Angry, Reckless, Perhaps Stupid, But Homicidal? Prosecution Falls Short Against Leigha Mumby

After the judge sent the jury home and recessed for the day, Leigha Mumby gave Reid Hart the kind of hug a client gives her attorney only after the verdict. After a favorable verdict. There’s been no verdict yet. 

Closing arguments are set for Wednesday morning, the verdict for not much later than that. But Mumby had reason to hug Hart. She’d had a good day, to the extent that a person on trial for allegedly killing her boyfriend can have a good day: Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark had convincingly shown the jury how angrily, recklessly and perhaps stupidly–as 25-year-olds made indignant by a lover’s affront can be–Mumby drove her Honda Passport that night. But she hadn’t shown her to be a killer. 

She hadn’t shown Mumby to have intentionally wanted to hurt Daniel Waterman. He was 21 at the time, and as Mumby had found out that morning, he was the father of her child. 

Clark left room for Hart to suggest, as he did in his two-minute opening argument this morning, that it would take ignoring too many unanswered questions to leap to a conclusion of vehicular homicide, the gravest charge Mumby faces, and that could send her to prison for many years if convicted (a maximum of 20, but she would not face that much regardless). 

“Does it make sense, based on the testimony and evidence that will be presented to you,” Hart told the jury of five women and three men, most of them with grown children, most of them aware of the vagaries of 20somethings, “that Miss Mumby chose to drive her vehicle in the manner described? Or does it make more sense that something happened within that vehicle that she did not expect, she did not anticipate, and she did not control? And despite her best efforts to avoid that car careening into the woods once the wheels were set in motion, there was nothing she could do to stop it.”

Hart has a taut, clipped, almost hurried style that at times risks making him sound like a know-it-all to the jury, until you realize that he intends to let the jury know just enough to cast doubt where he needs it. Some lawyers throw spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, asking expert witnesses how much they got paid, asking cops why they didn’t dust every blade of grass for evidence at a crash scene, trawling for red herrings in hopes of fooling the jury, who are rarely fooled. Hart kept his cross-examinations of the prosecution’s witnesses focused, brief and brisk, each time exploiting one or two key chances, if even that many, to undermine the state’s case, the way he did to great effect with the state’s last witness. 

It was Chip O’Toole, a crash reconstruction expert who’d just described to the jury a half-second by half-second account of the last seconds before the crash. Mumby had been driving at 95 miles per hour on I-95. She’d suddenly steered 45 degrees to one side as no safe driver would at even half that speed or less, and 75 degrees to the other. She’d never applied the brakes until the very end. Her actions had caused the crash. But actions are not intentions. They can just as well be reactions. 

Hart had already gotten O’Toole to describe the car’s event data recorder, or EDR (like a plane’s black box), as just a “snapshot” of events rather than an unfailing narrative, “like a strobe light of everything that’s going on.”

The car had been traveling fast, then suddenly there’d been a sudden, sharp turn left, three and a half seconds before the crash. Hart wasn’t arguing with that. But, he asked O’Toole, “based on your analysis,” a phrase Hart used three times during O’Toole’s cross-examination, as if welcoming the state’s witness to his side, “would it be fair to say that the left-hand input that occurred at three and a half seconds before impact, and everything else after that was an effort to avoid the carnage, correct?”

“It certainly looks like an effort to stop the leftward movement and it just gets into a left overcorrection…” O’Toole said. It was all the defense needed to hear. Hart ended his cross on that word: overcorrection. 

The prosecution had a nearly impossible task: to prove that Leigha Mumby intentionally gunned the car into the woods to hurt and possibly kill Waterman. 

Waterman died at 22, eight months after the crash, eight months he spent paralyzed from the neck down, unable to breathe on his own, unable to control his bodily functions, dependent on a feeding tube and ravaged by bed sores. He died of pneumonia, a common result for people in his condition. 

Mumby was so overcome with emotion at one point as images flashed on overhead screens that the judge had to excuse the jury and, with just a touch of sternness, address Mumby, whose display could be prejudicial. It had not seemed like an act. Mumby said she would control herself, the jury was brought back, and the scene wasn’t repeated. 

Waterman’s cause of death, a medical examiner testified today, was the car crash that Super Bowl night in February 2025, when Mumby was driving with him north on I-95, two miles north of Palm Coast Parkway, as the two were fighting. She was upset over texts he was exchanging with another woman. Rather than go back to the home they shared in Flagler Beach, she had turned around and was taking him back to his cousins’ house in the B Section, where they’d just spent the evening watching the game. 

One of the cousins, who happened to be one of Mumby’s closest friends, had spoken to Mumby by phone during that harrowing drive. Mumby was upset over the texts, told the cousin that she wasn’t going to let Waterman cheat on her, the cousin testified, and hung up on her after accusing the cousin of taking Waterman’s side. 

Waterman when he regained consciousness told law enforcement that Mumby had intentionally crashed the car, that, upset as she was, she had told him: ‘You’ll get what you deserve” moments before the crash. But none of Waterman’s words to law enforcement, even those documented in police reports, were admissible in court, Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols had ruled in pre-trial hearing. They were hearsay. Witnesses could testify on the stand to what others had told them. They could not testify to what Waterman had said. 

That opened a gaping vulnerability in the prosecution’s case against Mumby, whose attorney could then use Waterman’s enforced silence against him. If, as seems likely, Mumby overcomes the vehicular homicide charge, Waterman’s family may rue the outcome as much as it will the hearsay rule–as if Waterman would have been twice silenced. 

The defense had only one witness, Michael Tolbert, a 50-ish Flagler Beach man who had met Mumby online when she was around 20, for “companionship,” as he termed it (dinner and such: no romantic involvement, he testified). They became roommates for several years in Flagler Beach (and are roommates again in the same house since January). When Waterman and Mumby were dating, they lived together at Tolbert’s house. 

Tolbert may have been the last to speak with Mumby, who had called him to tell her that she was coming home without Waterman and didn’t want to be alone. 

“She said, ‘Can you please come home? I don’t want to be home alone with him,’” Tolbert testified. 

“Were you aware of anything going on between them up to that point?” Hart asked. 

“No.”

“And how long did that call last?”

“It was pretty quick. I mean, it was 10-15 seconds.”

“And what were the last words she spoke to you during that call?” Hart asked. 

“As I recall, she said that he was trying to grab for the phone, and ‘I got to go.’”

Tolbert’s testimony lasted a few minutes. Hart, as always, just wanted that one piece: he was trying to grab for the phone, the gesture, now in the record, that he can hang his theory on, turning the table on Waterman and blaming him for triggering what followed over the next few seconds until impact. 

Clark, the prosecutor, who rarely grabs for spaghetti, this time did. It was an indication of how the day had gone for her. She asked Tolbert about his drinking that day and harped on the number of beers he had. The blows didn’t land. That was after she asked him how he’d met Mumby, why he’d decided to invite her to live with him, paying rent at first, but not these days, noting the difference in their ages and hinting, as far as she could go, about another detail the judge had ruled inadmissible in court: a detail about Mumby’s lifestyle that, in fact, had no relevance to the case at hand, and that made the cross-examination sound like a collateral attack. 

Mumby faces two charges: aside from vehicular homicide, she faces a charge of reckless driving with bodily injury, a third degree felony that, if convicted, exposes her to up to five years in prison and a lifetime status as a felon. The strongest evidence in Clark’s case goes to that recklessness, starting with the speed alone. 

Closing arguments are at 8:30 a.m.