Jabea Johnson was 16 years old when he was among three juveniles arrested for a series of car break-ins in Palm Coast’s R Section, and for making fake crack cocaine in an attempt to sell it at profit. It was not his first arrest. It was far from his last.
Johnson was 20 years old when he pleaded less than two years ago to four felonies, including aggravated assault, and was sentenced to 28 months in prison. He’d pulled a gun on his own mother, with his brother and child around, after Johnson got upset that his young son his mother was caring for got his hair wet from going into the pool.
Johnson was in prison until April. He’d been living on Buffalo Drive, serving two years’ probation. Two months after his release from prison, he stopped at the Shell gas station at 5 Old Kings Road to get gas sometime after 1 a.m. the morning of June 21.
He knew the store clerk. They’d been incarcerated at the Flagler County jail together, where, in addition to his previous offenses, Johnson was convicted on a charge of assaulting another inmate after he and four cellmates beat, stomped and kicked 38-year-od Jordan Simon. The attack had been orchestrated from outside the jail by Margaret Octavia Watkins and Raymond Wesley Dukes after Watkins allegedly had gotten upset that Simon had ratted her out to cops for selling drugs. Watkins last year was sentenced to house arrest for two years and probation for four. Dukes was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Hints of another ratting out may have prompted Johnson to pull off his next attack: Instead of getting gas that early morning in June, Johnson followed the store clerk behind the counter and, based on surveillance video Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies reviewed, pulled out a gun, pistol whipped the clerk, and said something to the effect of “Who are you smokin’ on” and “say sorry.” He then demanded that the clerk approve $30 worth of gas at the pump. The clerk said he would lose his job. “Would yo rather lose your job or your life?” Johnson asked him.
The clerk complied. Johnson went back outside, opened the hood of his sedan and looked to the clerk as if he were hiding the gun in the engine before he got in the car and left without filling up. The store clerk did not want to pursue charges: the store manager did. The store clerk told authorities that he’d been part of a “feuding group” with Johnson in jail, but that they had not been antagonists at the time.
Just one week earlier, the Sheriff’s Office had included Johnson in a list of possible suspects or of people connected to the killings of Noah Smith and Keymarion Hall, both 16, both killed in drive-by shootings in which they were not involved, a few months apart.
The sheriff’s Real Time Crime Center traced Johnson’s vehicle’s license plate to a white 2009 Honda, which was located at a house on Buffalo Bill Drive later that morning, though Johnson was not there. “This is an armed and dangerous fugitive that we need to get off the street before he can hurt anyone else,” Sheriff Rick Staly said at the time as the agency sent out an alert.
Last Saturday, Johnson, whose middle name is Sincere, turned himself in at the Flagler County jail. He now faces charges of armed burglary, burglary with assault, attempted armed robbery, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, possession of a weapon by a convicted felon, and probation violation, all felonies that could add up to a life term if convicted.
“I guess he got tired of looking over his shoulder wondering when our PACE Unit or the U.S. Marshals were going to get him,” Staly said.
