Robens Cesar, inset, allegedly gunned down his ex-girlfriend Fridelene Daniel on Nov. 8, 2023, after she filed a police report against him for following and harassing her. (Mug shot: Palm Beach County Jail; Scene photo: WPBF/YouTube)
Horrified family members listened on the phone while their loved one was allegedly gunned down by her ex-boyfriend in the parking lot of her Florida apartment complex after she returned from filing a police report against him for harassing her.
Boynton Beach police officers were called shortly before 9 a.m. Wednesday to the Meadows on the Green apartment complex for a woman being shot. 911 callers said they saw a black Honda leaving the area. When officers arrived at the apartment complex, they found the woman, later identified as 34-year-old Fridelene Daniel, dead in the parking lot from multiple gunshot wounds. Officers found several spent shell casings near her body.
According to a probable cause affidavit reviewed by Law&Crime, police later learned that the shooting may be related to a complaint Daniel filed at the Boynton Beach Police Department about 40 minutes earlier. She said her ex-boyfriend, Robens Cesar, 41, was following and harassing her. Surveillance and body camera footage showed Cesar was wearing a blue-gray T-shirt, green shorts, and had his dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail, the affidavit said.
Detectives discovered Cesar drove a 2008 black Honda. Surveillance video from the apartment complex man fitting Cesar’s description get into a Honda and drive away around the time of the shooting. Police located Cesar at a home about four miles away and arrested him.
In an interview with detectives, Cesar allegedly admitted to shooting Daniel. He said the two had broken up and he was trying to convince her to get back together with him, but she refused, the affidavit said.
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“Cesar stated he couldn’t stand to see Fridelene with another man,” detectives wrote in the affidavit. “Cesar stated Fridelene reporting him to the police earlier in the day was the final straw and he shot her.”
Daniel’s family members gave a terrifying account of the shooting in an interview with local CBS affiliate WPEC. They said she was on the phone with a family member in Haiti when she pulled up to her apartment and said to someone “Oh did you bring a gun to kill me?,” they said.
Neighbors told the outlet they heard a barrage of gunfire.
“It was like boom, boom and then it was a brief maybe like two-second pause I want to say and three or four more. We just kind of froze there for a moment,” neighbor Dawn Rosado said.
Cesar is at the Palm Beach County Jail without bond on a first-degree murder charge.
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