Palm Beach Post
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — There was the sound of a click in Naomie Breton’s ear. Then came the flames that burned through her skin and flesh.
This was the violent end to the eight-year tumultuous relationship with her ex-boyfriend Roosevelt Mondesir, who doused her with gasoline and chased her in and out of a Boynton Beach gas station with a machete last year before he caught her, pulled out a lighter and set her ablaze.
His lawyers tried to convince a jury that it was nothing more than a cry for help. But after less than 40 minutes of deliberations Wednesday, the six-member panel sided with prosecutors — convicting Mondesir of attempted first-degree murder and domestic battery charges.
Mondesir, 53, faces up to life in prison when Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Stephen Rapp sentences him on August 23.
“I think the jury saw it just as we said — you don’t douse a person with gasoline and light them on fire unless you intend for that person to die,” Assistant State Attorney Alexcia Cox said after the verdict.
Mondesir, who Chief Assistant State Attorney Adrienne Ellis said sobbed audibly at the start of his trial earlier this week, spent most of the time holding his head in his hands Wednesday as prosecutors in closing arguments described how he lured Breton to the gas station on June 14, 2012 under the guise of letting her pick up Nathaniel, the 4-year-old son they share.
As soon as she arrived, they said, he got out of his car armed with a gas can and a machete.
“He comes there ready to get right down to business, and that’s what he did,” Ellis told jurors.
Defense attorney Tom Weiss, on the other hand, characterized the attack as “a pitiful, pathetic, highly disorganized cry for attention” — one of many such ploys Mondesir had tried toward the end of the couple’s violent relationship.
“It’s the proverbial schoolboy getting the girl’s attention by pulling her pigtails. Very obviously we’re far from schoolyards and pigtails here, but it’s the same principle of trying to get that attention by any means,” Weiss said.
Mondesir had been friends with Breton’s ex-husband, and in the beginning of their relationship, Breton previously told The Palm Beach Post, he had been so caring she quickly felt herself falling in love with him. But the relationship deteriorated quickly.
Among other things, Weiss explained to jurors, Mondesir had slept with one of Breton’s friends. It was payback, he said, for suspicions that she’d had an affair.
He’d also taken to calling her other two children when she wouldn’t answer her phone, and once threw one of her kids’ phones on a roof. On another occasion, when she came to pick up Nathaniel, he let all the air out of her car tires.
Breton and the kids had moved out of the Lantana home she shared with Mondesir about a month before the attack, after Mondesir took a knife and cut up her furniture. They’d had two fights where police had to get involved before the gas station meeting. In one of those incidents, police arrested her.
She’d sought a restraining order against him in May 2012, but a judge denied the request.
Mondesir had little reaction to the verdict Wednesday. Neither did Breton, who declined to comment on her way out of the courthouse.
Copyright 2013 Palm Beach Post
All Rights Reserved