JULIO FOOLIO MURDER: FOUR CONVICTED, JURY REJECTS DEATH PENALTY. PLUS LUIGI MANGIONE, TIGER WOODS, AND D4VD

0:03 Callaroga Shark Media. Good morning, this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher and it is Wednesday, May twentieth, twenty twenty six. If you've been with us the last couple of weeks, you've been hearing the Biting Back series, the underdog cases, the David and Goliath stories. That was the vacation slate, and it was a good one. But production is back. I'm back, and we are back to the daily docket. Let's get to work. Four stories on the desk this morning, and they split cleanly into two halves. The first half is paperwork. Three cases where nobody testified, nobody was sentenced, nobody cried on a stand, and yet the ground moved anyway. In New York, a judge handed Luigi Manjone a win, a partial, the kind of win where the headline says one thing and the fine print says another, and we are going to read you the fine print. Down in Florida, a judge decided that prosecutors get to look inside Tiger Woods's medicine cabinet. And if you remember what Woods told the deputies at the scene of that crash, you already know why that matters. And in Los Angeles, the case against the artist who records under the name David got pushed again the third time while his lawyers and the prosecutors stood in a courtroom and accused each other of running out the clock. We'll take all three quickly, and then the second half, the

1:37 long one, because in Tampa, a case this show has been following for a year and a half finally reached the end of the road. Charles Jones, the Rapper of the World knew as Julio Fulio, was ambushed in a hotel parking lot on his twenty sixth birthday. Four men were on trial for it, and over the last two weeks a jury did two separate things. They decide whether those four men were guilty, and then they decided whether those four men should live. We are going to walk you through both of those decisions because they are not the same decision, and the gap between them is the whole story. Stay with us. Let's start in New York with Luigi Mangone quick reset for anyone new Mangione, now twenty eight, is charged in state court with second degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon in the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson shot in the back outside a Manhattan hotel in December of twenty twenty four.

2:41 He also faces federal stalking charges. He has pleaded not guilty. We covered the suppression fight on this show back in December, when his lawyers spent the better part of a week trying to convince a judge that the evidence against him was gathered illegally. On Monday, the judge ruled, and the coverage you'll see calls it a win for Mangione. It is sort of let me be honest with you about what actually happened. When Altuna police found Mangione eating breakfast at a McDonald's, officers started going through his backpack right there in the restaurant, and they said they did it because they were worried about a bomb. The judge wasn't buying that. He pointed out that if you genuinely believe a bag might explode, you do not open it surrounded by customers and employees. A real bomb search and a crowded dining room do not go together. So everything officers pulled out of that bag at the McDonald's, a loaded magazine, a cell phone, a passport, a wallet, a computer chip, all of it is suppressed, the jury will never see it.

3:46 Here is the fine print. After the arrest, police took that same backpack back to the station and inventoried it a routine by the book catalog of a prisoner's property, and the judge said that search was clean, which means the two items that were also inside that bag, a handgun and a red notebook, are coming in. The gun, prosecutors say, matches the ballistics. The notebook, prosecutors say, contains his own handwritten plans. So yes, Mangoni's team knocked out the magazine and the wallets, they did not knock out the gun and the manifesto. The judge also ruled that statements Mangioni made to a corrections officer about the healthcare system about people seeming happier in poorer countries, those come in two because he volunteered them. Nobody was interrogating him.

4:33 His state trial is set for September eighth. The federal one picks a jury in January. Will be there for both. Now to Florida and Tiger Woods. We brought you this one back at the start of April. Woods, fifty years old, crashed his land Rover on March twenty seventh, Investigators say he tried to pass a truck over a double solid line, clipped a Ford F one point fifty, and rolled his suv onto its side. No one was hurt. He has pleaded not guilty to driving under the influence and to refusing a test, and when deputies at the scene asked him about medications, Woods told them, and I want you to hold onto this exact sentence, he said, I took a few. That sentence is why this week's news matters.

