GUILTY FL - Jaime Gough, 14, stabbed to death, Miami, 3 Feb 2004

Casshew

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Student found dead at Miami school


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MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- A student was found dead Tuesday at a middle school, which has been locked down, officials said.

Miami-Dade County police said the death at Southwood Middle School appeared to be "unnatural," but refused to release further details.

Story from CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/02/03/student.death.ap/index.html
 
Cass - you are always so full of such bright news!!!!!
 
And you are full of smart replies :razz: :loser:
 
Casshew said:
And you are full of smart replies :razz: :loser:


who moi???? :slap: take that!
 
Ghostwheel said:
Suspect in Custody-Florida Teen's Death Ruled Homicide
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,110322,00.html

Gosh Cass you sure are the bearer of bad news :slap: (just kidding)

this is so sad, tragic and unsettling. They better get tough with juvenile offenders if in fact the perp is a juvenile which I suspect he is. I think it would be hard to 'rehabilitate' someone who could slash another to death in cold blood. Crazy world in which we live...
 
indigomood said:
Gosh Cass you sure are the bearer of bad news :slap: (just kidding)
LOL...

Seriously though, sheesh.... makes you fear for your kids at school! :(
 
Posted on Wed, Feb. 25, 2004
ARRAIGNMENT HEARING: In court Tuesday, Judge Henry Leyte-Vidal asks about the finances of Kathy and Jesus Hernandez. He said they were not entitled to a public defender for their son, Michael Hernandez. TIM CHAPMAN/HERALD STAFF | More photos...

SOUTHWOOD SCHOOL SLAYING

Teen pleads not guilty to murder

Because the parents of Michael Hernandez have adequate assets, a judge says they must find a private attorney for their son, who skips arraignment on a murder charge.

BY MATTHEW I. PINZUR

mpinzur@herald.com

The 14-year-old boy indicted on a murder charge in the stabbing of his Southwood Middle School classmate entered a not guilty plea on Tuesday, and the judge said his parents were too wealthy for him to have a public defender.

To the chagrin of prosecutors, Michael Hernandez did not appear at the arraignment hearing but entered the plea through his attorney, Liesbeth Boots.

''We believe that, under the law, he's required to be present,'' said Assistant State Attorney Carin Kahgan, who wanted Circuit Judge Henry Leyte-Vidal to speak directly to the teen to assess his competence.

Leyte-Vidal accepted the plea and ordered Hernandez to appear in court on March 12 with his new attorney. The teenager has been in custody since Feb. 3, when investigators say he cut the neck of Jaime Gough in a bathroom of the Palmetto Bay school.

`NOTHING TO OFFER'

Criminal defendants routinely avoid early court appearances, especially in high-profile cases, said Milton Hirsch, a prominent defense attorney and expert on criminal procedure.

''I don't want my client there -- he will have nothing to offer and he brings nothing to these hearings, because they're not particularly substantive,'' Hirsch said. ``Having him there will make him anxious and nervous and subject him to the predatory practices of journalists, so there's no reason for him to be there and every reason for him not to be there.''

Leyte-Vidal told Hernandez's parents to find a private lawyer for their son. Jesus and Kathy Hernandez testified they have assets totaling at least $245,000.

''I don't think they qualify for a public defender,'' Leyte-Vidal said.

Most of the assets come from a retirement savings account and equity in their Perrine home, which county records indicate is valued at nearly $125,000.

Jesus Hernandez runs a resale shop, which he said brings in $800 to $2,000 a month. His wife is an occupational therapist at Baptist Hospital and said she takes home around $2,600 a month. They also have a daughter at the University of Florida.

HIGH FEES

The family may request another hearing to ask for the public defender to be kept on. The complexity of a case with a 14-year-old murder defendant is extreme, Boots said, and private lawyers have already told the family they would charge as much as $100,000 just to take the case.

''This is not your typical grand theft auto,'' Boots said.
 
