MURDER-TRIAL TESTIMONY BEGINS

TPD Tapes Reveal Details of Rachel Hoffman's Death

The street-smart voice of Rachel Hoffman looking to buy "beans" and
"fire" - Ecstasy and a gun - filled Leon County Courtroom 3G on
Monday, as prosecutors played a police-recorded conversation between
the confidential informant and Deneilo Bradshaw, one of two men
accused of killing her, during the first day of testimony in his
murder trial.

"You have a kind smile and kind eyes," Hoffman told Bradshaw during a
May 5, 2008, meeting at the Tennessee Street car detailing shop where
he worked. "Be good to me, and I'll be good to you."

Two days later, the first-time informant was dead, shot five times
during a botched drug sting operation on dead-end Gardner Road in
northeast Tallahassee. She was shot twice in the torso and three times
in the head. Two bullets passed through her wrist and fingers as she
tried to protect herself.

Irv Hoffman wiped away tears as he listened to the tape, in which his
23-year-old daughter asked to buy a "pretty gun" for protection, along
with 1,500 Ecstasy pills and cocaine to work off her own drug charges.

"I'm a little Jewish girl," Rachel Hoffman told Bradshaw on the tape.
"I need to be safe."

Attorneys for Bradshaw, 24, of Tallahassee portrayed Hoffman as a
high-level drug dealer who disobeyed police, had been previously
arrested and blatantly violated the terms of a court-ordered drug
diversion program.

Former Tallahassee police Investigator Ryan Pender testified that
Hoffman told him she was selling between $15,000 and $25,000 worth of
marijuana a week when he went to her east Tallahassee apartment on a
search warrant less than a month before she was killed. She
volunteered to become a confidential informant rather than go to jail,
he said.

On the tape played for jurors, defense attorney Clyde Taylor pointed
out: "It was Hoffman telling Bradshaw that 'white lady' was cocaine."

Pender, who was the only TPD officer to lose his job over the failed
operation, said that Bradshaw's co-defendant and brother-in-law Andrea
Green was the target of the drug sting he orchestrated with Hoffman.
Green's trial is set to be heard in October.

Pender's testimony included a recording from the listening device he
put in Hoffman's Volvo minutes before she failed to turn into
Forestmeadows Park and he and 18 other officers lost sight of her.

"I have no idea where I am," were Hoffman's last words on the
wire.

Static continued to play in the courtroom for another four minutes,
then stopped.

Assistant State Attorney Frank Allman told jurors they would not learn
if Bradshaw or Green actually fired the sticky-triggered .25-caliber
handgun that killed Hoffman. The gun was stolen at the detail shop
from a the car of a city employee who planned to pawn it that day for
money to buy new sneakers.

Allman said in his opening statement that the evidence will show that
Bradshaw helped to steal the $13,000 police gave Hoffman to make the
drug buy, that he used force and fear and was carrying a weapon to rob
her.

"The identity of the shooter is not something that is necessary to
come to a verdict in this case," Allman said. "Either (Bradshaw) was
the killer or was a principal in the killing."

The testimony revealed what happened to Hoffman after police lost her
on Gardner Road on May 7, 2008. Less than a half-hour later, at about
7 p.m., her Wachovia debit card was used at Maxwell's Grocery on east
Mahan Road at Chaires Cross Road.

After leaving, Green got his BMW stuck in a Jefferson County sand
road. He flagged down a truck driven by Rick Andrews.

But Andrews had nothing to pull him out with. When Green suggested
cutting out his seatbelts to use as a tow, Andrews became nervous and
left.

"He wanted to be pulled out really bad," Andrews said.

As Andrews drove away, he saw a silver Volvo drive past him toward
Green.

In the sand near the abandoned BMW, investigators found the clothes
hanger and red T-shirt that had concealed the listening device in
Hoffman's car.

"This is not a particularly complicated case," Allman said. "What
happened is fairly simple to understand."

Testimony to come this week will include witnesses who say the men
rolled into Perry, tossing out $50 bills. Later that night,
prosecutors said, Bradshaw and Green used her cash card again at a
Perry Jiffy Mart to buy a gallon of bleach to clean her blood-soaked
car.

The men then got a ride with friends to Orlando to meet up with their
girlfriends. They went to Macy's and spent $350 on new clothes and
shoes.

After buying more than $400 in jewelry at another store, Green and
Bradshaw went back to Macy's where they were arrested in the parking
lot.

Back at the apartment of Bradshaw's girlfriend, police found his
bleach-stained shirt along with Hoffman's identification cards and her
debit card.

Bradshaw, prosecutors said, then led them to her body, dumped in a
drainage ditch in Taylor County. It was partially covered by the
yellow sleeping bag she used at festivals, and which Pender used to
conceal the listening device in her backseat. After 36 hours,
decomposition was setting in, and the insects had arrived.