Mosley, alongside 11 other jurors, faced a daunting task: Whether Harrel Franklin Braddy, who kidnapped the girl and her mother nearly three decades ago, should get life or death for his heinous crime.
Determining Braddy’s punishment for the death of 5-year-old Quatisha “Candy” Maycock, whose ravaged body was found in a canal days later by fisherman, was the hardest thing Mosley and several other jurors said they had done in their life. Flashbacks from the trial — graphic photographs showing how the alligators ripped off Quatisha‘s arm, learning she was in her blood-stained Polly Pocket pajamas when she was found — still trigger painful memories.
In the end, on Jan. 30, the jurors sentenced Braddy, a 76-year-old former bricklayer, to life in prison for killing Quatisha, a kindergartener at Parkway Elementary who had just learned how to write her name.
Braddy’s life was almost not spared. After speaking to several jurors, the Herald learned the jury’s vote tally: 7 for death, 5 for life, one short of the eight required by a jury to recommend a death sentence. Under Florida law, only eight of 12 jurors have to vote for the death penalty, not the unanimous vote required by most states that permit capital punishment.
The deciding vote came down to Mosley, 44, who grew up in Niceville in the Florida Panhandle and moved to South Florida almost two decades ago. “I felt like death was the right decision to free all these people from the tether of their torment,” said Mosley, the jury foreman. “But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
Filled journals with trial details
Throughout the case, Mosley, a geologist by training, scribbled his observations into a notebook, filling dozens of lined pages.
The beige, navy blue and purple notebooks evolved into a self-published book about the ordeal — “Straight from the Jury Box.” In 113 pages, Mosley provided his raw perspective on the sentencing trial, from the evidence presented by the attorneys to the witnesses called to testify.
At one point in the book, Mosley describes how Quatisha’s mother, Shandelle Maycock, reenacted how Braddy beat and choked her until she passed out. He then stuffed her into the trunk of his rented gold Lincoln Town Car and left her for dead in a muddy sugar-cane field just north of the Broward line in Palm Beach County.
On the witness stand, Shandelle thrust her head back, demonstrating how Braddy’s hands gripped her throat. She later showed the jurors how she — unable to see because the blood vessels in her eyes had popped — staggered toward the highway, her arms stretched out in front of her. She pleaded for help as cars zoomed past her.
“It’s hard to watch,” Mosley writes.
Writing was Mosley’s way of coping with the case — especially because he couldn’t talk to anyone about the trial. He also wrote so he could later share his account with his wife and other loved ones, and they could understand what he and the jurors went through.
Mosley said he choked up as he wrote the book, reliving the case with every page. And while writing helped Mosley process the painful ordeal, it didn’t make it easier for him to decide whether Braddy should live or die.
“It was very tough,” Mosley said. “To take all the details of the case and all the details of the crime and try to ultimately come to the decision…”
Jury room secrets
On a breezy Saturday afternoon in late March, Mosley and three other jurors met under a pavilion in Virginia Key for the first time since they deliberated for four hours in the jury room.
They embraced, exchanged pleasantries, and introduced one another to their spouses and friends. The group was elated when the bailiff who greeted them every morning —and provided much-needed comedic relief during the trial — attended the beachfront cookout.
They began going over what they went through in the two-week trial at the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building, the nine-floor courthouse near downtown where most criminal cases are tried.
In between tidbits of small talk, Mosley, Luis Perez, Karola Vargas and Arianna Blanco, sitting around picnic tables, divulged details about what happened behind closed doors in the jury room. Despite how difficult sitting through the case was, the jurors commended Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Marisa Tinkler Mendez for her fairness — and lead prosecutor Abbe Rifkin for fighting so hard for Quatisha.
Shandelle had met Braddy, who is married and father of five, in a church group about six months before Quatisha’s murder on Nov. 7, 1998. He would help Shandelle run errands, but she rejected his advances.
The jurors were touched by Shandelle’s devotion to her daughter.
“She was being raised with love and affection, and she would have been somebody who made a difference,” Shandelle said, weeping on the stand. “She showed respect and love to everyone she met. And in her quiet way, she lit up a room when she walked in... That light has been snuffed out. And my world will be forever dark without her.”
During the trial, the jurors didn’t realize that Braddy had been on Florida’s Death Row since 2007, when he was convicted, and remained there until he was granted a new sentencing trial due to constitutional issues surrounding the state’s death penalty.
