On the morning of May 20, 2002, Valeria David discovered 78-year-old Courtney Crandall inside his home at the Mobiland by the Sea neighborhood in Melbourne, Florida. He was lying on the floor with blood on his head. David ran home and told her husband to call 911.
Paramedics and officers with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office arrived and determined that Crandall was dead. They found the cooling plate for an iron near Crandall’s body and remnants of a shattered iron strewn around the room. They also found a hammer near Crandall’s head and blood spatter on the wall four feet away from his body. In addition, officers found a bottle of 90 Oxycontin pills and $70 in cash in Crandall’s pockets.
Very early in the investigation, detectives with the sheriff’s office learned that Crandall had gotten into an argument a week earlier with Bruce Foley, the son of his girlfriend, Judy Foley. The incident escalated, and Crandall paid some young men from the area to savagely beat up Bruce. The Foleys, who lived with Crandall, went to stay with Judy’s sister, Rita Akridge.
Detective Gary Harrell tracked down the Foleys and Akridge and found them in a motel outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Harrell and his partner drove there and interviewed them on the morning of May 21. The Foleys and Akridge said they had left Florida on the morning of May 18, and they provided receipts from a welcome center and a convenience store in North Florida, as well as other evidence suggesting they had not been in Brevard County between the time that a neighbor last saw Crandall alive on the afternoon of May 19 and when his body was found the next morning. The Foleys and Akridge also told the detectives that Crandall had had some recent run-ins with 41-year-old Jeffrey Abramowski. Two weeks before Crandall’s death, Akridge said, Abramowski had threatened to kill Crandall.
Harrell interviewed Abramowski on May 22. He denied any involvement in Crandall’s death. During the interview, Abramowski, who had become addicted to pain pills after an accident, said that he had helped Crandall in an ongoing scheme to obtain Oxycontin by doctor-shopping for prescriptions for pain pills. During the interview, Abramowski gave a DNA sample to Harrell.
Later that day, Harrell and Abramowski drove out to Mobiland by the Sea to visit the crime scene. Abramowski said he had been to Crandall’s home though not in the days immediately before the murder. But David, who viewed Abramowski during the visit from inside a sheriff’s vehicle, said that she had seen Abramowski with Crandall twice on May 18. In addition, detectives had trouble confirming Abramowski’s account of that day, which he said involved going to a mall in Orlando with a man named Chris Vasquez.
On August 16, after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) said that Abramowski couldn’t be excluded as a contributor to genetic material found under Crandall’s fingernails, deputies arrested Abramowski and charged him with second-degree murder.
Abramowski’s first two trials, in 2004 and 2005, ended with mistrials. Steven Wisoker, with the public defender’s office in Brevard and Seminole counties, represented Abramowski at both trials, but Abramowski frequently complained about this representation, at one point asking the court to hold an inquiry into Wisoker’s effectiveness.
For the third trial, Wisoker stepped aside, and his wife, Laura Siemers, an attorney in private practice, agreed to represent Abramowski pro bono. The trial began on June 26, 2006, in Brevard County Circuit Court.
David testified that she saw Abramowski with Crandall on May 18. She said she didn’t know Abramowski’s name, but Crandall introduced him as “Jeff.” During cross-examination, David said she couldn’t remember if she ever identified Abramowski from a conventional lineup and that her corrected vision was good.
The Foleys and Akridge testified about their whereabouts at the time of Crandall’s death, about Crandall’s drug scheme, and about their own battles with opioid addiction. All three were in recovery, and Crandall frequently drove them to the methadone clinic. Akridge testified that Abramowski had threatened Crandall and said, “he was going to kill the SOB.”
Bruce Foley testified that before Crandall’s death, Crandall left Abramowski stranded at a Publix supermarket an hour from Melbourne after completing a pill scam.
Harrell testified about the investigation that led from the Foleys to Abramowski. During cross-examination, he stumbled at times over the thoroughness of his work confirming the alibis of the Foleys and Akridge after detectives interviewed them in Alabama.
Vasquez testified that he and Abramowski weren’t at a mall in Orlando on May 18. He said he dropped Abramowski off in front of Mobiland by the Sea that morning, as he had done in the past, and met up with him that night to go to Walmart. During cross-examination, Vasquez appeared to backtrack over the details of his relationship with Abramowski, including when they met and how often he drove him around.
