ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 5 (UPI) -- The woman known across the United States as the "hiccup girl" says she thought her companions one night in October were going to rob someone, not kill him.
Jennifer Mee, in interviews with NBC's "Today" show Tuesday and on local television, said on the night of the killing, "I was just going with what people were telling me to do."
The St. Petersburg Times said a recorded statement to police by Mee has the woman saying, "I thought they were just going to rob" Shannon Griffin, 22, not shoot him.
Mee, 19, was in the national spotlight several years ago when, as a teenager, she had a case of hiccups that wouldn't quit. She was out of the limelight until October, when she was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder.
Police said Mee helped lure Griffin to a vacant St. Petersburg house where Lamont Antonio Newton and Laron Cordale Raiford planned to rob him, but Griffin was shot and killed. Police said Mee was not the shooter; however, Florida's felony-murder statute allows a person who commits certain felonies to be charged with murder when someone dies as a result.
In Mee's first recorded statement to police in October, she said Raiford's girlfriend had a relationship with Griffin at one time, the Times reported.
"And when Laron I guess found out that he had some type of relation going on with his girlfriend, Laron snapped, grabbed the man up, choked him and pulled the gun out of a bag and put it to the man's head, and told the man not to say anything and brought the man to the back of the house and shot and killed him," Mee said.