5:15 Prosecutors subpoened Woods's prescription drug records, the names of the drugs, the dosages, the warnings. Woods lawyers fought it hard on privacy grounds. On Tuesday, a judge ended the fight. The two sides reached an agreement, and the judge signed off. Prosecutors get the records. They'll be sealed from the public. You and I will likely never see the list, but the state will look. I'm going to be honest with you, this was never going to be a case about a beer. Woods denied drinking. The entire question here is what was in his system that was not alcohol, And now the people deciding whether to prosecute him get to see exactly what he was prescribed and how much woods For what it's worth, was given the court's permission to leave the country for what's described as comprehensive impatient treatment. So somewhere out there he is presumably getting help. His next court day is June second. The legal story and the human story are running on two different tracks here, and only one of them ends in a courtroom. And our third file is in Los Angeles, the case against the musician who records under the name David. If you've been with the show, you know it David. Legal name David Anthony Burke, twenty one years old, is charged with the first degree murder of fourteen year old Celeste Revas Hernandez, along with continuous lout acts with a child and the mutilation of human remains. He is pleaded not guilty. Celest's body was

6:46 found last September, dismembered in the trunk of a Tesla registered in his name. This week's update is procedural, and it is frustrating, and I'll tell you why. There was a hearing Tuesday that was supposed to be the preliminary hearing, the seating where a judge decides whether the state has enough to send this to a full trial. It didn't happen. It got pushed to June twenty ninth. That is the third time the prelim has slipped. And inside the courtroom, the two sides pointed at each other. David's defense lawyers told the judge they had asked for the DNA evidence and still hadn't received it, and they accused prosecutors of stalling in their words, so they have more time to prep The lead prosecutor, Beth Silverman, pushed back, visibly frustrated, and she said something that I think is the honest center of this. These cases can drag on for years.

7:37 She said the state has already handed over about ten terabytes of evidence out of at least forty, and that finishing it could take months. Here's the thing. Both of those can be true at once. The defense can be right that delay gives the prosecution time to rehearse, and the prosecution can be right that forty terabytes of digital evidence does not move overnight. What I can keep coming back to is the one name in this that does not get to file motions. Celeste Revas Hernandez was fourteen years old. She has been waiting for a courtroom since September. There's a status conference on June seventeenth, and the preliminary hearing for now June twenty ninth. We'll keep counting when we come back Tampa. A rapper who posted his own birthday plans to the entire Internet, and four men who prosecutors say read those posts like a map. The verdict, and then the harder question the jury had to answer afterward.

8:41 Welcome back to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher. If you're a returning listener, you know this case. We brought you the original story back in October of twenty twenty five. We brought you the conviction of Alicia Andrews, the girlfriend, last November. We brought you the appeals fight in February when her sentencing judge got removed, and we were with you in April when the main trial began. Today, that trial is over and there is a lot to tell you. Quick refresher for anyone new Charles Jones twenty six years old. He performed as Juliofulio, a drill rapper out of Jacksonville, Florida, and a documented member of a Jacksonville street crew called six Block Six Block was, according to prosecutors, locked in a long running violent rivalry with two other Jacksonville factions, one called Aces Top Killers ATK and one called twelve hundred. I want you to hold on to that word rivalry. I'll come back to it in a minute, because it was fought over in this courtroom.

9:45 June twenty third, twenty twenty four, Fulio is in Tampa for his birthday. And here's the detail the whole case turns on. He told everyone where he was. He posted it the airbnb, the pool, party, the clubs. His Instagram was in effect a live broadcast of his own location, and around five in the morning, in the parking lot of a hotel complex near the University of South Florida, vehicles pulled up, men got out, and they opened fire on the cars. Folio and his friends were sitting in thirty one nine millimeter shell casings on the ground. Afterward, bullets punched into occupied hotel rooms. A family on a college move in trip, kids in the room screaming a bullet through their air conditioning unit. The mother left with a burn on her leg from shrapnel. Three bystanders shot, and Charles Jones found in a defensive position inside his own car, killed by a round that passed through his chest, his heart, and his lungs. Four men stood trial for that morning, Isaiah Chance, Sean Gathright, Reshad Murphy Davian Murphy, each charged with first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

