PBSO has identified the dead body found as “Vanessa Carmen Williams Bristol.”
The victim has been identified as Vanessa Carmen Williams Bristol, DOB: 3/22/87 for Margate. We do not believe the homicide occurred where she was found.
West Boca News reported Sunday that the body was found near Delray Marketplace. We still don’t have a lot more information. PBSO indicates that Ms. Bristol is from Margate, though we found a voter registration for her in North Miami Beach, along with other addresses in Coral Springs, West Palm Beach, and Lauderdale Lakes. We believe this is her in these photos: Our earlier report indicated she was “white or Hispanic.” The voter registration we found indicates Hispanic. However the woman we’ve found appears to be African-American. If any of our readers have information, please contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-4587-TIPS. Ms. Williams-Bristol was married to Joseph Radclif Bristol by the Broward County Clerk in 2010. We see five felony cases for Mr. Bristol from 2007 to 2014. The charges included burglary, grand theft, domestic strangulation, and child abuse. Note: Below we updated that Mr. Bristol called. While it wasn’t a pleasant conversation, based on the fact that he called, we doubt he was involved in her death. Update: The Sun-Sentinel reports that an arrest has been made – John Eugene Chapman. Court records show a dissolution of the Bristol marriage in 2013, effectively a divorce: We have asked PBSO if Mr. Bristol is a suspect or has been ruled out as a suspect. We have not heard back yet. However, in light of the update, it appears he has been cleared. Mr. Bristol has a YouTube channel including this video about Adrian Peterson and beating your children:
Update: We received an angry phone call from someone who purported to be Joseph Bristol (and sounded like the guy in the video). He threatened to sue us and/or have his lawyer call us. We attempted to have a conversation but he just kept threatening to sue us if we didn’t remove the facts about him from the article. We don’t remove facts just because someone doesn’t like them. The conversation did confirm that the body found was his ex-wife. And our strong hunch is that if he were involved in her death, he wouldn’t have called.
Vistawood Way in Timberwalk, Logger’s Run; Image from Google We heard from many readers this morning about an incident in the Logger’s Run community. People saw 10 or more PBSO cars, deputies with rifles and guns drawn, and a helicopter flying overhead.
Police operation happening now inside the Timberwalk Association, Loggers Run. Lots of police cars, chopper and police with guns drawn behind trees.
What is going on at Ponderosa & Winikoff? Riot police – 10 cars w automatic weapons drawn!
We contacted PBSO and received an official response:
Deputies were dispatched to a call of shots fired. When they arrived, we checked the area and all we found was some pounding noise coming from a house nearby. This was not a false 911 call per se, whoever called it in perceived they heard a shooting. It’s considered unfounded.
The incident apparently began sometime before 8 am and heated up as kids were being dropped off at Logger’s Run Middle School. The location of the incident was in the Timberwalk townhomes south of Palmetto Park Road near the southern intersection of Ponderosa and Judge Winikoff:
Other readers reported that the middle school went into lockdown and kids were scared:
My daughter was locked in the cafeteria and was scared out of her mind. She stated in her text to me that many of the kids were very nervous and huddling with their friends.
The initial report sounded very serious:
•••WEST BOCA••• BARRICADED SUSPECT — Ponderosa Dr @ Judge Winikoff Rd (Loggers Run) — Multiple PBSO units are at the scene of a male suspect possibly barricaded inside a house, wanted for questioning, reported fired shots up in the air and ran
After further investigation there was a follow-up report:
UPDATE: PBSO made entry, suspect not in the house, appears to have fled on foot unknown direction, Further investigation revealed there was no shooting or shot, the subject was just banging on a car with a hammer, units are clearing the scene now, no danger or threat any longer
Another source – a neighbor – tells us that this was a possible domestic dispute where a man was banging on a car with a hammer and a woman got angry about it and called 911 falsely indicating shots had been fired. The banging on the car part of the story appears to be accurate though the details of who the caller was and why they made the call are disputed by PBSO and another of our sources.
Update from PBSO: “The victim is an unidentified white or Hispanic female, possibly in her 20’s. An autopsy will be performed today.”
The Palm Beach Sheriff reports that a female dead body was found on the 14000 block of Smith-Sundy Road, about a mile north and a little west of Delray Marketplace.
