A violent serial criminal attacked a woman in Central Florida during a carjacking and robbery while evading police, but DNA and witness evidence aided the prosecution.
Prosecutors sentenced the violent repeat offender to life in prison for leading a police pursuit through Central Florida and beating a woman for her truck as he attempted to flee.
A Brevard County jury convicted 36-year-old Jermaine D. Morgan of burglary of a conveyance with assault or battery, carjacking, robbery, and aggravated flight or attempting to avoid police and inflicting damage, all stemming from a 2019 Rockledge cross-town rampage.
Assistant State Attorneys Elizabeth Garvey and Mike Doyle presented evidence that included Morgan’s DNA from blood left on the carjacking victim as she was severely beaten, as well as from a hat he lost while fleeing from police. Witnesses included the victim, who repeatedly identified Morgan as her attacker.
“It took seven years to get justice for the victim,” Garvey stated, “but now no one in Brevard County needs to worry about Mr. Morgan victimizing anyone here again.”
In March 2019, a Rockledge police officer was investigating an allegation of a stolen vehicle at a petrol station on Eyster and Fiske Boulevard. When she approached a Mazda SUV with Morgan at the wheel and another man inside, it drove off and sped east. The officer pursued Morgan in her patrol car but eventually pulled back and observed from a distance as she weaved between lanes, ran a red light, blew a tire while heading north, and abandoned the disabled SUV on U.S. 1 near Barton Boulevard.
The officer followed Morgan and the other man west on foot until they came across a woman getting into a black Ford Explorer pickup vehicle outside a laundromat on Barton. The males dragged the woman out of the truck by her arm, stole her mobile phone, and pummeled her to the ground before snatching her keys and speeding away in her truck. The truck carried the woman’s breastfeeding bag and medical supplies.
After several days of investigation, Rockledge investigators linked Morgan to the abandoned Mazda and visited an apartment building where they discovered the carjacking victim’s Ford Explorer truck. Inside an apartment, they discovered Morgan’s carjacking codefendant, as well as the victim’s phone, stethoscope, and personal paperwork bearing the name of a family member.
“It was him—100 percent,” Garvey stated about Morgan’s involvement.
Despite seven years of labor and delays, the State Attorney’s Office declined to offer Morgan a plea deal to conclude the case, Garvey said. Instead, prosecutors were successful in obtaining a guilty conviction at trial, as well as another jury determining Morgan to be a prison release reoffender. That decision imposed a life sentence without parole.
According to records, Morgan had only been released from a Virginia jail for two and a half months before his murder spree in Rockledge. He previously served ten years in prison for child abuse and voluntary manslaughter after hitting a two-year-old kid, who died as a result of his injuries.
Morgan was jailed without bond in the Brevard County Jail for seven years after his arrest. He is still facing a related charge of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm.
Circuit Judge Charles Crawford sentenced Jermaine Morgan to life in state prison without the possibility of parole. In 2024, his codefendant, 27-year-old Trayvon D. Jones, pleaded no contest to the charges and received a 25-year sentence.
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