Dr. Paulino Vassalo, the medical examiner for Brevard County, testified that he performed the autopsy on Crandall’s body on May 21. By then, it had been in a refrigerated facility for about a day. Vassalo said that Crandall had two severe wounds to his head. One was round, the other V-shaped. He also had extensive bruising to his neck, as if someone tried to strangle Crandall, Vassalo said. He said the head wounds were consistent with the hammer and the parts of the iron found near Crandall.
Vassalo also testified that he found two fine white hairs entwined in Crandall’s right index finger. The hairs were not Abramowski’s, who had brown hair, and Vassalo said no effort was made to identify the source of the hair.
During cross-examination, Siemers asked Vassalo whether anyone took the temperature of Crandall’s body. Vassalo said they didn’t, because body temperature was an inexact way of determining the time of death. Siemers kept pressing him to narrow down the time of death. Vassalo testified that he couldn’t do that.
“All I can say is when he was last seen alive and when he was found,” Vassalo said. “In that period of time, he was dead. He died.”
Gary Daniels, a senior DNA analyst with the FDLE, testified that he had analyzed genetic material taken from fingernail clippings on Crandall’s right and left hands. The left hand, he said, contained only Crandall’s DNA. The clippings from the right hand contained two DNA profiles. Daniels said that after analyzing the profiles: “I could say that neither Jeff Abramowski … nor Courtney Crandall could be excluded from the DNA mixture. That means that they were both included . . . Looking at the DNA mixture, they both appeared to be present.”
Daniels said that Abramowski’s DNA was clearly present in three of the 13 loci he analyzed. The others were ambiguous, he said, although Abramowski “fit the mixture.”
Daniels estimated that the probability of finding the profile that was not Crandall’s at random in the community would be about one in 72 million among the white population. He also said that the part of the mixed profile that wasn’t contributed by Crandall contained a microvariant, a slight mutation in the alleles on the DNA molecules. Because of the miniscule sample size, Daniels said, it took three attempts to confirm the presence of this variant.
“That same allele was found in the profile of Mr. Abramowski,” Daniels testified. “As I said before, this is a microvariant, and it’s very unusual. I have not seen it before. I don’t expect to see it again.”
Abramowski had his own expert DNA witness, Candy Zuleger, the laboratory director at Trinity DNA Solutions and a former DNA analyst with the FDLE.
Zuleger said she received a buccal swab from Abramowski as well as fingernail clippings from Crandall’s left and right hands. She said her analysis of 15 loci—as opposed to the 13 loci used by Daniels—excluded Abramowski as a contributor.
“I obtained a DNA profile from a single source, but it did not match the standard that I was given to compare it to,” she said.
During cross-examination, Zuleger said it was possible that the FDLE’s examination of the fingernail clippings had used up all the available DNA material prior to her performing any tests.
Abramowski did not testify. Jennifer Orr, a neighbor of Crandall’s, testified that she had witnessed the fight between Bruce Foley and Crandall the week before the murder and had also seen a man with a ponytail visit him on the afternoon of Saturday, May 18. She said the man she saw was also present at the fight, but it wasn’t Abramowski.
During closing arguments, the prosecutor said the DNA evidence placed Abramowski at the crime scene. Zuleger’s testimony didn’t clear Abramowski; it more likely meant that the mixture that contained his DNA had been consumed in earlier testing. He said the alibis of the Foleys and Akridge held up. He also said that the hair found in Crandall’s finger belonged to Judy Foley.
“You would expect to find her hair on Mr. Crandall, particularly hair, or knotted hair that may have been grabbed up during the course of him being slaughtered on his living room floor, as he groped, and felt, and tried to defend himself,” the prosecutor said.
Siemers said the state’s case was full of holes. She said the presence of Abramowski’s DNA didn’t prove he killed Crandall; it could have gotten on his nails the same way that Foley’s hair ended up around his finger. She told the jury that the alibis of the Foleys and Akridge were weak, and that the detectives did a poor job confirming their stories. She said the receipts that were said to confirm their locations could have been pulled from the garbage.
