The Fifth District Court of Appeal on Tuesday upheld the five-year prison and 15-year probation sentence against Brendan Depa, the former Matanzas High School student whose video-captured beating of a teacher’s aide unconscious in February 2023 drew worldwide attention.
A three-judge panel affirmed the decision without an opinion, as is frequent in appellate decisions.
Depa’s lawyer, Hani Demetrious of the Fort Lauderdale-based Robert David Malove law firm, argued in an appeal last April that Circuit Judge Terence Perkins had abused his discretion when he sentenced Depa as an adult rather than as a juvenile offender.
Depa was 17 at the time he attacked Joan Naydich after he was angered for being disciplined over an electronic game he had (and that school officials mishandled, it was later learned). The State Attorney’s Office charged him with a first-degree felony assault of a school employee, as an adult. He faced up to 30 years in prison.
His defense lawyers at sentencing pressed for a two-year sentence in a juvenile justice system facility to keep him out of state prison, and to remove the long probationary term. Perkins was intent on some prison time and a long supervisory term. Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark had asked for seven years in prison and 10 on probation.
Demetrious did not return a request for comment. The appeals court appears to put an end to the case, especially as a long-time confidant and former teacher of Depa described him today.
“He has truly accepted that he did something horrible and that there was consequences for that,” Gene Lopes, a special education teacher who regularly taught Depa at the Flagler County jail and has remained in contact with him since, said in a lengthy interview. “He’s a good human, he made a horrible mistake, and more than ever he realizes that, but his soul is good, and his strong beliefs, strong Christian beliefs he has, have also allowed him to see other points of view, and that amazes me.”
Lopes disagreed with the appeals court decision, as he had disagreed with Perkins’s sentence. But he spoke of Depa as if he’d moved on, and was now preparing for life after prison. Lopes talks with Depa every other week and last visited him three weeks ago at the Wakulla prison in Florida’s Big Bend, where he got “a big Brendan hug.” The Department of Corrections describes the prison as “a faith and character based facility.”
Depa is now 20. “He’s had a very positive attitude. When I saw him he was upbeat, he was kind of content,” Lopes said, “and he also had a much better understanding of what the consequences could have been of what happened, so I think the time has helped him to really get inside his action and he’s been pretty much a model inmate. He’s doing some reading, does a little bit of writing. He has gotten involved in a lot of different faith organizations. He was attending some Jewish services on Friday nights, been doing a lot of studying into the Bible.” He also looked in on Muslim studies, just out of curiosity. He has passed the full GED, and has his eyes set on college after prison, and a career in counseling, to help people who may have been in his circumstances.
“I don’t know at this point what more time in prison is going to do for him,” Lopes said. “I feel like whatever he needed to fix, I feel like he has a really good hold on that. The biggest problem he’s had I think is, he has a lot of intellectual curiosity and there are a lot of limits on the things he can do in terms of satisfying that curiosity.”
By the time Depa was sentenced he had already served a year and a half in a juvenile jail in Jacksonville and at the county jail in Flagler County, after he turned 18. He is due for release on Aug. 3, 2027. With gain time, or early release for good behavior, he is eligible to be released after serving 85 percent of his prison time, from the day of his incarceration in the state system (time accumulated in county jails doesn’t count toward gain time). Potentially, he could be released around February 2027.
His latest prison photo shows him clean-shaven, shorn of the big head of hair he had in his court appearances, with a thin mustache and his usual horn-rimmed glasses, brown now instead of black. In contrast with most inmates’ mugshots, he looks relaxed, his shoulders considerably chipless, bearing an expression with the faintest of Mona Lisa smiles.
His attack on Naydich had been laced with profanities and racist slurs. He has accepted responsibility for that. “His understanding is that it could have been a lot worse as far as Joan goes,” Lopes said, but he also “understands there’s a disparity between his sentence and the sentence of other people who have committed similar offenses but are of a different race.” It is among the things he wants to address when he is released.
Depa is aware, for example, of the five-year prison sentence followed by just five years on probation that the white son of a Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy received for a hit-and-run death (of a Black woman), if from a different judge, as an example of that disparity.
“He’s aware of all that but it doesn’t control him. He does the things that he needs to do to prepare himself for being outside in the real world,” Lopes said, describing Depa as bearing neither resentment nor as idly counting the days until his release, but filling his time constructively to the extent possible in prison.
He has not been the subject of violence, and reports being treated well, according to Lopes, with perhaps one minor incident. Depa has changed his appearance and works out (he had never done that before), suggesting that the look in the prison mugshot may not have been a one-off. Lopes is only one of several people, family and otherwise, who visit him and stay in contact with him despite the prison’s isolated location (his mother lives in the Tampa Bay area).
“So he’s very optimistic about the future. Myself, his mom, I think we’re all optimistic that he’ll get through this,” Lopes said, “and when he comes out he’ll find some sort of niche to be successful in life. I do think that some of the publicity, as negative as it’s been sometimes, it’s positive–there are a number of people who have gotten to know him in a different way, so I think he’s going to have opportunities because there are people who have seen the other side of him, which now is pretty much the only side of him.”
Asked about the lifeline he and others have provided to Depa in prison, Lopes’s response was surprising: “He’s been a lifeline to me. In all honesty, he’s been a lifeline to me,” Lopes said, describing how Depa inspired him to get back to teaching, as he now does in St. Johns County. “He’s changed my life.”
Atwp says
Didn’t a young white woman do something like that and got little to no time? Plesse correct me if I’m wrong. My advice to all young people especially young African Males please stay out of trouble. The color of your skin you can’t change but you do have control of your behavior. What Department was wrong and he should be punished, the white young lady should be punished too.
Bo Peep says
Great job.