Video

Four suspects were arrested in Lee County in connection with the slaying of NFL star Sean Taylor. The Daily News had reporters on the scene at FDLE all day covering the arrests. Watch »

Photos of the suspects in the murder of NFL star Sean Taylor. Click to enlarge.

RELATED STORIES

• VIDEO/PHOTOS: A year after NFL player Sean Taylor’s slaying, four Lee suspects await trial
• Prosecutors won’t seek death penalty in NFL star’s shooting death
• Trial now set for August in Taylor murder case
• Judge orders silence in Sean Taylor murder trial
• Judge puts gag order on Sean Taylor case
• Sean Taylor shooting death: Suspect drove to Miami, didn't know about gun
• Remembering Sean Taylor: Reactions to the slaying of an NFL star
• 4th Lee County man also held on no bond in NFL star Sean Taylor’s death
• Two of four Lee County men confess in slaying of NFL star Sean Taylor
• St. John Neumann coach's thoughts with former player Sean Taylor

More Local news

• Mental health center looks for Collier land donation
• Island Coast AIDS Network selected to benefit from national coat drive campaign
• PARADE FLOATS: Bonita’s holiday event on the Imperial River kicks off boat parade season

Tell us about it

• What would you add to this story? Tell us what we missed.
• Do you have photos from this event? Documents we need to see? Share with us.
• Upload photos & videos
• More ways to get your stuff online and in the paper.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

Share and Enjoy [?]

In late September, Jason Mitchell and a Dunbar High School friend drove down to Miami for the weekend.

Mitchell hadn’t met Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor before, but his buddy Christopher Wardlow was dating Taylor’s sister. The NFL star greeted them at the door. They helped out by tidying the house for the sister’s birthday party — Mitchell and Taylor cut the grass together — and when they were done, Taylor handed each of them a stack of large bills, totaling $300.

“That’s pretty generous?” a Miami-Dade police detective asked Mitchell months later.

The 20-year-old Lehigh Acres man nodded his head.

But that was nothing compared to the $10,000 apiece Mitchell said Taylor handed over that weekend to his sister, for her birthday, and their brother. According to documents released Wednesday by the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office in the Taylor homicide case — including portions of the statements Mitchell and two of his co-defendants gave police on Nov. 30, the day of their arrest — word of the cash flow at Taylor’s house filtered back to Lee County.

Some two months after Mitchell watched Wardlow pose for a camera with Taylor’s cash, authorities allege, Mitchell and at least three friends took a late-night road trip back across Alligator Alley and broke into the football player’s home.

Investigators say it was in the ensuing botched burglary that Sean Taylor was shot.

Mitchell and three others — Venjah Hunte, 20, Eric Rivera, 17, and Charles Wardlow, 18, a relative of the friend who introduced Mitchell and Taylor — have all pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and armed burglary charges.

Judge Dennis Murphy has approved a gag order banning attorneys linked to the case from speaking publicly about it.

In 107 pages of police statements the state released on Wednesday, all or part of at least 70 were redacted. Most of what happened the night Taylor was shot, blank.

Prosecutors can remove a suspect’s confession to a crime from the bulk of case evidence normally made public.

Mitchell’s conversation with the Miami police detective was by far the longest and most descriptive of the three. Taken together, the documents reveal or confirm several new details about the lead-up and fallout of the shooting.

For instance, Mitchell said he’d assumed Taylor wouldn’t be home that night, since the Redskins had been in Tampa for a game. And a fifth person apparently accompanied the four suspects on their trip to Miami.

Afterward, the reports say, the group burned their clothes and gloves so that, in Rivera’s words, “nobody can find out who did it.”

Who that fifth person was, and why he or she was not indicted along with the other four, was not clear.

On the return trip to Lee County, Rivera also told the detective, talk in their rented SUV was about how they would “keep it quiet and not tell anybody.” They had to pool together $2 in coins to buy enough gas for the last stretch up Interstate 75.

And when they arrived at a house in Lehigh Acres, Hunte recalled that they “just chilled, trying to get [expletive] out of our minds.”

Later on, Mitchell said, his buddy Christopher Wardlow showed up at his door back home to say that Taylor had been shot. “For real,” Mitchell said he replied. “Damn.” In the coming days, Mitchell said he contemplated turning himself in.

“Okay,” the detective asked him, “why didn’t you?”

Mitchell said he didn’t know.