I'm not sure how I stand on the issue of the public defender. By all rights, the boy has no money. If you argue the parents are responsible for him, then they get punished for something they had nothing to do with (except, of course for either being bad parents, or having the bad luck of having a sociopath for a son).

Then, if the parents are responsible, they could never try him as an adult, but would a 14 year old have that option?
 
Don't really know... it's a sticky situation, I tend to see the great possibility they just happen to have a sociopath for a son. The son kills someone and then financially destroys his family. I guess if he is tried as an adult he could be declared emancipated... but at 14?? Very sticky indeed.
 
An attorney for a teenager accused of fatally slashing a classmate in a middle school restroom said the killing may have been part of a suicide pact.

Defense attorney Richard Rosenbaum told a judge Tuesday he has evidence that 14-year-old eighth-graders Michael Hernandez and Jaime Gough visited a Web site about suicide, and that Gough told a classmate the day before his death that he once considered killing himself.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/lo...ling,0,7759103.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines

The Miami-Dade School Board on Wednesday approved a $1.7 million settlement for the family of a teenager fatally slashed by a classmate in a middle school restroom.

Jaime Gough, 14, died Feb. 3, 2004 at Southwood Middle School of more than 40 stab and slash wounds to his neck, face and hands.

Michael Hernandez, now 15, had blood on his clothes and a bloody knife in his backpack when he was arrested in class after the school was locked down when the body was found.

Hernandez faces a mandatory life prison sentence if convicted as an adult of the first- degree murder.

Hernandez was also charged with attempted murder in a failed plot to kill another classmate at the same time in the same restroom the day before Gough was slain.
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/12409462.htm

Prosecutors immediately rejected the theory as baseless, noting among other things that evidence shows the victim tried to fend off the attack and had wounds on his hands.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/12400651.htm?source=rss&channel=miamiherald_local
 
On the night before he confessed to killing his best friend, Michael Hernandez was up late reading about baby killers in Australia, computer records released Friday show.

The Web page, found under the "Serial Killer" section of Court TV's Crime Library, was typical of the sites visited by the then-14-year-old Southwood Middle School student, who seemed obsessed with death.

The records released on Friday on Hernandez's computer show that the teen spent almost all his online time downloading rap music and visiting macabre Web sites. Investigators recovered the information, though a program called "Evidence Eliminator" was run several days before Gough's death.

Aside from the disturbing nature of the sites, there was no indication Hernandez was plotting to kill Gough. In the days leading to the killing, Hernandez spent time reading reviews of the movie American Psycho, looking at gory drawings, and reading rap CD reviews.

The documents recovered, however, were more alarming. The topics included brainwashing, computer hacking, bomb making and martial arts. They included a 118-page manual titled "How to Become An Assassin" another called "How To Kill Someone." Both documents were last accessed within a month of Gough's killing.

"All this shows that it was pretty clear this child has mental problems," Rosenbaum said Friday. "You can't spend all this time and not let it affect you somehow."
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/lo...ug20,0,6160717.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
 
From March 2015:

http://miami.cbslocal.com/2015/03/16/re-sentencing-set-for-miami-middle-school-murderer/

In 2008, Michael Hernandez was convicted of killing his friend Jaime Gough in a bathroom at Southwood Middle School when both were 14 years old. But Hernandez’s initial sentence of life prison was tossed on March 20th, 2013. A year earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that mandatory life sentences cannot be imposed on juveniles...

On Monday, Hernandez appeared before Judge John Schlesinger who set his new sentencing date for August 24, 25 and 26.
 
Florida middle school murderer who knifed a classmate to death collapses and dies in prison aged 31 | Daily Mail Online

"A teenage killer who murdered a classmate at their suburban Miami middle school 17 years ago has died in prison.

Michael Hernandez, 31, died on Thursday, according to the Florida Department of Corrections, which did not give a cause of death.

WFOR-TV reported that Hernandez died from a drug overdose, citing unnamed sources.

Hernandez was serving a life sentence for the February 2004 murder of Jaime Gough when they were both 14-year-old students at Southwood Middle School in Palmetto Bay, just outside Miami."
 

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