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DeMorris Hunter Is Convicted of Strangling Theresa Green in Orlando in 2002

A Florida jury found Hunter, already serving 110 years for an Oakland murder, guilty of killing the 38-year-old after a party in 2002, then recommended death.

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Illustration: empty jury box with twelve chairs

On May 26, 2002, Theresa Ann Green and DeMorris Andy Hunter were both guests at a party a couple was giving in their apartment building. They left together, and witnesses saw the two of them fall down the stairs before going into Green's apartment. Hours later, according to prosecutors, Hunter came back and asked a neighbor for a favor: he handed over the keys to a white van and asked the man to follow him while he drove Green's car to a parking lot and left it there.

Green, 38, was reported missing to the Orlando Police Department. Sanford police found her car at a Walgreens, and her body was in the trunk. The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide by manual strangulation.

Nearly twenty-four years later, an Orange County jury found Hunter, now 59, guilty of first-degree murder. The trial was held before Circuit Judge Lisa T. Munyon, and the case was prosecuted by Richard Buxman, chief of homicide prosecution for the Fifth Judicial Circuit State Attorney's Office, and Assistant State Attorney Kenneth Nunnelley. The same jury came back for the penalty phase and recommended that Hunter be put to death.

Investigators established that Green was last seen alive with Hunter. By the time they questioned him, he was serving a 110-year sentence for another murder, committed in Oakland, California.

Green's son, Octavius Hayes, was thirteen when she was killed. "While other children were leaning on their mothers for guidance, I was forced to navigate the most formative years of my life in the shadow of her absence," he said in a statement to the court. "Every milestone I have reached since then has been bittersweet, marked by the hollowed space where she should have been standing."

"These past two weeks have been grueling for the family and friends of the victim," said State Attorney Bill Gladson. "Reliving the events that occurred on the night Green's life was taken has been nothing short of tragic."

The account of the night of the killing is the prosecution's, as stated by the Fifth Judicial Circuit State Attorney's Office, and the jury accepted it. Reports differ on the details of the earlier California case, including when it happened and who the victim was, so this story says only what the State Attorney's Office has: that Hunter was serving 110 years for a murder in Oakland.

Sources