The Crime

On the morning of May 20, 2002, Valeria David discovered 78-year-old Courtney Crandall inside his home at the Mobiland by the Sea neighborhood in Melbourne, Florida. He was lying on the floor with blood on his head. David ran home and told her husband to call 911.

​

Paramedics and officers with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office arrived and determined that Crandall was dead. They found the cooling plate for an iron near Crandall’s body and remnants of a shattered iron strewn around the room. They also found a hammer near Crandall’s head and blood spatter on the wall four feet away from his body. In addition, officers found a bottle of 90 Oxycontin pills and $70 in cash in Crandall’s pockets.

​

Very early in the investigation, detectives with the sheriff’s office learned that Crandall had gotten into an argument a week earlier with Bruce Foley, the son of his girlfriend, Judy Foley. The incident escalated, and Crandall paid some young men from the area to savagely beat up Bruce. The Foleys, who lived with Crandall, went to stay with Judy’s sister, Rita Akridge. 

​

Detective Gary Harrell tracked down the Foleys and Akridge and found them in a motel outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Harrell and his partner drove there and interviewed them on the morning of May 21. The Foleys and Akridge said they had left Florida on the morning of May 18, and they provided receipts from a welcome center and a convenience store in North Florida, as well as other evidence suggesting they had not been in Brevard County between the time that a neighbor last saw Crandall alive on the afternoon of May 18 and when his body was found the next morning. The Foleys and Akridge also told the detectives that Crandall had had some recent run-ins with 41-year-old Jeffrey Abramowski. Two weeks before Crandall’s death, Akridge said, Abramowski had threatened to kill Crandall.

​

The Trial
 

Abramowski’s first two trials, in 2004 and 2005, ended with mistrials. Steven Wisoker, with the public defender’s office in Brevard and Seminole counties, represented Abramowski at both trials, but Abramowski frequently complained about this representation, at one point asking the court to hold an inquiry into Wisoker’s effectiveness.

For the third trial, Wisoker stepped aside, and his wife, Laura Siemers, an attorney in private practice, agreed to represent Abramowski pro bono. The trial began on June 26, 2006, in Brevard County Circuit Court.

​

David testified that she saw Abramowski with Crandall on May 18. She said she didn’t know Abramowski’s name, but Crandall introduced him as “Jeff.” During cross-examination, David said she couldn’t remember if she ever identified Abramowski from a conventional lineup and that her corrected vision was good.

​

At his sentencing hearing on October 23, 2006, Abramowski said he was innocent. He said Crandall was his friend, and the state had twisted the facts at his trial. He acknowledged that Crandall had stranded him in Orlando, but said they made up the next day. He also said that he had protected Crandall when Bruce Foley fought with him on Mother’s Day.

​

Abramowski said he had served six years in the Coast Guard and was credited with saving close to 100 rescue victims. “I risked my own life on a daily basis to save all of these lives of people I will never see again,” he said. “And this is how the state of Florida repays me.”

​

Judge Rainwater sentenced him to life in prison.

​
 

Post-Conviction
 

Abramowski filed a pro se petition for post-conviction relief in 2009 and another one in 2010. The first said that Siemers had provided ineffective assistance. The second was based on a letter Crandall’s granddaughter wrote to Abramowski’s daughter that implicated the Foleys. Both petitions were denied.

​

Represented by Bruce Onek, Abramowski filed his third petition on March 22, 2012. Siemers had said in an affidavit that she stopped taking her medication to treat her bi-polar condition at the time she began representing Abramowski. The motion said Siemer’s mental breakdown rendered her incapable of providing effective assistance. It said that Siemers had failed to take Judge Rainwater up on her suggestion of calling for a mistrial after a witness accidentally mentioned that Abramowski had been in jail. 

​

Siemers would later tell Florida Today , “In my psychotic mania, I believed that I was so brilliant, that it would be easy to win the trial; even though I had never tried a murder case, I had never tried a DNA case, and I had convinced Jeff to let me take over his case 10 days before his trial was to start.”

​

A judge also denied this motion, ruling that the claim wasn’t really new evidence but rather the reason for the ineffectiveness rejected in an earlier petition.

​

In 2019, John Torres, a columnist with Florida Today , featured the Abramowski case on his podcast, Murder on the Spacecoast . 

​

Kevin McCann, an attorney in nearby Merritt Island, heard the podcast and became interested in the case. He began representing Abramowski pro bono in 2019, conducting his own re-investigation. Working with the Florida Innocence Project, McCann received permission to perform DNA testing on several items, including the two murder weapons. The Florida Innocence Project paid for the cost of the testing. 

​

Bode Technology tested the items in the summer of 2024. It said in a report on July 24, 2024, that the hammer had three contributors, and the testing found “limited support” for Abramowski’s exclusion. The iron had two contributors, and the testing found “very strong support” for exclusion.

​

McCann filed a motion for a new trial on April 1, 2025. The motion said this was new evidence of innocence that was not available at Abramowski’s trial and would have likely resulted in a different verdict.

​

The motion noted that the Office of the State Attorney for the 18 th Judicial Circuit was now working collaboratively with Abramowski and supported his request for a new trial.

​

On April 17, 2025, Judge Steven Henderson vacated Abramowski’s conviction. Abramowski was released on bond the next day.

​

In his court order outlining the conditions of Abramowski’s release, Judge Henderson said the new DNA testing called into question whether Abramowski was involved in Crandall’s death. He wrote: “The weight of the evidence against the Defendant is problematic based on the new DNA testing that was done … Apparently, the Defendant’s DNA was found under the victim’s right-hand fingernail, which can be argued as strong evidence. However, there was not enough ‘material’ to re-test this DNA. The Court was not provided with any information as to what type of material was obtained from the fingernail.” 

​

On July 7, 2025, the state dismissed the charge against Abramowski. 

State Attorney William Scheiner said in a statement: “The State Attorney’s Office prosecuted Jeffrey Abramowski in good faith 19 years ago based on the best available DNA evidence and witness testimony. Now, also in good faith, we are declining to retry Mr. Abramowski because of new DNA evidence, the loss of key witnesses, and an inability to re-test archived evidence for DNA using current techniques.”

– Ken Otterbourg

​

https://exonerationregistry.org/cases/14470