she made the right call.
The shooting happened last November at Jones High School at a game against Wekiva High School. Gamaine Brown, 19, was killed and the 17-year-old suspect, Jeremiah Cundiff, was arrested about a month later.
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The teen was facing three charges including second-degree murder. However, the state attorney said there’s not enough to make the charges stick, and that the case is “weak, full of holes, and would never support a verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The paperwork shows the witness who said she saw the shooting is a 15-year-old old student and identified Cundiff from a surveillance photo. However, she gave the wrong nickname for him and a poor description of his clothing, and after he was arrested she couldn’t ID him from a photo line-up.
Prosecutors also noted that no gun has been recovered from Cundiff or connected to him, meaning there’s no weapon to compare to the shell casings at the scene.
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Cundiff’s attorney, Jacob Stuart, said they’ve maintained since December what the state attorney is now saying.
“I think it’s a first step in recovering justice,” Stuart said. “There was no evidence, objectively, to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the shooter in this tragic accident that happened.”
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However, Stuart said the damage for his client is already done.
“There’s this reputation he has even if he’s overcome it, he’ll have to live with that for the foreseeable future,” Stuart said. “It’s my perspective that the Orlando Police Department rushed to judgement, sensationalized this story to make it seem like they’d done something when they haven’t, and now we’re here four months later.”
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