GRAND JURY HEARS TESTIMONY IN RACHEL HOFFMAN DEATH

A Leon County grand jury will continue to hear testimony today about
the May shooting death of Rachel Hoffman, a 23-year-old woman who was
working as a Tallahassee police informant.

The grand jurors will decide whether to file first-degree murder
charges. Two men, Deneilo Bradshaw, 23, of Tallahassee, and Andrea
Green, 25, of Perry, have been charged with armed robbery in the case.
Hoffman was to buy drugs and a gun from the men with $13,000 in marked
bills, but Tallahassee police lost track of her, and she and the men
disappeared. Green and Bradshaw, who were later arrested in Orlando,
led investigators to her body in rural Taylor County, police said.

State Attorney Willie Meggs said about 10 witnesses, including one
police officer, testified Tuesday during the closed grand jury
session, which began about 9:30 a.m. and ended about 6 p.m. All grand
jury testimony is kept secret.

Meggs is unsure when the grand jury could return an
indictment.

"It will be as soon as we get done, and I don't know how long that
will take," he said.

Green's aunt, Shirley Yelverton, 63, waited outside the courtroom's
doors with a friend who was to testify. Yelverton described how Green
grew up bouncing from one household to another. He spent some of his
childhood in foster care in Greenville.

Yelverton let Green move in with her when he was 16, but kicked him
out a year later when he shot her 10-year-old niece with a BB gun,
bruising the girl's back, she said.

Dealing with Green was "hell," she said. She wanted to give him a
second chance, so she took him in when others wouldn't. But he
wouldn't listen to her.

"I bought him a brand-new music box, brand-new clothes and told him to
go to school," said Yelverton, who lives outside Perry. "He didn't
listen to anything I said. . . . Once they're 16, you don't have a
chance. His mind was fully developed."

As for what happened the day Hoffman was killed, Yelverton calls it
"entrapment."

She said Hoffman was harassing Green and Bradshaw to do the deal even
though the men are not big-time drug dealers.

"She just thought they were something that they weren't," Yelverton
said. "It's very sad what happened to that girl."

Yelverton said the men didn't have any drugs, but they decided they
were going to rob her instead.

She said she blames the Tallahassee Police Department for allowing
this to happen.

With all the national attention the case has gotten, Yelverton said
Green and Bradshaw face a hard road ahead.

"(The case) is on '20/20,'" she said. "I feel they're probably going
to put them in the electric chair."