Driver’s murder trial nears in pal’s drowning
Under law, crash makes him liable
DaJuan Peak drowned in a pond last year while trying to swim away from deputies.
Now, the 25-year-old Delray Beach man’s best friend and brother-in-law, Lontrelle Durham, is about to stand trial on a first-degree murder charge.
While Durham, 20, didn’t force Peak under the water, it’s still murder under the law, prosecutors say.
The allegation is that Peak died as a result of Durham crashing a stolen car in the dark, muddied retention pond, during a reckless attempt to flee from law enforcement.
Attorneys for Durham contend he is wrongly accused because Peak, a ca--
reer criminal, was on his own when he drowned trying to avoid capture after the white Volkswagen Passat landed in the water. Also, Durham’s girlfriend had “loaned” him the car earlier that night, the defense contends.
Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Charles Burton is presiding over jury selection, beginning this morning.
The events in the case began when deputies spotted Peak leaving Emperor’s, an adult club, at 8340 Resource Road. It happened about 3 a.m. Nov. 5.
After Peak got into the passenger seat and Durham sat behind the wheel, deputies in unmarked cars with flashing lights approached in an attempt to arrest Peak on the warrant, according to court records.
But Durham pushed the accelerator, and the Passat hit a police car and another club patron’s car while darting out of the parking lot and onto a road, reports show.
As deputies tailed the pair, Durham drove east on Park Avenue at up to 70 mph, ran a red light at Congress Avenue, and continued until crashing the Passat through a barrier at a dead end and into a retention pond, according to court documents.
As the car began sinking, both men crawled out of windows and allegedly began swimming away from the shoreline where several deputies stood and called out to the pair before entering the water themselves.
Durham soon was apprehended — deputies say they “saved” him — and he was put in the back of a patrol car about 3:15 a.m.
But Peak struggled and slipped under the surface before deputies could reach him about 30 minutes after the crash, according to Durham’s arrest report and court records. Efforts to revive Peak at a hospital were unsuccessful.
A distraught Durham immediately blamed the deputies for the death of his friend of 13 years.
“He was calling for help!” Durham said in an audio recording from the patrol car. “I was telling y’all we needed help! … Both of us was going under! I went under multiple times to save him. No one came to help us!… Y’all killed him! … They killed my brother!” Once Durham realized that Peak wasn’t rescued, he asked deputies to kill him: “I’m dying with him, sir. … Take me with him, sir!”
After being placed on suicide watch at Palm Beach County Jail, Durham requested a furlough so he could attend Peak’s funeral on Nov. 19. The court refused.
The prosecution of Durham during the past eight months has included battles over:
The defense’s attempt to have all of his post-crash statements barred fromthe trial.
The defense’s plan to tell the jury about Peak’s extensive criminal background and a propensity to flee from cops.
The prosecutor’s move to classify Durham as a prison-release reoffender who would be subject to harsher penalties if convicted again.
Durham has six felony convictions, including robbery, and was released from state prison four months before the arrest in this case, and from Broward County Jail six weeks earlier.
Prosecutors say his record includes arrests on robbery and grand theft auto charges at age 14.
In a pretrial hearing in April, Assistant State Attorney Aleathea McRoberts rebutted the defense claim that Peak caused his own death, not Durham.
She suggested that Peak may have been “disoriented” after the Passat’s airbag deployed on impact — so without Durham’s action of crashing the car into the pond in the first place, Peak would be alive.
But Assistant Public Defender Elizabeth Ramsey said there is no proof that Peak was disoriented, and Peak easily could have stood in the water around the sinking car and walked out of the pond to safety.
But he was a felon with two prior prison stints who always ran from cops, Ramsey wrote, citing Peak’s six arrests from 2009 to 2016.
“Peak’s history with police encounters evidences a pattern of evading police, disobeying police instructions … and flight,” Ramsey wrote. “This pattern should be heard by the jury as evidence that Peak’s flight across the pond was intentional, planned [and] not accidental and motivated by the desire to evade police.”
Deputies were seeking to arrest Peak that night on armed robbery and aggravated battery charges, records show.
Ramsey also has announced her intention to blame the crash on a “dangerous condition” from “design defects” at the Park Avenue dead end.
She is calling an accident reconstruction expert and Lake Park Town Manager John O. D’Augostino to testify about the issue and repairs at the site since the crash.
The defense also plans to call Peak’s mother to testify on behalf of the man accused of killing her son.
Ramsey has said she has watched a dash-cam video from one of the deputy’s cars, which shows Peak and Durham “struggling in the water shortly after the crash.”
The attorney said a deputy shut off the camera at a key point.
“Officers at the scene turn the video off within moments of arriving, leaving the rest of us in the dark as to exactly what occurred after those first moments,” Ramsey wrote. “Durham’s actual rescue and the recovery of Peak’s body 30 minutes after the crash are not preserved in any video.”
Durham’s lawyer also accuses deputies of inflicting “psychological pressure and physical torture” on her client by keeping him confined to the deputy’s car for five hours, without offering a blanket or medical aid.
Prosecutors did not respond in writing to the specific allegation about the dash cam, but they argued that any comments made by Durham in the police car and until he asked for a lawyer eight hours later are fair game for the trial.
Assistant State Attorney Terri Skiles wrote on June 20 that Durham had no expectation of privacy in the patrol car, made his comments voluntarily, and “suffered no rights violation during the duration of his custody.”