The location is about a half mile east of US 441, and about a half mile north of the northeast corner of the Four Seasons community (formerly Tivoli Isles). The area is mostly farmland. Smith-Sundy Road, looking southbound at the 14000 block. Image: Google. So far PBSO is not releasing much information. We will update if and when we learn more. They do say there appears to have been “foul play.” inn other words this looks like a homicide investigation.
Joanne Luu mugshot (PBSO) Yesterday on our Facebook page we posted a link to a well-written article in the Sun-Sentinel about the Joanne Luu not guilty verdict. This comes from a fatal accident at 441 and Sandalfoot Blvd. Our Facebook post received a lot of “engagement” from readers, with 15 shares and a total of 68 comments (including on the shared posts). Most of the comments were angry. Accident victims Ferrarella and D’Angelo This was a horrible accident. The families and friends of the victims are understandably upset, and like anyone else who reads about this, we are deeply sympathetic to their suffering. But I’ve been a trial lawyer for 20 years now and have handled many DUI cases. In my continuing quest for unpopularity, I have to say what our readers apparently don’t want to hear: The jury got it right. Over a year ago we explained the Angela Stracar decision, a similar case. Both Stracar and Luu were accused of causing an accident that killed people, of being impaired by drugs, and of driving recklessly. Stracar was convicted at trial after an accident in front of Boca Isles (on Cain Blvd.). Her conviction was reversed on appeal and the charges were dismissed. Here’s some key language from the Sun-Sentinel article:
Sheriff’s … toxicologist … Yeatman testified the blood sample showed traces of a chemical produced by the metabolization of cocaine. But there was no actual cocaine detected in Luu’s blood, and Yeatman said on cross-examination that the chemical alone would not have caused her to be impaired behind the wheel.
The DUI homicide charge she faced applies when someone is impaired by drugs. You would have to have such a drug in your system in order for it to impair you. There was no cocaine in Luu’s blood. This doesn’t mean that Luu is a good person, or that the victims deserved to die. It just means Luu was not driving under the influence of drugs. She is genuinely innocent of the DUI charge. What was found in her system was a metabolite. When you take a drug (legal or illegal), your body processes (or metabolizes) it. The results of that process are metabolites. The most common metabolite of cocaine is benzoylecgonine. You can read about how cocaine is metabolized in a scientific journal. Our best guess is that the drug test showed benzoylecgonine. It only showed “traces” of it according to the article. Usually “trace” in a blood test means an amount that is so low as to be almost undetectable. That means if Luu had used cocaine it would have been long before the accident. The prosecutor argued that Luu’s “behavior is completely abnormal because she’s crashing from cocaine use.” To be polite, that’s a creative theory. The statute requires that someone be impaired by drugs, not by the absence of drugs. You wouldn’t have to take this argument much further to argue that an alcoholic or addict who is clean at the time of an accident is impaired by the cravings from their addiction.
Warren Redlich is the author of Fair DUI: Stay Safe & Sane in a World Gone MADD
Even if she had actual cocaine in her system it would be tough for prosecutors to prove guilt. As the NHTSA puts it:
The presence of cocaine at a given blood concentration cannot usually be associated with a degree of impairment or a specific effect for a given individual without additional information.
The very notion that cocaine impairs driving is itself dubious:
Single low doses of cocaine may improve mental and motor performance in persons who are fatigued or sleep deprived, however, cocaine does not necessarily enhance the performance of otherwise normal individuals. Cocaine may enhance performance of simple tasks but not complex, divided-attention tasks such as driving. Most laboratory studies have been limited by the low single doses of cocaine administered to subjects. At these low doses, most studies showed performance enhancement in attentional abilities but no effect on cognitive abilities. Significant deleterious effects are expected after higher doses, chronic ingestion, and during the crash or withdrawal phase.
Indeed another NHTSA study (pdf) showed little if any evidence that illegal drugs such as cocaine and marijuana increase the risk of driving:
[A]nalyses incorporating adjustments for age, gender, ethnicity, and alcohol concentration level did not show a significant increase in levels of crash risk associated with the presence of drugs.
