FHP: No criminal charges in slaying
Suspect in ‘road rage’ stabbing avoids charge based on ‘stand your ground.’
RIVIERA BEACH — A man who fatally stabbed another motorist last year in an Interstate 95 “road rage” confrontation will not be criminally charged because of Florida’s “stand your ground” law, investigators have concluded.
Following an investigation that took 15 months, the Florida Highway Patrol has concluded Mario
Rene Briceno Escobar, 45, of Lake
Worth, feared for his safety when he killed Duvarn “Devon” Fraser,
26, of West Palm Beach, in the
June 20, 2017, confrontation after two vehicles sideswiped along the highway in Riviera Beach.
The FHP report says the man and his brother, Jose Rene Briceno, 50, of West Palm Beach, told investigators that Fraser pointed a gun at them and tried to fire just before Mario stabbed him.
Mario “described an imminent threat to him and his brother, and acted on that threat to avoid being seriously injured or killed,” the FHP report concluded.
Prosecutors later concurred. Aleathea McRoberts, an assistant state attorney for Palm Beach County, wrote FHP on Sept. 6 to say Mario “was justified when he used deadly force against Mr. Fraser.”
Fraser’s mother, Jacqueline McNealy, told The Palm Beach Post on Thursday: “We are still grieving and in total shock.” She said she didn’t want to comment further and was seeking privacy “during this terrible ordeal.”
Just after her son’s death, a distraught McNealy had told The Post, “He was a good child. He was a helpful child. He did not deserve to be murdered like this.”
And this past June, on the anniversary of her son’s death, she complained about her frustrating wait for results of the investigation. McNealy, who said she was a former police officer in Jamaica before emigrating in about 1989, acknowledged she might not like what authorities conclude, but said she just wanted to know.
Michael Salnick, a West Palm Beach attorney who represented Jose Briceno, said Thursday the two brothers did not want to comment.
“It was a horrible, sad situation,” Salnick said. “These are good guys. These are family men. These are people that have a lot of good in them and behind them. This was just a very difficult situation that I hope nobody would ever be in.”
The altercation started shortly after 3 p.m., after Fraser’s black 2008 Chevrolet Malibu and the Bricenos’ 2015 Chevrolet Express van sideswiped in the southbound lanes near Blue Heron Boulevard. It then escalated into a fistfight on the shoulder of the highway.
In 911 audio obtained by The Post in August 2017, a call from the man presumed to be Mario Briceno starts with: “Yeah! He got a gun in the hand! He put a gun to me! He put a gun to me!”
The man then is heard shouting, “Jose! Jose! I got him.” He tells the dispatcher later: “Listen. The guy, the guy, the guy who had a gun, he tried to exterminate on my brother outside! The person you have up here, he still have the gun and everything in here.”
FHP reports say an arriving trooper found Jose Briceno on top of Fraser, whose abdomen had been torn open by stab wounds. A new supplement said troopers found in Mario Briceno’s back pocket a loaded and bloody gun. He said it had no rounds in its chamber and no rounds had been fired.
Jose Briceno later told investigators he had pulled the van over after the sideswipe and had approached Fraser’s car. He said Fraser stepped out and lifted his shirt to show the gun in his waistband. He said Fraser shouted an expletive, then said, “I’m going to kill you right now. You hit my car.”
Jose Briceno said he returned to his van to call 911, and that Fraser trailed him and then pointed the gun at him.
Mario Briceno said he grabbed a knife the brothers use to cut mangoes and put it in his waistband. He said Fraser told him he had a “license for the weapon” — apparently a reference to his concealed-weapons permit — and Mario Briceno answered, “Yes, but not to kill us.”
He said Fraser struck him, then pulled his handgun and tried to shoot, but the gun didn’t fire. He said he grabbed Fraser’s wrist and during the struggle stabbed Fraser as Fraser tried to put a round into the gun’s chamber.
The report said Mario Briceno told the trooper he believed that, had he not stabbed Fraser, “he and his brother would have been shot.”
Jose Briceno said he helped his brother get the gun away from Fraser. Jose Briceno said he then noticed Fraser was bleeding. He said he asked his brother for water for Fraser and removed his shirt to use as a tourniquet. He said he told Fraser to stop struggling.
He said Fraser apologized and began to cry.
Fraser died at 10 that night at St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach.
The FHP report said the facts that the brothers called 911, tried to wave over a police officer who was driving by and called 911 a second time as they attempted first aid eliminate “the suspicion that this incident was planned or staged.”
A friend of Fraser who owned the Glock 23 found at the scene told investigators he’d left it that day in Fraser’s car. On Fraser’s cellphones, troopers also found photos he apparently had taken, moments before he was killed, of the damage to the Bricenos’ van and the two brothers standing by it, with Jose Briceno talking on a cellphone.
Just before the confrontation, Fraser was headed home from his clerk’s job at Costco on Northlake Boulevard in Lake Park, his mother has said.
She said he had worked at the discount warehouse for about five years. She said her son had planned to join a restaurant endeavor that a relative was starting up in the area.
She said in June that Fraser left behind a daughter, now 7 years old, who “has nightmares quite often. She cries for her father.”