They said they were curious how Braddy would adjust to serving a life sentence, rather than being on Death Row. As a lifer, Braddy will no longer get his own cell and will have to be around other inmates.
Braddy is now at Liberty Correctional Institution, a prison just an hour west from Tallahassee, records indicate. He is in close custody, a high-security designation for inmates who have to be closely monitored. (In September 1984, Braddy escaped from custody three times, first overpowering a Miami-Dade corrections officer at the criminal courthouse and later four Broward sheriff’s deputies while on the run.)
In hindsight, the jurors said they are glad that Braddy can no longer appeal and that Shandelle will never again have to face Braddy in court. Shandelle had to testify several times in Braddy’s 2007 trial and in his resentencing.
Although Braddy’s age didn’t come up in their deliberations, the jurors acknowledged that had Braddy received the death penalty, the now 76-year-old would likely never be executed. On average, Death Row inmates spend almost two decades awaiting execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
But Perez, Vargas and Blanco were devastated by the decision to let Braddy live. Will Stackhouse, who ended up being an alternate juror because he was sick on the day the trial ended, said he, too, was upset by the verdict.
The three jurors said it was a heavy decision, but felt Braddy deserved to be on Death Row.
“You feel like you failed Quatisha and her mother and her family,” Blanco said. “I also feel like we failed her,” Vargas added.
Trauma from the trial
Several of the jurors said they couldn’t stop crying after going home from a day of testimony. Vargas said she couldn’t sleep the night the forensic pathologist testified about Quatisha’s injuries. The jury was shown graphic photos of Quatisha, whose left arm was yanked off by the gators and whose head and stomach were stained with bite marks. The photos were projected onto a large screen in the courtroom.
Vargas said she can’t see a 5-year-old child, including her boyfriend’s grandson, without thinking about Quatisha and the horrors she suffered. Braddy said Quatisha was alive when he left her, according to a story in the Herald’s archives.
“As we’ve been talking, emotions come up. It’s sad to remember what that little girl went through,” Blanco said, as the other jurors silently nodded their heads. Looking down, Perez, the most quiet of the bunch, murmured, “It was terrible.”
Strips of paper for voting
Mosley approached his foreperson role as a trained geologist, completing field study reports. He said he meticulously followed the jury instructions, and the jury delved into each piece of evidence in the case.
The jurors found that Quatisha’s killing was the product of heightened premeditation because Braddy drove for miles along remote stretches of the Everglades to torment Shandelle for rejecting his romantic advances.
The jury determined that Quatisha’s murder was especially heinous because after he dumped her mother on a deserted stretch of U.S. 27 in Palm Beach County, Braddy locked the kindergartner in his trunk. He then drove to Alligator Alley, dumping Quatisha near mile marker 34 in Broward. He feared the girl would identify him.
RELATED | Jury reconsiders death for man who left 5-year-old girl to die in alligator‑filled Everglades
In the jury room, the jurors voted by writing “life” or “death” on strips of torn-up paper to shroud the vote in anonymity. Mosley said he and at least two other jurors were “holdouts,” abstaining from voting for several rounds.
“It felt like I was the one pulling the lever down,” Mosley said. “...My brain was telling me to put death, but I couldn’t write death.”
One juror — who came in thinking of sending Braddy to the execution chamber — changed his mind, Mosley said. That, and other changes of heart, led to the close verdict.
As he weighed his decision, Mosley said he felt death was the appropriate sentence, and would probably be the best thing for Shandelle. But Mosley said he couldn’t shake the gravity of having a human life in his hands.
Connection to another death-penalty case
Mosley had never been on a jury before, but he did have a connection to another death penalty case. When he was a child growing up in the Panhandle, he attended the same church as Paul Jennings Hill, who killed a doctor and his bodyguard at an abortion clinic in 1994.
Mosley said he sat feet away from Hill every week at church. He believes that jury made the right decision when it recommended that Hill be condemned to die. Hill confessed to the crime and said he lay in wait to gun down the doctor and his bodyguard because of his anti-abortion religious beliefs. (Hill was executed for the murders in 2003.)
Two months removed from Braddy’s trial, Mosley has mulled the verdict, and thinks he made the right choice. “He’s a killer, but putting death on the piece of paper, aren’t you also a killer? Do the rules that put us here [make] it right to kill him?” Mosley said.
Source: miamiherald.com, Grethel Aguila, April 11, 2026
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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