Florida teens laugh and record man as he drowns, police say

Jamel Dunn, 31, died on July 9 after drowning in a pond in Cocoa, Fla. Police say a group of teens recorded his death with a cellphone but didn't call for help. Photo by Simone Scott/GoFundMe

July 21 (UPI) — A group of Florida teens saw a man drowning in a pond and laughed at him as they recorded his death instead of trying to help, police said.

The video shows the drowning death of Jamel Dunn, 31, of Cocoa, Fla. Dunn drowned on July 9 and his body wasn’t found until July 12.

“You a [expletive] junkie,” shouts one of the teens at Dunn. “Get out the water, you’re going down!”

Another teen mockingly shouts that an alligator is coming before somebody else shouts: “We not fitting to help your ass! Ain’t nobody fitting to help you, you dumb [expletive]. You should have never got in there!”

At one point in the video, one of the teens is heard asking his friends if they are really “gonna sit right here and still…” before trailing off. Another teen responds: “Why? You afraid to see a dead person?”

“Hell, no I’m not afraid to see a dead person,” the teen says. “But you gotta understand…”

Before the teen can finish his sentence, Dunn is heard screaming for help. The teens laugh and Dunn’s head goes underwater for several seconds. He comes up once more and then quickly goes under again, drowning.

“He just died!” one of the teens says excitedly. The others laugh.

According to Florida Today, the teens did not report the drowning to authorities. Instead, Dunn’s fiancee filed a missing person’s report when Dunn didn’t come home and then found the video of him drowning on social media. Authorities went to the pond depicted in the video and found Dunn’s badly decomposed body three days after his death.

Police said Dunn went to the pond after an argument with his fiancee. The teens watched him wade into the pond and began recording.

“The kids were at the park that day smoking marijuana and apparently saw him walk into the water. He walked in on his own. They were watching him,” said Yvonne Martinez, spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department.

Simone Scott, Dunn’s sister, said in a Facebook Live video that police told her the teens did not call 911 because they were afraid of getting in trouble for smoking marijuana.

But aside from the alleged use of illegal drugs, police said the teens did not commit a crime by refusing to help a dying man.

“While the incident depicted on the recording does not give rise to sufficient evidence to support criminal prosecution under Florida statutes, we can find no moral justification for either the behavior of persons heard on the recording or the deliberate decision not to render aid to Mr. Dunn,” the Brevard-Seminole State Attorney’s Office said in a statement.

“I agree they don’t have to help, but they should have called 911,” Scott said.

“I feel like something should be done to them, probation or something. If they can just sit there and watch a man die before their eyes, imagine what they could do when they get older,” she said.

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