Camp Swamp Road Ep. 5: Jacksonville

0:00If you want to get caught up on the story of the Scott Spivey case, start by listening to episode one of Camp Swamp Road. The full series is linked in the show notes.

0:17Since I started my reporting on the Scott Spivey case, I've been a part of a larger team at the Wall Street Journal who've been diving deep into stand-your-ground laws across the country. 30 states now have these laws, which give people broader rights to use deadly force, even in public places, when they're in fear for their life. Since these laws have been enacted, many more killings have been labeled as justifiable homicides. We've been exploring the effect these laws have had. What purpose do they serve? And could there be unintended consequences? Who gets labeled as the victim? and who do you believe when the other side is dead?

1:01In this episode, we have some updates on the Scott Spivey case. But before that, we're going to Florida, the state where Stand Your Ground laws were born. And we're focusing on Jacksonville. Compared to other places with populations above half a million people, the Jacksonville area has the largest share of homicides classified as justifiable killings by civilians. One Jacksonville case caught the attention of my colleagues. In September 2023, a teenager named Colleen Fedrick was shot and killed. Authorities eventually deemed the case a justifiable homicide, committed by a man acting in self-defense.

1:42But unlike in the Scott Spivey case, no one actually claimed self-defense. The police cleared the Fedrick case, even though no killer came forward at all.

1:57I'm Valerie Borlein, and this is Camp Swamp Road, a series from The Journal.

2:07Coming up, episode five, Jacksonville.

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3:5916-year-old Killian Frederick was shot between the ribs.

4:06It was September 21st, 2023, and he was found on a dirt path near a convenience store. The spot was so close to his house that Frederick's mom, Latoya Williams, could hear the gunfire. And she said she just knew something. She just felt it. She just felt that something was wrong. My colleague Hannah Critchfield spoke with Williams about that day. She runs towards the convenience store, and she finds her son lying there, and he's been shot, and he tells her it's bad. He says, you have to call 911.

4:48The police were called. After they arrived, Federick was loaded into an ambulance. Williams pleaded with the paramedics to let her ride with her son, but they said she couldn't. Williams didn't have a car, so she started walking to the hospital. She starts to walk, and a woman pulls over and says, Hey, did you hear about the shooting in the neighborhood? And Latoya says, That's my son. That's my baby. And so the woman ends up giving her a ride to the hospital.

5:24After Williams arrived, she was told that her son was in surgery. While she waited, she spoke with Detective Ty Mittling of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Williams told the detective that Frederick could be a hellraiser. Eventually, a doctor came in and told Williams that her son was dead. At the same hospital, another man was getting treated for a bullet wound. So, this is maybe a good time to introduce Anthony Jean-Pierre. Anthony Jean-Pierre is a man in his 30s with a felony record. Pierre was near the convenience store on the day Frederick was killed. He had been shot in his left hand.

6:04According to police records, Pierre said at the hospital that he was just an unlucky bystander. Wrong place, wrong time. And what he says happened is that he was driving a stranger for cash in his car to an area where the stranger wanted to buy weed. and he says that as the driver, he gets out of the car and he sees this younger man walking up to him and that man pulls a gun. He's shot in the hand and he flees the scene. After he was treated for his gunshot wound, Pierre was taken to the police station for questioning. Detective Mittling tried to get a statement from Pierre about what happened, but after being read as Miranda writes, Pierre refused to talk without a lawyer.

6:57There was an outstanding arrest warrant for Pierre on an unrelated charge, and that night he was put in jail. About a week later, Pierre was released. The investigation into who killed Colleen Fedrick continued.

7:15What kind of investigation did the police do? Right, so early on, homicide detectives, they clearly apply the standard sort of routes that you would employ when you're trying to solve a homicide investigation. Police knocked on doors in the neighborhood looking for witnesses. There were people who said they heard the shots, but no one saw anything. Near the crime scene, police recovered a gun, but it didn't match the shell casings found in the area. Here it appears that the investigation stalled. Then, about three weeks later, Detective Mitling got a lead. It came from a person the sheriff's office picked up on a burglary charge.

7:57And they say, I actually might have some information about this killing. Now, this person gives a rumor. The rumor is that they heard that Kalia and Fedrick plans to rob someone during a drug deal and that this 16-year-old was shot and killed by someone who got shot in the hands. But it's hearsay. That description matched Anthony Jean-Pierre, but the person giving this information also warned police that nobody in the neighborhood was going to tell them anything. That was true. No one talked to the police about Frederick or Pierre. So they didn't interview other witnesses or reliable witnesses that you're aware of?

