Prosecutors have sent a violent repeat offender to prison for life for leading a police pursuit across Rockledge and beating a woman for her truck as he tried to escape.
A Brevard County jury found JERMAINE D. MORGAN guilty on March 26 of burglary of a conveyance with assault or battery, carjacking, robbery, and aggravated fleeing or attempting elude police and causing damage – all from one cross-town rampage in 2019. At a hearing March 30, Circuit Judge Charles Crawford sentenced Morgan, 36, to life in state prison without parole.
Evidence presented by Assistant State Attorneys Elizabeth Garvey and Mike Doyle included Morgan’s DNA from blood that he left on the carjacking victim while beating her severely and from a hat he dropped while running from police. Witnesses included the victim, who positively identified Morgan as her attacker, as she had done consistently.
“It took seven years to get justice for the victim,” Garvey said, “but now no one in Brevard County needs to worry about Mr. Morgan victimizing anyone here again.”
In March 2019, a Rockledge Police Officer was investigating a report of a stolen vehicle at a gas station at Eyster and Fiske Boulevards. When she approached a Mazda SUV with Morgan behind the wheel and another man inside, the vehicle took off and sped east. The officer initially pursued in her patrol vehicle but pulled back and instead watched from a distance as Morgan swerved between lanes, ran a red light, blew out a tire while turning north, and then abandoned the disabled SUV on U.S. 1 at Barton Boulevard.
The officer watched Morgan and the other man flee west on foot until they encountered a woman who was getting into a black Ford Explorer pickup truck outside a laundromat off Barton. The men pulled the woman out of the truck by her arm, snatched her cell phone, and beat her to the ground before taking her keys and speeding off in her truck. The truck contained the woman’s nursing bag with medical supplies.
Continued investigation over several days led Rockledge investigators to connect Morgan to the abandoned Mazda and to visit an apartment building where they found the carjacking victim’s Ford Explorer truck. Inside an apartment, they found Morgan’s codefendant from the carjacking – along with the victim’s phone, stethoscope, and personal paperwork with a family member’s name on it.
“It was him – 100 percent,” Garvey said of Morgan’s involvement.
Despite seven years of work and delays, the State Attorney’s Office refused to make a plea offer to Morgan to resolve the case, Garvey said. Instead, prosecutors successfully pursued the guilty verdict at trial plus an additional jury finding that Morgan was a Prison Releasee Reoffender. That finding mandated a life sentence without parole.
Records showed Morgan had been free from a Virginia prison for only 2-1/2 months before his crime spree in Rockledge. He previously served 10 years for child abuse and voluntary manslaughter for beating a two-year-old child who died from his injuries.
Morgan remained held without bond in the Brevard County Jail for seven years following his arrest. He continues to face a related charge of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
His codefendant, TRAYVON D. JONES, 27, pleaded no-contest to the charges in 2024 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.