Mother says her son’s murder was retaliation

The mother of a man murdered on Mother’s Day morning on one of Southwest Florida’s busiest bridges said her son was killed as a direct result of his name showing up in documents related to a 2016 mass shooting.

Jadwin “JC” Carrion was found shot to death inside a vehicle on Cape Coral’s Midpoint Bridge after midnight on May 9. His murder happened just months after his name appeared in an arrest affidavit for five suspects accused in the murders of two teenagers at the Club Blu nightclub in 2016.

Stef’An Strawder, a standout basketball player at Lehigh Senior High School, and Sean Archilles, an eighth-grader at Royal Palm Exceptional School, were killed.

According to court documents, Strawder and Archilles were not the targets of the shooting that night.

Detectives believe members of the “1Way” gang planned to kill members of rival “Bottom Boys” gang. Carrion was named as a potential target of the 1Way members in the documents.

“They knew that once they put my son’s name in that paperwork, that there would be some retaliation. They knew it,” said Lorrieann Thurman, Carrion’s mother.

Thurman claimed that the Fort Myers Police Department was trying to get her son to be a witness in the Club Blu case, but he had not cooperated. She said his life had been in danger since he was involved in a fistfight at Dunbar high school in 2015.

Court documents connect a wave of violence leading up to the Club Blu shooting to that high school squabble. Thurman, who rebuked the term gang, said her son had left “street life” behind him when he was murdered. She said he was focused on being a devoted father to his 3-year-old son.

“I feel like Fort Myers Police Department fail(ed) my son as a citizen. They failed him,” she said.

Thurman said another murder Tuesday morning is also connected with those documents.

On Tuesday morning, police found Montrell Amari O’Neal, 21, shot to death inside a vehicle near City of Palms Park.

A “Montrell O’Neal” is mentioned in the Club Blu documents as a member of “1Way” and as the brother of one of the “1Way” members arrested for murder. Police would not confirm the connection.

Thurman said she did not believe that O’Neal’s murder is a retaliation for her son’s death, even though he’s supposedly a member of the rival group.

The police department would not comment on any of these potential connections other than to confirm it is working in collaboration with the Cape Coral Police Department to investigate Carrion’s murder.