ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — The gun thrown out of a car window moments before Keith Moses was arrested for marijuana possession in 2021 could not be conclusively tied to the now-accused murderer, crime analysts with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) found.
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The test was ordered amidst a political firestorm in early March, days after deputies said Moses went on a killing spree that ended the life of a woman, a Spectrum News reporter and a nine-year-old girl in Pine Hills.
Critics of State Attorney Monique Worrell, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, honed in on the traffic stop and arrest to show that she was soft on crime for allowing Moses to walk the street. Moses had a lengthy juvenile record, but the marijuana charge was his first as an adult.
“I know the District Attorney in Orlando thinks you don’t prosecute people and that’s the way you somehow have a better community--that does not work,” he said.
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Days after WFTV aired a story about how the gun was never tested, despite being thrown from Moses’ side of the car, Orange County deputies sent the gun to FDLE for testing, records showed.
The April 6, 2023 FDLE report said the swabs taken from various parts of the gun, including the trigger, contained a mixture of DNA samples.
“Due to the inability to estimate the number of donors to the mixture, this data is not interpretable,” the report said. “No determination can be made regarding the contribution of Keith Moses to this item.”
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Body camera video released
In addition to the FDLE report, body camera video from the 2021 arrest was also released.
The series of videos, from multiple deputies, shows them arriving on scene with three men in a white sedan backed up to a fence.
One deputy exclaims he saw a gun being thrown out of the vehicle, though his camera footage was not included in the batch made public.
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Deputies found the gun in the bushes next to the passenger side of the car and counted 15 bullets in the magazine and chamber. Though there was some uncertainty over who threw it, the deputies agreed it was almost certainly Moses in the back seat.
“He tossed it!” one said.
Moses denied the accusations on scene before and after he was read his rights. He asked to see deputies’ camera footage and denied knowledge of the gun or its make.
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Both he and the other passenger, who was found with a ski mask, could have faced charges for being in possession of the gun, which was determined to be stolen out of Orlando, especially given their lengthy records.
Moses now faces the death penalty for the 2023 murders. It’s not clear if a conclusive DNA test and subsequent conviction would’ve kept him in prison for a long enough time to prevent the shootings.
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