PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. (CBS12) ? The CBS 12 News I Team is digging deeper into the criminal history of the man Palm Beach Gardens Police say killed 14-year-old Ryan Rogers.
Semmie Lee Williams Jr., 39, is a drifter. Records show he has moved around a lot and his life has been chaotic and violent.
Police released some of what they discovered about his past in a media handout at a Thursday press conference announcing his arrest.
From 2004 to 2016 there were at least
12 criminal charges.
The crimes happening in 3 states.
Here are the ones that speak to a danger to society.
An assault involving strangulation. In that case, the victim was a senior citizen.
2 domestic assaults.
Carrying a concealed electronic weapon.
The CBS 12 News I Team looked at records from Seminole County Florida and Fulton County Georgia.
In his own handwriting, in a letter Williams sent to the court, he claimed self-defense in the confrontation with the senior citizen.
It appears to have worked as the charges were then downgraded.
In other court documents we obtained, we see that Williams signed a guilty plea to the lesser charges, and the sentence would be 10 years, of which he?d serve 5, then be placed on probation.
Going back further, in the early 2000s, when he was about to face trial for one of the domestic assaults in Florida, records show Williams refused to get dressed to go to court.
A few weeks later, prosecutors decided not to proceed to trial.
"When you are dealing with people who are living on the street, often the victims they?re dealing with are fellow homeless people, people with mental health issues, it's not someone you can send a subpoena to at a certain address and have them appear in court, to see justice is done... it gets complicated when you're dealing with homeless person committing violent acts and it looks like this person was homeless and moving all around the country," Patrick McKamey told the I Team.
McKamey is a former prosecutor in Palm Beach County - now a criminal defense attorney.
We showed McKamey Williams? criminal history and he says, i
t doesn't matter what complications prosecutors encountered. He says they should have been more heavy-handed, he says the pattern of violence is alarming and blatant.
"How did this guy fall through the cracks and why was he ever let out?" McKamey said, "Because someone at first appearance should have said 'listen we don?t have convictions on all of these cases but there is a serious problem here, this guy has an extremely violent history,
maybe he?s mentally ill.' "
And McKamey says
extremely high bonds or no bonds should have been used to keep Williams off the streets.
And about the possibility of mental illness, police say they became aware of a YouTube account Williams updated daily. Using his cellphone to take videos- often of strangers he encounters on the street.
We showed McKamey the Youtube page and he says these videos suggest paranoid delusions, he says he saw it often as a prosecutor.
Williams was posting videos about people stalking him, conspiring against him, cults out to get him.
There are even Youtube videos from around the time Ryan Rogers was killed that investigators used to firm up his location back on November 15 and 16h when Rogers disappeared and was killed.
"This monster was out on the street when obviously, clearly, he shouldn?t have been," McKamey said.
McKamey says the death penalty could be sought in the Williams case.
The I Team asked about use of an insanity plea. McKamey says the prosecution could easily argue if he's savvy enough to be posting to Youtube, there is not diminished capacity, and he knows right from wrong.
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