Girl, 5, Was Left to Be Eaten by Alligators. A Jury Just Decided If the Man at Fault Will Be Executed'
A Florida jury has decided the fate of a 76-year-old man convicted in the 1998 murder of a 5-year-old, whose mother he knew through church.
The child, Quatisha "Candy" Maycock, was kidnapped from her bed by Harrel Braddy from her Florida home in November 1998 after her mother, Shandelle Maycock, then 22, rejected his advances.
Braddy took the mother and daughter in a car and began driving, at one point putting Shandelle in the trunk.
At one point, he stopped the car, pulled her from the trunk and then choked and beat her, rendering her unconscious before leaving her in a deserted area, according to prosecutors, the Miami Herald reported last month.
On Nov. 9, 1998, two days after the abduction, Quatisha's body was found in an area of the Florida Everglades known as "Alligator Alley." She was covered in bite marks and was missing an arm.
On Friday, Jan. 30, a jury spared Braddy the death penalty and sentenced him to life behind bars, NBC Miami and the Tampa Bay Times reported.
Braddy was convicted in 2007 of killing Quatisha and kidnapping Shandelle, according to Florida Supreme Court records viewed by PEOPLE.
He was sentenced to death after an 11-1 vote by a Miami-Dade County jury, but the sentence was overturned in 2017 owing to a law that dictates it's unconstitutional for the death penalty to be imposed without a unanimous jury decision.
That law has since been amended, putting Braddy back in court for a jury to once again decide his fate.
In January, he faced a re-sentencing trial where Shandelle recounted the horrors of the night of her and Quatisha's abduction, per the Miami Herald. During the trial, Braddy glared at her as she testified.
A former medical examiner told the jury brain scans of Quatisha showed "puncture wounds into the skull," which were "consistent with an alligator biting the top of her head," NBC Miami, the Miami Herald and reported.
His defense attorneys had argued that he was a loving father and church leader who had been impacted by losses of several people in the family, NBC Miami reported. It wasn't immediately clear how that impact played into the little girl's murder.
