Orlando shootings suspect fit for trial
A man charged with killing one person at a downtown Orlando firm and injuring five others took the stand Monday at his competency hearing and testified that he remembered what he did before and after the spree but not during.
After hearing testimony from shooting suspect Jason Rodriguez and three mental-health professionals, Chief Circuit Judge Belvin Perry Jr. ruled that Rodriguez, 44, is competent to stand trial. Jury selection is scheduled to begin early next week.
Rodriguez testified that he left home Nov. 6, 2009, with a gun, but he did not carry the weapon into a post office or a school where he stopped to try to register for classes because he knew it was illegal.
Rodriguez admitted taking the gun, for which he had a concealed-weapons permit, into the office of his former employer Reynolds, Smith & Hills. He said he wanted to talk to a manager about why he had not received an unemployment check.
Rodriguez was fired in 2007 from his job as an engineer.
Why did he go to the office, Chief Orange-Osceola Assistant State Attorney Linda Drane Burdick asked.
“To confront them because they were tweaking the numbers, and every time I was trying to get a check I couldn’t,” Rodriguez replied.
Burdick asked Rodriguez what happened when he went upstairs to talk to the manager, but he said he did not remember. He also told her that some of her questions were “irrelevant” and that he did not want to “get into the facts of the case.”
“I was psychotic. I can’t tell you what happened,” Rodriguez said.
The hearing was a lastditch effort by Assistant Public Defenders Melissa Vickers and Laura Klossner to have Rodriguez declared incompetent for trial. Perry in July also ruled Rodriguez competent after previously ruling him incompetent several times.
Orlando attorney Mark NeJame, who is not involved in the case, said it’s always risky to call a defendant to the stand.
“The trouble is now the defense has arguably as-
sisted the prosecution in showing the defendant can distinguish right from wrong,” NeJame said.
Rodriguez has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, suffers from delusions and auditory hallucinations and blames a voice he calls “sharp tooth” for giving him instructions via radio frequencies in his ear, testimony showed.
He sat impassively at the defense table, unshaven, and periodically jiggled his knees up and down and rubbed the table with his right middle finger.
Rodriguez is living at North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center in Gainesville, a psychiatric center for men committed by criminal courts. He is taking the anti-psychotic medications Haldol and Seroquel, which make him sleep most of the day, according to testimony.
Rodriguez is charged with one count of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted first- degree murder.
Prosecutors say he killed Otis Beckford, 26, a computer- design technician. Witnesses said he walked around the eighth-floor office in the Gateway Center off North Orange Avenue shooting other people, too.
The defense has filed a notice that it plans to rely on an insanity defense.