Trial: Man killed ex in front of mother
Estranged boyfriend doesn’t deny pulling trigger, but lawyers say it wasn’t planned
After weeks of making death threats, Dacoby Wooten killed the mother of his two children while the victim’s own mother watched, prosecutors said at the start of a trial Thursday.
Wooten, 29, doesn’t deny pulling the trigger nearly four years ago inside a Belle Glade apartment. But his lawyers contend the killing had not been planned, so it’s not a case of firstdegree murder.
Prosecutors told the Palm
Beach County jury there is plenty of evidence that it was a premeditated or intentional killing. If Wooten is convicted as charged, prosecutors will ask the jury to recommend a death sentence.
Assistant State Attorney Aleathea McRoberts said the proof of Wooten’s intent is in his text messages — there are vows to end the life of Davneisha Bryant, his 24-year-old estranged girlfriend.
“It feels so good to have a person’s life in your hands,” one message reads. “I’m going to make you beg for it.”
McRoberts said Sharon Bryant will testify she too received texts from Wooten that contained death threats against her daughter, before the Nov. 23, 2015, tragedy.
One read: “Sharon, I’m going to take her life. Sorry for the pain in advance. It’s going to be a sad Christmas.”
Public Defender Carey Haughwout said the text messages need to be viewed in the proper context, which is that Dacoby and Davneisha had a tumultuous relationship for years.
“They were up and down, on and off,” Haughwout said, noting that he sometimes made threats when she didn’t return his calls.
On top of that, Wooten had recently lost a sanitation job and “his world was falling apart.”
About 5:45 a.m. on the day of the shooting, Sharon Bryant drove Davneisha to an apartment they rented together, because her daughter needed some extra clothes for work, the prosecutor said.
When Davneisha didn’t return to the car, her mom walked upstairs to the second-floor unit and noticed a key still in the lock. As Bryant pushed open the door, she discovered Wooten holding a gun to Davneisha’s back. The night before, Wooten had kicked open the door and was waiting, the prosecutor said.
“I told you I was going to kill her,” Wooten told a startled Sharon Bryant, according to McRoberts. Wooten added, “My mind is made up. I have nothing to lose and I’m going to kill you too.”
Bryant tried to talk him out of it, and even offered her own life in exchange, so Davneisha’s 5- and 7-year-old sons with Wooten would not grow up without their mother.
“This was 20 minutes of begging by Sharon Bryant not to kill her baby,” McRoberts said. “No
begging or pleading was going to change his mind.”
Wooten shot Davneisha twice in the back, including a shot that severed her spinal cord, according to an autopsy report.
Bryant will testify that Wooten turned and began firing at her, but she fled down the stairs.
The jury also will consider charges of attempted first-degree murder, for the act of shooting at Sharon Bryant, and burglary while armed, for the break-in.
Wooten’s lawyer said the confrontation happened differently. Haughwout said Wooten only went to the apartment to talk to Davneisha, but the situation unraveled, and everyone got upset. At one point, Sharon Bryant made a sudden move that startled Wooten, his lawyer said.
“It’s only when there’s a quick movement of Mrs. Bryant pushing Davneisha toward the apartment (door) that Dacoby fires the gun,” Haughwout said, suggesting the shooting happened during an “emotional frenzy.”
Some of the detective work used to aid Wooten’s capture in Fort Pierce at a girlfriend’s apartment, two days after the shooting, was the subject of a court battle last year. Prosecutors tried to keep hidden how investigators used an ultra-secret cellphone tracking device, called a cell-site simulator.
But Circuit Judge Cheryl Caracuzzo ruled that the tracking information listed in warrants couldn’t be kept from Wooten’s lawyers and the public. An appeals court upheld the decision, writing, “in a free society governed by our constitutional framework, the default should be for transparency and disclosure.”