Jury Finds Jermaine Williams Guilty of Wife’s Premeditated Murder in 22 Minutes; He Now Faces Death Penalty Phase

“Ladies and gentlemen, ‘I’m tired of this shit.’ Not my words. The words of this man sitting right here,” Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis told the jury, pointing to Jermaine Williams Sr., who killed his wife Yolonda in August 2024. 

“After he stabs and stabs and stabs and stabs and stabs and stabs his wife over and over and over again, we know exactly what’s going on in his mind? He’s done with this shit. He told it to his son right there. There is no doubt in this case that this is first-degree murder.”

As he inveighed the prosecution’s rebuttal closing this morning near the end of 54-year-old Jermaine Williams’s trial on a premeditated murder charge, Lewis described Williams as a barbarian hunting his wife with forethought and “premeditation,” a word he repeated dozens of times, at one point repeating the word for every stab wound he pointed to in an autopsy picture of Yolonda.

Defense attorney Junior Barrett had just completed his closing, arguing that there was no premeditation, that the killing was the result of an argument no one can know about. 

“You watch that video,” Lewis continued in his 11-minute closing, after holding the murder weapon, a large chef’s knife now encased on a transparent box, “he’s not just stabbing over and over willy-nilly,  he’s waiting he’s deliberating he’s pulling her hands away, he’s trying to make her vulnerable so he can get the kill shot.” 

Lewis doesn’t lose cases. 

A jury of 10 women and two men today took just 22 minutes to find Jermaine Williams Sr. guilty of the premeditated murder of his 50-year-old wife Yolonda Williams on Aug. 2, 2024 on South Pine Street in Bunnell, when he stabbed her some 20 times with a chef’s knife after disabling her car to make sure she could not leave. 

A dozen and a half members of Yolonda’s entourage were in the courtroom for two of the five days of trial (few people attended jury selection), as was State Attorney R.J. Larizza, who sat with Yolonda’s family at one point, as were Bunnell Police Chief Dave Branon and Bunnell Lt. Shane Groth–Groth had supervised the investigation early on, jointly with the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office–several assistant public defenders and assistant state attorneys, and others. 

Some of the members of Yolonda’s entourage cried. Jermaine Williams looked impassive.

The verdict in the fifth day of Williams’s trial is only the first phase. The jury will return Monday for the penalty phase, when it will again sit through two or three days of testimony as Assistant State Attorneys Jason Lewis and Helen Schwartz make the case for death. Defense attorneys Junior Barrett and Anthony Eric Leonard of the Office of Criminal Conflict and Civil Regional Counsel, which is similar to a public defender’s office but for the Fifth Circuit, of which Flagler County is a part, will argue for life in prison. 

The jury will again deliberate and render a recommendation. It will then be up to Circuit Court Judge Dawn Nichols to impose the sentence. Williams may become the first Flagler County resident to be sentenced to death since 2009. 

The state never offered Williams a plea. Williams could have pleaded to the crime to avoid the first phase of the trial, and he could have opted for a non-jury penalty phase. He did neither. 

Jermaine Williams committed the murder within sight of several surveillance video and Ring video cameras, which the jury watched. The videos included closeups of Jermaine butchering his wife, beating her down when she’d get up and pulling on her hair to keep her in place and, when the couple’s 14-year-old son ran out of the house to stop his father, swinging the knife at his won. 

It also included a different video that recorded the full context of the incident, starting from when Yolonda was standing by the driver’s side door of her disabled car, talking or arguing with Jermaine, and including a period when Jermaine went into the house, retrieved the knife–his son heard from his bedroom the familiar clanking in the knife drawer–then ran out and began the assault. An assault that lasted a minute and 50 seconds.“110 seconds to make a different choice, to stop what you were doing,” Schwartz said. 

Schwartz recounted the series of witnesses who testified on Thursday–the neighbor across the street who, returning at 7:30 a.m. from dropping off his girlfriend at an airport, had noticed Jermaine Williams was under the hood of Yolonda’s car. He didn’t make anything of it since Jermaine was known as a handy mechanic. But as Jermaine’s brother testified, Jermaine told him from jail after his arrest that he was disabling Yolonda’s car. “He admitted that he removed the fuse and his conversation was that he didn’t want Yolonda to leave,” Assistant State Attorney Helen Schwartz told the jury in the state’s first closing. (The state gets to close twice, with the defense’s closing in between.). “That’s where it starts.” 

That’s where the premeditation started. 

