Niamh Shackleton
Chilling footage showed the moment that three teenagers were charged in connection to another teen's death.
In 2011, 15-year-old Seath Jackson was brutally murdered by a group youths.
Jackson had been lured to a mobile home by his ex-girlfriend Amber Wright, also aged 15 at the time, and ambushed.
Wright and Jackson had dated for around three months, but he'd suspected that she was cheating on him with 18-year-old Michael Bargo. With this in mind, there was ongoing tensions between the two teenagers for months.
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Then in April 2011, the teenagers started plotting Jackson's murder.
Jackson was lured with the hopes of reconciliation with Wright, when he arrived at the location she told him to go to he was viscously beaten and shot dead - with Bargo being the one to pull the trigger.
Jackson's body was then burnt and his ashes were put into paint containers.
Bargo was later sentenced to death for his role in the killing and remains on death row, while his four co-defendants - Wright, her brother 16-year-old brother Kyle Hooper, 18-year-old Charlie Ely and 20-year-old Justin Soto were charged with first degree murder.
Chilling footage shared on TikTok shows the moment Wright, Hooper and Ely learnt of their fate, being told: “You’re all going to be booked for first degree, premeditated murder.”
See it here:
Detective Rhonda Stroup of Marion County Sheriff's Office explained how the two juveniles of the group would be sent to Juvenile Assessment Center, while the adult would go to Marion County Jail.
They were then told: “Take a deep breath. You’ll have no bond. You won’t be getting out. Listen to me, everybody just take a deep breath.”
When one of the teens tries to say that they ‘really didn’t do anything’, Stroup says: “No, no, no. See, but you did.
“Listen, first of all, let’s get over that hump right now - that ‘We really didn’t do anything’ - because everybody’s complicit here.
“A person died, a person was murdered.”
All the defendants were sentenced to life in prison for Jackson’s murder.
In 2020, after nine years in prison, Ely was released after pleading to a lesser charge.
James Havens - the ex-boyfriend of Amber Wright’s mother - was accused of helping the teens dispose of the remains and pleaded guilty in 2018 to accessory to murder, receiving a 10-year sentence.
Bargo became Florida’s youngest inmate on death row, with the Supreme Court upholding his sentence in 2021.