ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — A teenager who Orange County deputies said confessed to fatally shooting a 23-year-old woman is accused of shooting and killing a pregnant teenager less than a year later.
Jackie Davis said if her daughter’s accused killer had been kept in jail, maybe 16-year-old De’shayla Ferguson and her unborn child’s lives could have been saved.
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Davis’ daughter, Jemile Pittman, was killed 11 months before Deshayla.
“I just dropped to my knees because that was the worst news I could ever imagine, that my child was dead,” Davis said.
Then 16-year-old Lorenzo Larry admitted to detectives that he killed Pittman but he claimed it was self-defense.
Read: Sheriff: Orange County boy, 17, accused of killing pregnant girl, 16, and her unborn child
According to an investigative report, he told detectives he and Pittman were struggling over a gun he was trying to sell. The report shows in the moments and days after the shooting, Larry confessed to multiple people that he killed Pittman and threw the gun and a phone into a lake.
He then left the area, and the report shows at one point his family members appeared to use social media posts to fake his death.
Larry himself later posted, “I’m good and not dead.”
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Five months later, he was back in Central Florida and Davis says she saw him and called 911.
“I was on the phone and I was like shaking, we got the killer we’re finna get him, all I want is for him to be off the streets,” Davis said.
That night, months before Ferguson’s murder, Larry was arrested on gun charges.
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“That was the happiest moment that I ever could [have felt] because I said I did my job,” Davis said. “I got him off the streets. But that wasn’t the case.”
Sherriff’s office investigators said they handed their investigative report into Jemile’s death to the state attorney’s office to consider charges.
The prosecutor at the time thought the shooting could be justified, but no final decision on charges was made.
Read: Woman dies after being found shot, unresponsive in Orange County, sheriff’s office says
In the following months, Larry was arrested multiple times including for domestic violence and gun charges. Then he was arrested and charged with the murder of De’shayla Ferguson.
“If he was in there still incarcerated for my daughter, De’shayla and her baby would still be alive today,” Davis said.
When Channel 9 first contacted the state attorney’s office about this case three weeks ago, we were told the office could not decide on charges in the Pittman case because it didn’t have the final case packet from the sheriff’s office.
We learned that packet was requested from the sheriff’s office after we spoke to them.
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