Where's the dramamine? Part Nineteen

Were the Miami Herald and AP both covering the same murder trial? Let's start with the Herald-

Harrel Braddy stood quietly Tuesday as a court clerk read the decision he has spent almost nine years trying to avoid.

Guilty of trying to escape. Guilty of burglary. Guilty of attempted murder and two counts of kidnapping.

And the final verdict: guilty of murdering a little girl by leaving her in the middle of the night in the Everglades.

Quatisha Maycock was killed by alligators in November 1998 after Braddy dumped her by the side of Alligator Alley.

After more than a week of testimony in the trial, Assistant State Attorney Abbe Rifkin asked the jury on Tuesday to consider Quatisha's final moments.

''You're 5. .T. . You're hurt. You're alone. It's dark,'' she said.

Braddy had already left the little girl's mother, Shandelle Maycock, for dead in a sugarcane field after choking her repeatedly.

*****

Shandelle Maycock testified last week that she had tried to save herself and her only child by jumping out of Braddy's moving car. Rifkin asked the jurors during her closing argument: ``How desperate would you have to be to jump out of a moving car with your child?''

But Braddy's attorney, G.P. Della Fera, offered an alternative theory to explain the child's death: It was the mother's fault.

From this story, you get the impression Quatisha died the result of either falling or being thrown from a car. Now here is how AP reports the murder.

Braddy stopped, choked the woman again and put her in the trunk, she testified. Maycock never saw her daughter again. Prosecutors said Braddy then drove to a section of Interstate 75 in the Everglades known as Alligator Alley and dropped Quatisha in the water beside the road.

She was alive when alligators bit her on the head and stomach, a medical examiner said.

AP reports Quatisha was alive when thrown in with the alligators. Did these two reporters cover the same trial?

A few other things have me puzzled. The mother was left in a different location than her daughter but defense claims the girl died because her mother made them jump from the car. How are those consistent? The girl would have been dead or dying when before Braddy dropped the mother off at another location. I'm confused, and the Herald is at fault. Get me that drammaine.

One last thing-

Braddy had served 13 years of a 30-year prison sentence for attempted murder before being released early for good behavior.

The trial had been delayed for nearly nine years because Braddy has fired several attorneys and represented himself at one point. His attorney, G.P. Della Feram, declined to comment.

A dozen law enforcement officers stood guard, aware that Braddy has escaped from the courthouse before. He fled after trying to strangle a Miami-Dade corrections officer in 1984.

Braddy tries to kill a corrections officer and then gets released on good behavior. Not to mention Braddy's legal maneuverings causing his trial to be put off for nine years. Doesn't give you much faith in the Florida justice system does it? If and when Braddy's appeals run out, it would only be just if he was put to death in a fashion befitting the crime committed.

Make him Gator meat.

Linked to- Bullwinkle, Bright & Early, Cao, Conservative Thoughts, The World Accroding to Carl,