Justin Maddox, 31, Indicted on Capital Murder Charge in Drug-Overdose Death of Jeremy Kocorowski

Justin Maddox first degree murder
Justin Maddox.

A Flagler County grand jury on Thursday indicted Justin Maddox, a 31-year-old resident of 51 Pepper Lane in Palm Coast, on a capital felony murder charge in the drug-overdose death of 40-year-old Jeremy Kocorowski of Bunnell in March. Kocorowski had a daughter.

Kocorowski had just started a job at Builders First Choice. After a recent break-up he had been staying with a friend and co-worker at the Palms at Town Center apartments when his friend called 911 around 4 a.m. on March 28 to report that he was unresponsive. She remembered seeing him leave the bedroom an hour earlier.

A Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab analysis confirmed that he had some fentanyl in a folded over piece of paper. His friend told authorities that he’d not seen anyone at home, and if he’d gotten any narcotics, it would have had to be elsewhere. Authorities learned from Kocorowski’s former girlfriend that he would buy narcotics from a man nicknamed “Fox,” who drove a white Cadillac and lived in the P Section. There were clues in Kocorowski’s phone, including a phone number labeled X that also matched a phone number in a cash app with the user name “FluGameFox93.”

Fox was identified as Justin Maddox. A white Cadillac was registered in his name. Detectives set up an undercover buy for delivery at the address where Kocorowski had died. When he showed up (in a black Cadillac, according to an arrest report), deputies conducted a probable cause traffic stop and arrested him on charges of drug possession–Oxycodone, 2.4 grams of fentanyl, a gram of cocaine in the car, 8.5 grams of fentanyl on his person.

The piece of paper wrapping the fentanyl with Kocorowski had markings from the Daytona Beach police animal control department. So was the fentanyl found on Maddox. Testing later indicated that the two pieces of paper were the ripped halves of the same sheet. In an interview with detectives, Maddox then confirmed that he’d met someone named “J” at a Builders First Choice warehouse off U.S. 1 in Bunnell on March 26, and that “J” was talking about getting Maddox a job with him. Maddox also “admits to bringing Jeremy fentanyl to his work,” his arrest report states–in a folded piece of paper, along with some oxycodone. The admission was recorded. He admitted to doing so “on multiple occasions” the week of March 24, including on the 24th and the 26th.

On April 29, the medical examiner ruled Kocorowski’s main cause of death as resulting from fentanyl and mytragynine, commonly known as kratom.

Maddox had been arrested on March 28 on three drug-felony charges, including a first-degree felony count of trafficking fentanyl within 1,000 feet of a school (the apartments where Kocorowski died are within 1,000 feet of Flagler Palm Coast High School), all of which he still faces. The case had been wending its way through court, with docket sounding–the scheduling of trial–set for Dec. 11.

On Thursday, the grand jury issued its indictment a little after 10 a.m., and Maddox, who has been at the Flagler County jail since March 28 on $157,000 bond, was visited by detectives who served him the new warrant with the murder charge. He is being held on no bond for that charge. The capital felony makes him eligible for the death penalty. The State Attorney has never sought the death penalty in numerous such cases, winning pleas and convictions in the majority of them.

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