8:45No, they ultimately told us that no witnesses, no direct witnesses came forward in this case. And, you know, this is something that came up a lot in our reporting on civilian justifiable homicides, is that it is much harder to solve a homicide investigation when it occurred in a community that might be distrustful of police or fear retaliation from other actors within the community who are shopping at the same grocery stores, maybe attending the same churches as they are. It's a lot harder when people are reticent to talk to police for whatever reason. In the months that followed, Detective Mintling made multiple attempts to get a statement from Anthony Jean-Pierre.

9:35But he was unsuccessful. Then, in May of 2024, Mittling got word that Pierre had been arrested after fleeing a traffic stop. The next day, according to Hannah's reporting, a lieutenant in the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Homicide Unit sent Mittling an email about the Killeen-Fedrick case. He wrote, quote, Let's decide what this is going to be. It can't stay pending forever, so let's make a plan to move forward. Mittling replied by saying that he interviewed Pierre that morning, but Pierre, quote, couldn't quite grasp the concept of self-defense. As the one-year anniversary of Frederick's killing approached, Detective Mintling said he was clearing the case after speaking with a local prosecutor.

10:20He laid out his conclusion in a memo.

10:27Do you have it? Can you read it to me? Yes. So he says that the two of them agreed that, based upon the known facts, Kalian Fedrick was the primary aggressor and was shot and killed by, presumably, Anthony Jean-Pierre in self-defense. What does presumably mean? You know, one of the things that I found most fascinating over the course of this reporting is learning that you can have a justifiable homicide without a person claiming self-defense. You don't need to have someone come forward. Wow. So does this mean that the police and the prosecutors decided unilaterally it was self-defense? It's a good question.

11:13I think that's one of the big things that our reporting shows in this is that the decision to categorize something as justifiable and not pursue murder or manslaughter charges is discretionary. In the memo, Mittling laid out a theory for why Pierre might not have confessed to the shooting. He wrote, quote, It is believed that as a convicted felon, he does not want to admit to having a firearm. You spoke with Anthony Jean-Pierre. What did he say about this case? Did he know it had been closed? He said that he hadn't heard from law enforcement about where the investigation was at. He had no idea if it was opened or closed.

11:56and when I spoke with him, was adamant that he didn't know anything, you know, that he got shot and he ran. He ran for his life. Police reports show that law enforcement spent a total of 36 hours on the Killian-Fedrick case. That's roughly four business days over the course of about a year. Law enforcement in Jacksonville are busy. In 2023, the year Fedrick was killed, the sheriff's office website says there were 148 homicides in their jurisdiction. The stretch of neighborhoods that Fedrick lived in has been referred to as Jacksonville's, quote, deadliest zip code. Another deadly weekend at Jacksonville with two men shot to death.

12:39Jacksonville just closed a chapter on one of its deadliest Januaries in years. The murder rate in Jacksonville has long been talked about in the media as a big problem. For decades now, Now, Jacksonville, it's made headlines as the murder capital of Florida. And this is a designation that area leaders have worked to change. You know, reducing the murder rate is an important priority. If Jacksonville is ever going to get past his reputation as the murder capital of Florida, the body count this month will not help. In recent years, the murder rate has been declining in Jacksonville, following national trends.

13:23That rate doesn't include justifiable homicides. In 2024, Jacksonville's sheriff touted the decline, saying the media, quote, won't be able to call us the murder capital of Florida anymore. Once something is deemed a justifiable homicide, is considered a case that can clear and no homicide charges are filed because justifiable homicides aren't crimes. They're not considered murders. So if a death is classified as a justifiable homicide, how does that affect the official murder rate? They aren't included in murder rate statistics. They move into a separate category because they're not a crime. they're not factored in into a city's overall murder rate.

14:14In 2005, when the Florida legislature passed the country's first stand-your-ground law, they said their intent was to give citizens greater self-defense protections. But in Hannah's reporting, she found an unintended consequence to the way self-defense laws are put into practice.

14:35Some experts said stand-your-ground laws appeared to give police and prosecutors an incentive to clear tough cases. You talked to a lot of experts. What did they say about how law enforcement uses their ability to label cases as justifiable homicide? You know, one said stand-your-ground became sort of a garbage dump for difficult-to-handle homicide cases. And it has emerged as this open question for some researchers who study Stand Your Ground and sort of the ricocheting impacts on justifiable homicides in general on communities. A spokesperson from the Office of the State Attorney said that they have never shied away from prosecuting difficult cases.

