Shortly after midnight on June 19, 2024, Bunnell police officers and Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies responded to the report of a shooting at 813 Hymon Circle in Bunnell. The victim reported that six shots struck the residence. The shooting may have been motivated by a long-standing grudge.
A year and a half later–on Nov. 10–Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols signed a warrant for the arrest of Traycan Verdell, 27, whom Bunnell police had interviewed days after the shooting when he was under arrest in Lake County for driving on a suspended license. They did not arrest him then. He told them he was at home in Daytona Beach when the drive-by shooting occurred, so they let him go.
He was rearrested in Daytona Beach on Nov. 29 for pot possession, and on the Flagler County warrant. But he posted bond almost immediately and was released.
Two days later, Bunnell police issued a hand-out announcing his arrest, though he was back at his house at 433 Jean Street in Daytona Beach by then and is not currently on Flagler County’s court docket.
He faces a third-degree felony charge of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon (he was adjudicated guilty of a 2020 charge of fleeing cops in Volusia County and served 210 days in jail), and a second degree felony of firing a gun into a house. No one was injured in the shooting.
Surveillance video showed the car allegedly driven by Verdell had turned around in front of the Hymon Circle house, its headlights off, then parked a short distance away. Video showed a man step out of the car, walk around the property, and go back to the car. Then allegedly two people in the car fired several rounds before the car fled northbound, though the shooting is attributed only to Verdell for now.
License plate readers picked up the vehicle’s track before and after the shooting, identifying the car as a silver Chevrolet Trax, registered to a Daytona Beach resident.
Bunnell Police Lt. Shane Groth interviewed the Chevrolet owner, who, with a friend who was also interviewed, gave police an elaborate and, as it turned out, a fabricated story about lending the car to a person who went by the name “Little Man,” and who wanted to go to the store. She was unable to provide additional identifying information about him.
Daytona Beach police towed the Chevrolet to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office for forensic processing by the sheriff’s Crime Scene Investigations unit. Groth got a search warrant signed by Circuit Judge Chris France. The search of the car produced a Hi-Point 9 mm handgun, a magazine containing two 9 mm rounds, another magazine containing nine rounds, a black face mask, a spent .45 caliber shell casing, a spent 9 mm Luger round, a box of Winchester ammunition containing 33 rounds, a holster, a pawnshop receipt for an SCCY handgun, and minor traces of drugs.
Groth reinterviewed the car owner, who repeated the account she’d told the first time, adding more fabrications.
“As evidence progressed,” the Bunnell police release states, “shell casings recovered from the scene were submitted to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for [ballistic] comparison. The results confirmed one of the firearms recovered from the suspect vehicle was used in the shooting. The comparison also revealed the second firearm, which was reported stolen, had been recovered by the Daytona Beach Police Department in January 2025 during a robbery investigation. Although Verdell was not in possession of the stolen firearm at the time of the robbery, detectives obtained evidence showing he previously possessed the weapon at the time of the drive-by shooting.”
Verdell was a passenger in a Honda SUV last week that Daytona Beach police pulled over for violating a few traffic laws. When he identified himself, the officers arrested him on the Flagler County warrant, and the pot charge, for carrying about 8 grams of marijuana.
No motive for the alleged shooting has been confirmed, though an “unidentified individual” told police that Verdell and his sister were responsible for the shooting, and that it may have been retribution for his sister getting sexually abused during her childhood by the alleged victim of the shooting. The alleged victim and Verdell’s sister are cousins.
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