The prosecution needed to prove premeditation if it was to make the case for murder and capital punishment. The jury had a choice: premeditated murder or any one of several “lesser-included” or lower offenses, starting with second degree murder, then two levels of manslaughter and a not guilty option. If the jury deliberated at all, it would have been between premeditated murder and second degree murder. 

Schwartz’s closing focused on the technical evidence that made Williams’s guilt for the killing itself beyond doubt–his bloodied clothing, the DNA test, the video evidence–but also on the forensic brutality of the assault down to the details of the medical examiner’s explanations of how each stab ripped into soft tissue, organs, muscle, so many of the wounds potentially fatal. Such details were not necessary to make the case, but to appeal to the jury’s emotional and visceral response to violence against a defenseless person. 

Barrett in his closing for the defense was extremely limited by what he had to work with. In pre-trial hearings and as evidenced by a deposition with a psychologist he sought, he had wanted to argue that it was a crime of passion, of rage, triggered unexpectedly and immediately. The prosecution shut that down, arguing successfully that to use the expert psychologist to conclude from scant contact with the case would have been a backdoor to Jermaine’s self-serving claims, an inadmissible form of hearsay. 

Barrett had suggested that Jermaine would testify. That possibility was alive as recently as last night, when the defense attorneys last met with Williams at the jail. This morning, they said he would not testify, and Williams himself told the judge as much. 

“You can’t find him guilty of first degree murder based on speculation,” Barrett said.  the case that Jermaine was not in his right mind would be a backdoor way to an impermissible conclusion based on hearsay–based on Jermaine’s own self-serving claims. 

Had he been able to use the crime of passion argument, Barrett could have used that very rage–the very details of the prosecution’s argument–to turn the narrative around and argue that Jermaine Williams was just angered spontaneously and lost control. 

He came close: “I would suggest to you, it is the action of someone basically to use the terms, who lost it,” he said. But he could not get beyond that without drawing an objection, leaving hom to simply say–or claim–to the jury that there was no premeditation, that the prosecution’s conclusions were speculative. 

“You can’t find him guilty of premeditated murder based on speculation,” Barrett told the jury. But the statement was itself speculative because it was not based on anything in evidence other that what Barrett described as “common sense,” as the jurors’ own interpretations and conclusions based on the circumstances that morning. 

“There’s no question that she’s dead. There’s no question that Mr Williams caused the death. The only question is whether it was premeditated,” Barrett told the jury. He said it was irrelevant how often the prosecution played videos of the stabbing. “This case should not be decided because you feel sorry for someone, or because you’re angry at someone. This case must be decided based upon your analysis of evidence.” Whether Williams slung Yolanda around during the act is not relevant. What is relevant is what happened before: premeditation. 

The law will not say that a minute or two minutes are sufficient times for premeditation. The law sets no time, Barrett told the jury. “Use your common sense,” he said. 

Barrett said the suggestion that Jermaine disabled the car makes no sense, because Yolonda was sitting in the car while he was under the hood. He would not have disabled the car with her in her driver’s seat, let alone disabled it to kill his wife while the couple’s children were in the house. He didn’t want to kill her. “He wanted to talk to her,” Barrett said, returning to that element again and again.  

And he said that the prosecution’s claim, verbalized by Schwartz in her openings and closing arguments to frame the theme of the state’s case, that “if he couldn’t have Yolonda, no one else would,” was without evidence. 

The defense could not overcome the combination of the the prosecution’s graphic and unquestionably emotional evidence and Lewis’s own rhetorical kill shot wrapping up the case.

“If you watch the video, it’s so barbaric,” Lewis told the jury. “When she’s trying to defend herself, he grabs her by the hair, and then starts stabbing her so he can make it more accessible for him to kill her. To argue that there’s no premeditation is just lunacy, ladies and gentlemen. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t match with the facts in this case.” 

He continued: “The only thing that stopped this defendant from plunging that knife over and over and over again into his wife was his dad taking a gun out and saying, ‘If you do it one more time, I’m going to kill you.”” Lewis told the jury. “He is guilty, ladies and gentlemen. There’s no question. This case is about the first-degree murder of Yolanda Williams. It’s about this defendant’s actions on August 2nd, 2024, where he made a conscious decision after reflecting to go into that house and acquire this butcher knife, this big knife, and he made a conscious decision to walk outside the house. He had to walk out the garage, and he walked up to his wife. This case is about someone who thought about it, premeditated it, and did it, and then he took his wife, threw her on the ground, and started stabbing her. She fought for her life valiantly, but in the end, she died. She succumbed to these injuries. This defendant must be held responsible for his actions.” 

The jury returned the verdict the state was seeking.