TITUSVILLE, Fla. – The tension in Titusville continues to escalate in the wake of a shooting in which a 25-year-old man died at the hands of police officers.
Titusville police confirmed to News 6 that the department is investigating alleged social media threats made against officers, some of whom were involved in the call that led to Tri-Marea Charles’ death.
One person has been arrested in relation to these posts, Titusville Police Chief John Lau confirmed.
Jasmine Edwards faced a judge over the weekend before bonding out of jail on a felony charge of making threats.
“Free speech doesn’t give you the right to threaten officers’ lives,” Lau said in a phone call Tuesday with News 6.
News 6 learned about the investigation into the posts days after filing a public records request with the city of Titusville regarding social media activity related to Charles’ shooting.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) is overseeing the investigation into the officer-involved shooting. Body-camera footage is expected to be released upon the conclusion of the probe.
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In response to the public records request, News 6 obtained an email that Lau sent to Titusville’s city manager and other city leaders.
The email, which was delivered in the morning of Friday, Feb. 14, came a day after an NAACP meeting that addressed Charles’ shooting. The meeting, at times, grew heated, as a group of Charles’ friends and protesters stormed out during Lau’s address to the crowd.
During that meeting, Lau described the events of the night of Feb. 7. He alleged that Charles tried to run out a front door, but while doing so, tripped, causing a gun to fall out of his waistband.
While Lau claimed Charles engaged in a physical altercation with police and re-armed himself, protesters seized on Lau’s comments that the gun had fallen onto the ground.
“The key thing was he dropped a gun,” Alicia Marie, who attended the meeting, said shortly after it finished. “He didn’t have a weapon.”
The next morning, in his email to city leaders, Lau said the meeting was “by and large, received well by most of the group.”
The email’s subject line read, “Threats of Public Officials.” Lau wrote that after the meeting, “there was a frenzy of social media activities from our community to try and identify our police officers involved in this shooting.”
Lau wrote that the threats consisted of “retaliation, calling him, ‘murderer,’ and posting that they would kill him.”
An arrest affidavit for Edwards, who was arrested shortly after midnight on Feb. 14, alleges that she posted an encouragement to “kill cops.” She allegedly included the hashtag #LLTRAY, which the affidavit claimed had been used on Facebook to refer to Tri-Marea Charles.
During Edwards' first court appearance at the Brevard County jail, attorneys in court argued over whether her threats were credible.
“We should do like Cali [expletive] and kills cops, end quote,” the public defender read what Edwards is accused of writing. “There is no specificity over who is being threatened in that post,” he said.
“The post she’s making is to kill cops,” an attorney for the state responded. “That’s very specific. That’s enough.”
In his email to city leaders, Lau said he was able to make contact with the officers who were threatened, and that “they relocated their families until we could get a handle on this.”
He went on to write members of his staff “met with many of the names attached to the threatening posts.” He said that all but one of the posts had been taken down at the time he composed the email.
When asked what officers told the people responsible for the alleged posts containing officers’ personal information, Lau told News 6 they said, “You’ve got 30 minutes to take this post down.”
Lau insisted those comments did not amount to a threat, but rather were a warning about the legal statute of which they were in violation.
The individual who was arrested was charged with “written threats to kill.”
Lau said the person who was arrested is not the only person of interest in the police investigation, and that the probe into the social media posts is ongoing.
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