Family of convicted killer testifies

Jurors deciding whether a man convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s teenage daughter should be executed or get life in prison heard Tuesday from his family, who described him as a hardworking man who supported them financially but never returned to his native Haiti for nearly two decades.

Sanel Saint-Simon was convicted of killing Alexandria Chery, 16, in 2014. He had helped raise Alexandria since she was about 5 years old, and in the months before her death, she told her boyfriend that Saint-Simon was touching her inappropriately. Jurors are expected to make their recommendation about which penalty Saint-Simon should face by the end of the week.

Miriam Saint-Simon, via video feed, described her cousin as a hard worker who moved to the U.S. and sent back money to support his family, even paying for the funeral of his grandfather, whom she described as abusive to SaintSimon.

Saint-Simon’s mother left him with his paternal grandmother when he was young, his cousin said. She would occasionally come visit. “She was not really so affectionate to Sanel,” Miriam SaintSimon said. “All the attention came from our grandmother.”

Jean Marie Marthe, mother of Saint-Simon’s nearly 21-year-old daughter, said on video he sent money back to Haiti to provide for his daughter but she did not know much about his life in Orlando.

A circuit judge in Orange County nearly sent jurors home for the day when attorneys told him they were not prepared to present video testimony Tuesday afternoon.

Saint-Simon’s family lives in a rural part of Haiti and could not travel to Orlando to testify in his defense. Instead, an assistant public defender went to Haiti and set up a live video feed last week to record their testimony, including cross-examination and questions from the judge, so they could play it for jurors. The videos needed some redaction of testimony attorneys objected to.

Prosecutors rested their case after about half a day of testimony Monday, and jurors began watching the videos. Judge John Marshall Kest gave jurors the morning off Tuesday so prosecutors could conduct a last-minute deposition of a defense witness. He asked jurors Monday afternoon to be back in court at 1 p.m. Tuesday.

But when attorneys returned to court, prosecutors said they only had time to review one video the defense gave them that morning, and that it needed redaction. That would take some time. The defense at first said they did not have other testimony ready.

“I can’t have them sitting there for two hours,” Kest said, to wait while the lawyers redacted video.

Jurors came back into court at 1:30 p.m. Instead of editing the videos to redact them, prosecutors wrote down time stamps of sections that should be removed on a Post-It note, and a defense attorney stood by the laptop the video was being played on and manually skipped portions of the video.

Alexandria’s mother reported her missing in July 2014 when she came home from work and found the teen and all her belongings gone. Landscapers found Alexandria’s body near the Osceola-Polk county line Aug. 1, 2014.