Shortly after the jury began deliberations on June 30, 2006, it sent a note to Judge Tonya Rainwater asking for a transcript of the DNA testimony from Daniels and Zuleger. A transcript wasn’t available, but a readback was.
The judge asked the state and Siemers how they wanted to proceed. The state said the jury should be told that they must use their “collective recollection.” Siemers agreed.
Eleven minutes after receiving Judge Rainwater’s response, the jury returned with a verdict, convicting Abramowski of second-degree murder.
At his sentencing hearing on October 23, 2006, Abramowski said he was innocent. He said Crandall was his friend, and the state had twisted the facts at his trial. He acknowledged that Crandall had stranded him in Orlando, but said they made up the next day. He also said that he had protected Crandall when Bruce Foley fought with him on Mother’s Day.
Abramowski said he had served six years in the Coast Guard and was credited with saving close to 100 rescue victims. “I risked my own life on a daily basis to save all of these lives of people I will never see again,” he said. “And this is how the state of Florida repays me.”
Judge Rainwater sentenced him to life in prison.
Abramowski filed a pro se petition for post-conviction relief in 2009 and another one in 2010. The first said that Siemers had provided ineffective assistance. The second was based on a letter Crandall’s granddaughter wrote to Abramowski’s daughter that implicated the Foleys. Both petitions were denied.
Represented by Bruce Onek, Abramowski filed his third petition on March 22, 2012. Siemers had said in an affidavit that she stopped taking her medication to treat her bi-polar condition at the time she began representing Abramowski. The motion said Siemer’s mental breakdown rendered her incapable of providing effective assistance. It said that Siemers had failed to take Judge Rainwater up on her suggestion of calling for a mistrial after a witness accidentally mentioned that Abramowski had been in jail.
Siemers would later tell Florida Today , “In my psychotic mania, I believed that I was so brilliant, that it would be easy to win the trial; even though I had never tried a murder case, I had never tried a DNA case, and I had convinced Jeff to let me take over his case 10 days before his trial was to start.”
A judge also denied this motion, ruling that the claim wasn’t really new evidence but rather the reason for the ineffectiveness rejected in an earlier petition.
In 2019, John Torres, a columnist with Florida Today , featured the Abramowski case on his podcast, Murder on the Suncoast .
Kevin McCann, an attorney in nearby Merritt Island, heard the podcast and became interested in the case. He began representing Abramowski pro bono in 2019, conducting his own re-investigation. Working with the Florida Innocence Project, McCann received permission to perform DNA testing on several items, including the two murder weapons. The Florida Innocence Project paid for the cost of the testing.
Bode Technology tested the items in the summer of 2024. It said in a report on July 24, 2024, that the hammer had three contributors, and the testing found “limited support” for Abramowski’s exclusion. The iron had two contributors, and the testing found “very strong support” for exclusion.
McCann filed a motion for a new trial on April 1, 2025. The motion said this was new evidence of innocence that was not available at Abramowski’s trial and would have likely resulted in a different verdict.
The motion noted that the Office of the State Attorney for the 18 th Judicial Circuit was now working collaboratively with Abramowski and supported his request for a new trial.
On April 17, 2025, Judge Steven Henderson vacated Abramowski’s conviction. Abramowski was released on bond the next day.
In his court order outlining the conditions of Abramowski’s release, Judge Henderson said the new DNA testing called into question whether Abramowski was involved in Crandall’s death. He wrote: “The weight of the evidence against the Defendant is problematic based on the new DNA testing that was done … Apparently, the Defendant’s DNA was found under the victim’s right-hand fingernail, which can be argued as strong evidence. However, there was not enough ‘material’ to re-test this DNA. The Court was not provided with any information as to what type of material was obtained from the fingernail.”
On July 7, 2025, the state dismissed the charge against Abramowski.
State Attorney William Scheiner said in a statement: “The State Attorney’s Office prosecuted Jeffrey Abramowski in good faith 19 years ago based on the best available DNA evidence and witness testimony. Now, also in good faith, we are declining to retry Mr. Abramowski because of new DNA evidence, the loss of key witnesses, and an inability to re-test archived evidence for DNA using current techniques.”
– Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 07-17-2025
Last Update Date: 07-17-2025
