Suspects lead police to Hoffman’s body in Taylor County | tallahassee.com | Tallahassee Democrat

Rachel Morningstar Hoffman, 23, a 2007 Florida State University graduate, was found dead in rural Taylor County early Friday after two men suspected in her kidnapping and robbery led investigators to her body. Murder charges are pending, according to the Tallahassee Police Department.

Hoffman was last seen Wednesday night near Forestmeadows Park while attempting to assist TPD vice investigators by buying drugs and a gun from two men.

When Hoffman agreed to help police, she was facing multiple felony charges and was in a diversion program after being caught with more than 20 grams of marijuana, Chief Dennis Jones said in a news conference Friday.

Hoffman was facing charges of possession of ecstasy with intent to sell, possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell, maintaining a drug house and possession of drug paraphernalia, Jones said.

She agreed to buy 1,500 pills of ecstasy, 2 ounces of cocaine or crack cocaine and a gun from two men, Andrea J. Green and Deneilo Bradshaw, Jones said.

TPD spokesman David McCranie would not say whether Hoffman was wearing a wire, but another of Hoffman’s friends, Shaina Hale, recalls Hoffman saying that police wanted her to do so. Police did not say why Hoffman was doing the bust, but McCranie said she was not coerced and helped willingly.

Hale and other friends said they think police scared Hoffman into thinking she was going to spend years in prison for the felony charges if she didn’t become an informant.

Here at NORML we have a saying that marijuana is not fatal, but its prohibition can be.  Paramilitary SWAT raids terrorize and sometimes kill cannabis users, and sometimes non-users when officers accidentally get the wrong address on a warrant.  Or, as in this case, a cannabis user is “flipped” into becoming an informant in order to avoid lengthy prison time.

In this case, we have a young woman who was caught twice with less than one ounce of cannabis and some ecstasy pills.  Police then press her to give the names of these two dealers and to go make a deal, trying to parlay the “little fish” pot dealer into a “bigger fish” coke dealer.  Now, do you think these guys might figure something is up when a small-time marijuana and club-drug user suddenly wants to get a gun, some coke and dealer-amounts of pills?  And to meet in a public park?

The most shameful thing is the Tallahassee police trying to pin the blame of her death on her shoulders because she left the park, not because they put a naive young woman into a high-stakes drug sting and then lost her when she left with the two coke dealers:

Tags: informants, Rachel Hoffman

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 6:28 am and is filed under 4:20 NewsHour, Law Enforcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.