10:55 The fifth person originally charged, Alicia Andrews, was tried separately last year, and we'll get to her before we're done. The States case took about two and a half weeks, and it was built out of the modern world surveillance footage, cell tower data, instagram stories, recorded social media audio. Prosecutors walked the jury through how they alleged the four men drove three hours from Jacksonville, tracked folio from club to club using his own posts, and split into roles. Chance, the state said, helped scout locations, while Gathright and the two Murphys were the gunmen at the hotel. Forensic analysts told the jury that DNA recovered from tape on one of the rifles came back with a major contributor. Sean Gathright, a medical examiner, described the fatal wound. Gang unit detectives testified to the rivalry, to the tattoos, to the social media taunts, the drill videos mocking rivals who had already been killed, and the defense fought every piece of it.

11:56 This is where that word rivalry comes back. The defense called its own expert, the professor who studies gangs, who told the jury that, in his assessment, these three groups did not actually have a gang war at all. Rashad Murphy's lawyer argued his client's phone simply does not place him in Tampa around the time of the killing. Gathwright's lawyer told the jury his client was barely eighteen and got swept up in something far bigger than him. Chance's attorney said, no weapon, no clothing, nothing forensic tied his client to the crime. DAVI and Murphy's lawyer said there was no message, no DNA, no proof his client planned anything.

12:40 The common thread of the whole defense was the one you hear in a lot of these cases that the state had built a story out of assumptions and proximity, not proof. On May eighth, the jury went out, They deliberated for more than seven hours, and then they came back and they convicted all four men guilty of first degree murder, guilty of conspiracy. Every defendant, every count now, under Florida law, a first degree murder conviction is only the first half of the work, because the state had announced it wanted these four men to die, and so the same twelve people who had just said the word guilty were told to come back the following Monday and decide something much heavier, whether guilty should mean dead. We'll pick that up on the other side of the break when we come back the penalty phase. The defendant's families take the stand, One of the convicted men speaks for himself, and twelve jurors are asked to decide who lives. Stay with us. Welcome back, Garrett Fisher with you. Before the break, four men were convicted of murdering Charles Jones Julio Fulio.

13:56 Now the same jury had to decide whether the state of Florida would put them to death. The penalty phase ran the better part of last week, and it is a very different kind of proceeding than the trial itself. The guilt phase is about what happened. The penalty phase is about who these people are, and the defense's entire job becomes building a case for mitigation, for a reason to choose life. So the jury heard from family from a former stepfather, a grandmother, a mother, a sister. They heard Sean gathwrte described as a kid who was smart and curious, who love football and travel. They heard Isaiah Chance described by his own grandmother as a boy so quiet he did not speak until he was four or five years old. A psychologist testified that Chance reads at roughly a fifth grade level, that his math sits around third grade, and that his measured IQ is seventy one, well below the average range, and that he has spent his whole life seeking approval, wanting to be seen as capable.

14:58 They heard that Davian Murphy has learning disabilities, that his behavior got him pushed out of his own home and sent to live with a grandmother, that he bounced through fourteen different schools. These are the threads a defense pulls in a penalty phase, not to excuse what was done, to contextualize it, to say to twelve strangers, before you vote to end this life, here is the life. And Sean Gathwright did something his co defendants did not. He took the stand himself. He told the jury, and I'll quote him because the words matter. He said he was just there to be a man and take responsibility. He turned towards Charles Jones family and expressed remorse. He told them he had been doing programs in jail. His sister testified, and as she cried, Gathwright cried with her. I want to be careful here, because this is the part where editorial and fact have to stay in their lanes. I do not know what was in Shawn Gathright's heart on that witness stand. Neither do you. A man facing a death's sentence has every reason in the world to perform remorse, but a man can also genuinely feel it. Both of those things can be true at the same time, and the only people whose job it was to weigh them were the twelve in the box. On May fifteenth, they came back with their answer. For all four men, Chance Gathwright, and both Murphys. The jury recommended life in prison without the possibility of parole. They rejected the death penalty. The

