Posted on 05/14/2008 8:21:25 PM PDT by RDTF
One of the four Lee County men initially arrested and charged in the fatal shooting of NFL player Sean Taylor, has accepted a plea deal.
In exchange for complete, truthful testimony in the upcoming trials for the other defendants, Venjah Hunte, 20, of Fort Myers, will plea guilty to second degree murder and armed burglary.
He will then serve 29 years.
Hunte's plea deal announcement coincides with the arrest of a fifth suspect in case, 16-year-old Timmy Brown, who was taken into custody last night.
Under the plea agreement, without Hunte's satisfactory testimony, he would instead be sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
Like the other initial suspects in the case -- Eric Rivera, 18; Jason Mitchell, 20; and Charles Wardlow, 18 -- Hunte had been charged with first degree murder in the shooting that left Taylor, a rising star in professional football, fatally wounded after he had confronted the burglars who had entered his Palmetto Bay home while he, his girlfriend and his young daughter were sleeping last November.
The young men's' trials had been scheduled to start in August in Miami-Dade County.
Brown was detained late Tuesday by the lead detective in the case on Tuesday, according to sources. He appeared in Juvenile Court in Fort Myers this morning.
Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office spokesman Ed Griffith said Brown is charged with first-degree murder under a sealed warrant.
All five suspects are accused of driving from Fort Myers to Miami in late November with the intention of robbing Taylor.
Eric Rivera Jr., 17 at the time of the shooting and 18 now, is the accused triggerman.
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(Excerpt) Read more at naplesnews.com ...
NFL ping
Pity
You simply cannot do that if you're a celebrity or anyone of note who stands out. Even if you're just a minor character actor on a rarely-seen TV show, you have to understand there's at least a dozen screwballs in the nation who either want to rob you, make you their slave in a dungeon, insist that you marry them, or tie you and and peel off your skin with a vise-grips.
From what I recall they had a security system but his sister or his girlfriend’s sister or someone was coming and going and they disabled it.
Considering the location of the wound, the circumstances of the shot itself (surprised home invaders find large man with machete confronting them) and everything that led up to the attempted robbery, it is just a terrible thing to contemplate how many different ways Taylor would have LIVED and the relative few possibilities that would have led to his death.
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