Warning: this article contains discussions of violence towards women and a child which some readers may find distressing.
A man who abducted a mother and her child managed to evade the death penalty in Florida, despite abandoning the five-year-old to be attacked by alligators in the Everglades.
Harrel Braddy was not sentenced to death by a Miami-Dade jury for the 1998 killing of young Quatisha Maycock. That November, Braddy offered Shandelle Maycock a ride home from work and agreed to pick up her daughter from a family friend’s house, according to reports from People.
Upon returning to their residence, Shandelle asked Braddy, whom she knew from church, to leave. In response, Braddy assaulted and threatened her life. The married father-of-five reportedly strangled her until she lost consciousness, and did it again once she awoke.
He then forced Shandelle into his car trunk and left her along a part of U.S. 27 close to the Broward-Palm Beach County line, before abandoning her daughter on Alligator Alley.
A few days later, The Independent reported that fishermen discovered her body in a canal while she was still dressed in her Polly Pocket pajamas. The condition of her body indicated she had been attacked by alligators, with bite marks on her head and stomach, and her left arm severed.
Prosecutor Abbe Rifkin argued that Braddy kidnapped them and killed her daughter due to repeated romantic rejections, despite being married since the 1970s.
After nearly three decades, a jury deliberated for over three hours on Friday, January 30, 2026, and concluded that Braddy would face life imprisonment. This decision followed his initial death sentence in 2007 by an 11-1 jury vote.
The initial death sentence was overturned in 2017 due to a requirement for unanimous verdicts. However, a 2023 Florida law allows a jury to impose the death penalty with an 8-4 vote.
Braddy has a lengthy criminal background, including convictions for robbery, kidnapping, and trying to kill a corrections officer.
Before the murder of Quatisha, Braddy had escaped custody three times in 1984 after overpowering law enforcement.
Shandelle Maycock was not present for the verdict, according to the Miami Herald, although she attended the trial, which was a source of intense emotional pain for her.
“The jurors in the resentencing of Harrel Braddy worked hard to find a proper sense of justice for the 1998 murder of 5-year-old Quatisha Maycock,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle stated. “No one can adequately describe the pain that Quatisha’s mother, Shandelle Maycock, had to go through reliving the details of her daughter’s murder.”