A Casselberry man who shot video of himself having sex with an 11-year-old girl – then tried to hire a hitman to kill her – has been sentenced to life in prison.
Seminole County prosecutors convicted TALIL M. VANN at trial in June of two counts of capital sexual battery on a child under the age of 12 and one count of using a child in a sexual performance. At a hearing July 27, Circuit Judge David Dugan sentenced Vann, 25, to two life prison terms for the sexual battery and 15 years for using a child in a sexual performance.
Vann used Snapchat in 2024 to manipulate the girl into meeting for sex, which he recorded on a phone. Then, while jailed for the sex crimes in 2025, Vann tried to hire a hitman to kill the victim, prosecutor, and lead detective on his case in a bid to derail his prosecution.
At trial, Assistant State Attorneys Stewart Stone, Domenick Leo, and Martine McCarthy used the evidence of the defendant’s solicitation to commit murder to demonstrate his consciousness of guilt in the underlying sexual battery charges.
Said Leo: “While no jury verdict can undo the harm inflicted upon the child victim, today’s sentence ensures that the defendant was held accountable and that the community is protected from further harm.”
Talil Vann (left) was photographed by his victim (upper right) moments before she met him and he sexually battered her. Vann later plotted from the Seminole County Jail to kill the victim and others in his case.
SEXUAL BATTERY CASE
Vann was arrested in May 2024 after the victim told her mother that she had received Snapchat messages months earlier from someone who claimed to be a girl from her school. The person offered her money to help “catch her boyfriend cheating.”
Shortly after the victim texted the “classmate” her Cash App account information, Vann (playing the roles of the school aged-girl and her cheating boyfriend) arrived in the parking lot of the victim’s Altamonte Springs apartment complex. Unbeknownst to Vann, the girl took a photo of him while he was standing near the parking lot wearing plaid pajama pants.
Once she was outside, Vann walked with her to a secluded area of the complex where he pressured her to have sex and perform sex acts while he took videos with a phone.
An Altamonte Springs Police detective ultimately connected the Snapchat accounts to Vann and recovered phone videos that showed the sexual battery. The man in the videos wore the same plaid pajama pants as the man the girl photographed outside her apartment.
SOLICITATION OF MURDER
Vann later asked a fellow inmate to arrange the hits on the victim, prosecutor and detective by someone on the outside, offering a BMW car he owned as payment. The detective would be taken out with a pipe bomb strapped to a remote-controlled car, according to Vann’s written directions.
But the killer Vann thought he had hired from inside the county jail turned out to be an undercover deputy from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office, tipped off by a confidential informant.
The State Attorney’s Office reassigned Vann’s cases to other senior prosecutors, who convicted him at trial.