That’s in stark contrast to the findings about alcohol:
Findings from this study indicate that crash risk grows exponentially with increasing BrAC. The study shows that at low levels of alcohol (e.g., 0.03 BrAC) the risk of crashing is increased by 20 per- cent, at moderate alcohol levels (0.05 BrAC) risk increases to double that of sober drivers, and at a higher level (0.10 BrAC) the risk increases to five and a half times.
If you believe this government science, just one or two drinks significantly impairs driving and is far more dangerous for a driver than any amount of cocaine or marijuana. The comments on our Facebook post clearly misunderstand what happened. For example, one commenter wrote: “She had a great attorney. The payoff worked well. I mean he “worked” well. That’s all folks. So sad for the family.” Ms. Luu was represented by the public defender’s office. There was no payoff. While many people have a negative view of public defenders, we have some very good ones in Palm Beach County. They did a great job in this case, and in the Stracar case as well. Another commenter wrote:
It is called the criminal justice system because the criminals are the only ones to receive any justice, the victims sure don’t and it is not called the victim justice system.
This comment has both truth and error in it. The commenter is correct that the system is generally not about victims. We already have civil courts for that where victims can sue the people who hurt them. One of the harder parts about this case is that the Luu vehicle may have had very limited insurance, leaving little money to compensate the families of the victims. In some cases the system does work to get some kind of compensation for victims. There is an entirely different approach to crimes called restorative justice that focuses more on victims, but it’s not widely used and is probably not what the bloodthirsty commenters want. The commenter is completely wrong if he believes that the system is favorable to people accused of crimes. In my experience the deck is stacked against defendants, including innocent ones. With that said it does seem like the prosecutors in South Florida drop a lot of cases involving real crime. Another commenter wrote: “Sloppy police work and lousy prosecutors.” There was no sloppy police work here. The police did what they’re trained to do and they did their jobs well. The only thing the prosecutors did wrong was continue to pursue a case without evidence of guilt. “The fact that two people died meant nothing to this case??” No it did mean something. The case was prosecuted at the very serious level of a DUI homicide rather than as a lesser DUI or reckless driving case. Had there been no death there’s a good chance the case would not have been prosecuted at all. When there is public outrage over an incident like this, some prosecutors will go ahead with a prosecution to satisfy the public’s blood lust. “It’s a sad day when all the evidence is present and a criminal is set free. The judge should be incarcerated.” I’m at a loss to understand why this commenter blames the judge. A jury found Luu not guilty. If anything the judge should have dismissed the case without letting it get to the jury at all. One of our regular readers posted this: This is her picture. I think it’s obvious how she was acquitted and it wasn’t lack of evidence. Another reader suggested that the male jurors didn’t want to convict her. This is nonsense. If you take a look at the comments in total, you’ll see that the overwhelming majority think she’s guilty. The jury pool consists of people with similar attitudes. But when they get into a courtroom and have the law and the facts explained to them, they take their responsibility seriously and in this case they got it right. One last thing deserves mention. The victims were not wearing their seatbelts. Some, including the county medical examiner, assert that they would have died even if they had been wearing them. That’s an irresponsible thing to say. Seatbelts save lives. Dr. Bell may be a competent physician, but he’s not a biomechanical engineer and so he’s not qualified to make such a statement.
In response to an additional comment, which assumed that Luu ran a red light, we don’t know that. “During her closing argument, Arco (the prosecutor) acknowledged it was unclear whether Liborio Ferrarella turned on a green arrow or a red arrow.” Fault in the accident is irrelevant to a DUI homicide charge. If you’re impaired by a drug or alcohol, you’re on the hook in Florida even if it’s the other driver’s fault.
West Boca News has decided we will no longer cover arrests. We have experienced too much harassment and we see a sentiment in at least part of the community that reporting on arrests is more offensive than committing crimes. Crime reporting has become a much smaller part of what we do anyway. Fortunately for those who want to follow crime news, there are other sources. Our friends at Boca News Now cover some crime stories. And there’s a website that seems to report every arrest: Boca Busted, with a very active Facebook page. We have been using that as a resource for several months. Other useful resources include the Sheriff’s blotter, Palm Beach court records, Broward court records, and Miami-Dade court records. From now on we will focus on other areas that have been getting more response from our readers.
