From Car Break-Ins When He Was 16 to Facing Decades in Prison at 21: The Violent Life of Jebea Johnson

November 16, 2024 update–Jebea Johnson, the 22-year-old Palm Coast resident held at the Flagler County jail since July on a half dozen felony charges, some of them punishable by life in prison, was charged on Friday with attempting to order the murder of another man in a gang-related dispute. Johnson is accused of trying to orchestrate the hit from the county jail.

According to a sheriff’s release, detectives on Oct. 15 learned of a series of phone calls from the jail between Johnson and family members in which Johnson detailed gang activity and instructed a family member to relay a message through social media to place a hit on a victim who had been trying to leave the gang. All calls at the jail are recorded.

Detectives analyzed the calls and confirmed that Johnson had used multiple terms used by criminal street gangs and had ordered the victim to be killed. (That would-be victim is currently held at another jail.) Johnson was charged with Solicitation to Commit First-Degree Murder – Gang Related and Unlawful Use of a Two-Way Communications Device.

“Not only did we know the lingo he was using, but we have the conversation recorded,” Sheriff Rick Staly was quoted as saying in the release, but Johnson “will be staying right where he is for a very long time and wins the award for dumbest criminal of the week.”

The previous article, on Johnson’s July arrest, is below.

Detectives then conducted various interviews. During these interviews, they learned that Johnson had tried to recruit the victim into the Kutt Throat Committee prison and criminal street gang while they were both inmates at the jail. People interviewed confirmed they had sent the message on Johnson’s behalf but stated they were unaware of the coded gang language contained in the message.

July 31, 2024–Jebea Johnson was 16 years old when he was among three juveniles arrested for a series of car break-ins in Palm Coast’s R Section, and for making fake crack cocaine in an attempt to sell it at profit. It was not his first arrest. It was far from his last.

Johnson was 20 years old when he pleaded less than two years ago to four felonies, including aggravated assault, and was sentenced to 28 months in prison. He’d pulled a gun on his own mother, with his brother and child around, after Johnson got upset that his young son his mother was caring for got his hair wet from going into the pool.




Johnson was in prison until April. He’d been living on Buffalo Drive, serving two years’ probation. Two months after his release from prison, he stopped at the Shell gas station at 5 Old Kings Road to get gas sometime after 1 a.m. the morning of June 21.

He knew the store clerk. They’d been incarcerated at the Flagler County jail together, where, in addition to his previous offenses, Johnson was convicted on a charge of assaulting another inmate after he and four cellmates beat, stomped and kicked 38-year-od Jordan Simon. The attack had been orchestrated from outside the jail by Margaret Octavia Watkins and Raymond Wesley Dukes after Watkins allegedly had gotten upset that Simon had ratted her out to cops for selling drugs. Watkins last year was sentenced to house arrest for two years and probation for four. Dukes was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Hints of another ratting out may have prompted Johnson to pull off his next attack: Instead of getting gas that early morning in June, Johnson followed the store clerk behind the counter and, based on surveillance video Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies reviewed, pulled out a gun, pistol whipped the clerk, and said something to the effect of “Who are you smokin’ on” and “say sorry.” He then demanded that the clerk approve $30 worth of gas at the pump. The clerk said he would lose his job. “Would yo rather lose your job or your life?” Johnson asked him.




The clerk complied. Johnson went back outside, opened the hood of his sedan and looked to the clerk as if he were hiding the gun in the engine before he got in the car and left without filling up. The store clerk did not want to pursue charges: the store manager did. The store clerk told authorities that he’d been part of a “feuding group” with Johnson in jail, but that they had not been antagonists at the time.

Just one week earlier, the Sheriff’s Office had included Johnson in a list of possible suspects or of people connected to the killings of Noah Smith and Keymarion Hall, both 16, both killed in drive-by shootings in which they were not involved, a few months apart.

The sheriff’s Real Time Crime Center traced Johnson’s vehicle’s license plate to a white 2009 Honda, which was located at a house on Buffalo Bill Drive later that morning, though Johnson was not there. “This is an armed and dangerous fugitive that we need to get off the street before he can hurt anyone else,” Sheriff Rick Staly said at the time as the agency sent out an alert.




Last Saturday, Johnson, whose middle name is Sincere, turned himself in at the Flagler County jail. He now faces charges of armed burglary, burglary with assault, attempted armed robbery, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, possession of a weapon by a convicted felon, and probation violation, all felonies that could add up to a life term if convicted.

“I guess he got tired of looking over his shoulder wondering when our PACE Unit or the U.S. Marshals were going to get him,” Staly said.