16:29 formal sentencing is set for June twenty second, and I'll note that date because it lands one day shy of the second anniversary of the morning Charles Jones was killed. Here's where I'll give you my honest read, and I'm flagging it as opinion. The state asked twelve people to kill four men, and twelve people said no. And I do not think that was softness. I think those jurors sat for two weeks with thirty one shell casings and a dead twenty six year old and a family with shrapnel burns, and then they sat for another week with an IQ score of seventy one and fourteen schools and a kid who did not talk until he was five, and they decided that life in a cell until death was punishment enough, and that the machinery of an execution would not make Charles Jones any less dead. You can agree with that or not. I think it is defensible.

17:20 Life without parole is not mercy. It is the rest of your existence inside a box. These four men will die in prison. The jury simply declined to set the date. There is one piece still unfinished. Alicia Andrews, Isaiah Chance's girlfriend, the fifth person charged, was convicted last year of the lesser charge of manslaughter, and she has still not been sentenced. Her case has become its own tangle. Her original trial judge was removed for alleged bias. The prosecution is appealing that removal, and Andrews's own lawyers are now asking the court to throw out her conviction entirely and grant her a new trial. So that threat is still live, and we will keep pulling it, but step back from the procedure for a second. Charles Jones was twenty six years old.

18:08 He was a rapper. He was good enough at it that strangers three hundred miles away knew his name and tracked his birthday. And that is the bitter center of this whole story. The same machine that built his career, the constant broadcasting, the location, the posts, the performance of his own life. That machine is exactly what four men used to find him and kill him. There is a playbook for this. Now you announce where you are. Your enemies read it, and the Internet becomes a map. Fulio did not invent that game, and he will not be the last person it kills. Charles Jones should have turned twenty eight last month. He did not. Four men will spend the rest of their lives answering for that. And his name was Charles Jones. Somebody has to say it.

18:58 That's Daily Crime and Justice US for Wednesday, May twentieth, twenty twenty six. Quick recap. In New York, Luigi Manjone won a partial suppression ruling. The magazine and the wallet are out, but the gun and the notebook are in, and his state trial holds for September. In Florida, prosecutors won access to Tiger Woods's sealed prescription records. His next court date is June second. In Los Angeles, the case against the artist known as David slid again. The preliminary hearing now set for June twenty ninth, with a status check on the seventeen. And in Tampa, the four men who murdered Julia Fulio were convicted on every count and a jury chose life without parole over execution. They are formally sentenced June twenty second. We tracked the Fulio case for a year and a half on this show. It is, in the legal sense, nearly finished, but Charles Jones is still gone. Three bystanders still carry what happened in that parking lot, and a teenager named Celeste Revas Hernandez is still waiting for her day in a Los Angeles courtroom. Justice, when it comes, tends to come slow and tends to come incomplete. That does not mean we stop watching for it.

20:10 I'm Garrett Fischer. It is good to be back on the daily desk. Look out for each other, do better. Disclaimer Daily Crime and Justice is a production of Calaroga Shark Media. All defendants discussed are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. Where individuals have been convicted, those convictions are identified as such. Editorial commentary in this program reflects the opinions of the host and is offered as opinion, not as a statement of fact or a legal conclusion. Some details in today's Julio Fulio coverage, including the penalty phase recommendation of life without parole, and the June twenty second sentencing date, are drawn from news reporting that post dates our primary trial source, and the date of the guilt phase verdict has been reported inconsistently across outlets. These points should be regarded as accurate as of recording and are subject to update. The characterization of a gang war among the groups name reflects the prosecution's theory of the case and was disputed by a defense expert at trial. Information in the Mangione, Woods and David segments reflects court rulings and proceedings as reported at the time of writing, and remains subject to further motions, hearings, and appeals. This program contains discussion of violence. Listener discretion is advised.