15:18he added that anyone who questions whether filing decisions are made to influence crime data is, quote, unaware, uneducated, or uninformed about how our office operates. Regarding Frederick's death, a Jacksonville Sheriff's Office spokesperson said, quote, our agency conducted a thorough investigation into this incident. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, Many of the civilian-justified homicides from 2021 to 2024 took place in neighborhoods where a significant share of residents lived below the poverty line. That includes where Frederick lived.

15:54Nationally, data on justifiable homicides is hard to tease out because there's so much variation in the way police track these cases. Since Hannah Beganer reporting, police have arrested Anthony Jean-Pierre. They had searched his car on the day of Frederick's shooting and found a 9mm magazine with Pierre's DNA. The gun that held the magazine has not been recovered. Pierre is charged with possession of a firearm by a felon and possession of ammunition. He is pleaded not guilty. Pierre currently doesn't face homicide charges. Frederick's case is still identified as a justifiable homicide on the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office website.

16:38Almost two years after Frederick's death, his mother, Latoya Williams, thought the case was still an active murder investigation. No one had told her that it wasn't. Until Hannah did.

16:52That's next.

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18:34About a year before her son died, Latoya Williams moved with her husband and four kids to Jacksonville. She was hoping to give her oldest child, Federick, a fresh start. He'd been expelled from school, fathered a child at age 14, and had another on the way. According to Williams, Federick had wanted to turn his life around. He had applied to Job Corps, a federally funded career training program. Williams said a letter arrived two days after her son's death. He had been accepted.

19:10Hannah went to Florida to meet with Williams and to tell her that Federick's case had been cleared as a justifiable homicide. Hannah connected with Williams after she got off work at a Halloween store. It was October, and so she finished her shift. It was a really busy season, and so we drove to a nearby Popeyes to grab dinner. Of course, when this conversation began, Williams wasn't able to eat. I mean, it was, yeah, she was devastated. That's wrenching. She was confused. She was shocked. I mean, she hadn't heard any of this. And, you know, the idea that your son's death is not considered a criminal act, I think that's shocking for anyone.

20:10And she had a lot of questions. A lot of questions that I, as a reporter, couldn't answer. The clearing of her son's case is documented publicly on the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office website, but you'd have to know where to look to find that, and she had no idea. This sounded so familiar to me. I heard that same shock and confusion from Scott Spivey's family when they learned his killing wasn't a crime. families don't understand how a homicide case could be closed without a judge or jury involved and there's anger that the killer gets to walk free here's williams on the phone with hannah a few weeks later i still feel like it should have been a court setting up about how do you how do you say it's justifiable when you don't have it in front of who is justifying this who who is making it justifiable?

21:07Like, who has the uphand to do that if you're not a judge type deal? Like, who are you to judge the situation if you're not a judge? Who are you to make the final call on a judgment when you're not a judge? Latoya Williams wants to fight for her son, but she doesn't know how to do that. This is the story of a family who they didn't have a car. And the resources that were available to them were very scarce. And you couple that with the grief that any of these families experience, just the regular weight of loss. It's an incredibly disempowering thing to have a family member die in this way in the first place, as well as an incredibly devastating thing.

22:02And so when you add on top of that, this factor of having limited time and limited resources, I mean, you just see that so many of the cases that we looked at in Jacksonville involve people who are below the poverty line. And so it does just raise questions of all the stories that don't get told because people have less access.

22:40Before we go, there's an update on the Scott Spivey case. When we left off in Episode 4 of Camp Swamp Road, South Carolina's Attorney General, Alan Wilson, had issued a public statement. That statement reaffirmed his decision to close the Scott Spivey case, despite the evidence that had surfaced through Jennifer's civil suit against Weldon Boyd and Bradley Williams. Jennifer was devastated. I read it, and I couldn't get past the second paragraph. And after that, I mean, I just laid in my kitchen floor, and I just cried hysterically. When I asked Alan Wilson about the statement, he doubled down.

23:19Valerie. Yes. If something changes the facts of the shooting, we're happy to review those facts in light of the facts we've given them. And that was that. Jennifer thought her campaign to reopen a criminal investigation into her brother's killing was over. But then, just days after my interview with Alan Wilson was released, a letter hit the news. We're giving you the first alert to breaking news. a newly obtained letter reveals the South Carolina Attorney General is requesting an upstate solicitor to review the investigation into the Scott Spivey case. Publicly, at least, it didn't appear that anything had changed about the facts of the case.