Florida teens film, mock man as he drowned
Teenagers, aged 14 to 16, then posted the video to social media
About seven seconds into the video, a teenager raises the spectre of death. “Get out the water, you’re gonna die,” one of the teens shouts to a disabled man whom his friends are watching struggle fully clothed in a fencedin pond. “You shouldn’t have gone in,” says another. The kids laugh.
“He keeps putting his head under,” another says. “Wow.” Once the group realises the weight of the situation, one of the boys prods another.
“Bro, you scared to see a dead person?” he asks. Jamel Dunn, 32, drowned on July 9 in Cocoa, Fla., a coastal city east of Orlando. The teenagers, aged 14 to 16, filmed the incident as they laughed and mocked Dunn, then posted the video to social media. The video, which police called “extremely disturbing,” was found by detectives and handed over to Brevard County State Attorney’s Office, which recently released it to Florida Today.
“He started to struggle and scream for help and they just laughed. They didn’t call the police. They just laughed the whole time. He was just screaming ... for someone to help him,” Yvonne Martinez, spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, told the paper, which posted only the audio of the incident. Both the police department and attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The teens were identified and questioned by detectives investigating the case, but they are unlikely to face charges. They were not directly involved in Dunn’s drowning, and good Samaritan laws — which typically involve protections for bystanders helping on the scene of an emergency — don’t apply to the case, police said.
Dunn was at the pond following an argument with his fiancee shortly before the incident and walked in on his own, Martinez said. “They were watching him,” she said about the teenagers. “Everybody is just horrified by this.”
Dunn’s fiancee filed a missing people report on July 12. His “badly decomposed body” was found on July 14, and a family member identified Dunn from the video circulating online. Dunn walked with the aid of a cane and had two young children, Florida Today reported.
— Washington Post
The teens were identified and questioned by detectives investigating the case, but they are unlikely to face charges as they were not directly involved in Dunn’s drowning.