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Teens recorded drowning man and laughed, but face no charges

 
Jamel Dunn, 31, drowned July 9 in Cocoa.
Jamel Dunn, 31, drowned July 9 in Cocoa.
Published July 22, 2017

Authorities say a group of teens who watched, laughed and made a video as a man drowned in a retention pond can be charged with failure to report a death.

Cocoa Mayor Henry Parrish III says the misdemeanor charge is at least a start in the July 9 drowning death of 31-year-old Jamel Dunn. It's generally not a crime to fail to come to someone's rescue in Florida or elsewhere in the United States.

Cocoa police say that after the drowning, they discovered a group of teens recorded Dunn's drowning on video. The video was released by the State Attorney's Office on Thursday, and audio was published by Florida Today. The teens can be heard laughing at Dunn, telling him that he's going die and that they weren't going to help him.

Police identified and interviewed the five teens involved. Cocoa police Chief Mike Cataloupe called their actions "utterly inhumane and cruel," but initially said criminal charges could not be filed because state law doesn't require people to give or to call for help when someone's in distress.

The announcement of the charge came as the story gained widespread online attention.

The five teens did nothing to help him, not even call 911.

"In the state of Florida, there is no law in place that requires a person to render aid or call to render aid to a victim in distress," Yvonne Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, said Friday.

Dunn drowned on July 9 and his body was found five days later when the police received a report that it was floating near the edge of the pond in a park in Cocoa.

As detectives investigated the death over the weekend, a family member of Dunn's alerted them to the video, which the teenagers had begun sharing with friends.

The police asked the office of Phil Archer, the state attorney for Brevard and Seminole counties, to review the video. But the prosecutor's office said it did not contain the evidence needed for a criminal prosecution.

The low-quality, 2.5-minute cellphone video shows a man flailing in the middle of a body of water as the teens describe his struggle and laugh at him from the shore of the pond.

One of the teens, using an expletive, calls Dunn a junkie. Someone tells him not to expect any assistance: "Ain't nobody going to help you, you dumb b- - - -. You shouldn't have got in there," he says.

About a minute into the video, the man appears to let out a whimper before submerging, fully, underwater.

"He just died!" a voice can be heard saying, as the others begin to laugh.

Later, one of the teens appears to suggest that they call police, only to be rejected by another.

The police identified and met with all five, who ranged in age from 14 to 18, Martinez said. None appeared to show much emotion.

"What I saw was not remorseful," she said.

A Facebook user named Simone Scott, who identified herself online as Dunn's sister, expressed frustration with the investigation and said "something should be done" in a video live-streamed on the social network Thursday.

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"If they can sit there and watch somebody die in front of their eyes, imagine what they're going to do when they get older?" she said about the teenagers.

She expressed frustration with the investigation and said she wondered how Dunn, who she said was disabled and walked with a cane, ended up in the middle of the pond.

Surveillance footage obtained Thursday from a neighbor showed that Dunn entered the pond on his own and did not appear to be coerced or forced to go in, Martinez said.

Information from the Associated Press and the New York Times was used in this report.