Man sentenced for accidentally killing his friend while playing with loaded gun

Emma Kennedy | Pensacola News Journal

In a packed Escambia County courtroom Wednesday, two families mourned the single tragedy that has surged ripples through their neighborhood for more than a year.

Three young boys playing video games. One loaded gun. An accidental shooting that left one of them dead.

As Jordan Dumas, 20, stood solemn awaiting sentencing for the negligent manslaughter of his friend, 16-year-old Jaibreon Cook, three generations of both the defendant and victim’s families stood to speak of the tragedy in the Montclair Road bedroom on Dec. 4, 2016, and of the ongoing events that have impacted both sides since.

Judge Joel Boles heard testimony from close to a dozen family members and friends of both boys in court Wednesday, and took a recess before imposing his sentencing to deliberate what he called an “extremely difficult situation” that demanded both justice and mercy.

Ultimately, he sentenced Dumas to five years in state prison to be followed by one year of community control.

Multiple members of Cook’s family cried, shook their heads or stood and left the courtroom as Boles read the sentence. Members of Dumas’ family did the same.

'You still owe me that apology, son'

The tension between the two families was obvious throughout the multi-hour hearing, but the sentiment from both remained the same: Cook didn’t have to die.

Dumas told the court he, Cook and another friend – a juvenile who wasn’t injured nor charged – were playing video games at the third friend’s house when the friend pulled out a gun from under his pillow. None of them had seen a gun in real life, Dumas said, and none of them knew it was loaded.

They each held it, curious, and passed it around. As Dumas grabbed the gun, he lost his footing and accidentally fired the weapon, shooting Cook in the head.

“Please understand this was an accident,” he said, reading from a pre-written letter.

Much of the Cook family’s disdain for the Dumas family seems to stem from what happened after, when Dumas told investigators Cook had shot himself in a suicide attempt. Investigators would later learn that it was Dumas who had fired the weapon. The knowledge that Dumas initially lied stayed with Cook’s parents, who had come to think of Dumas as a second son, and weighed heavily on the Dumas family.

“You still owe me that apology, son,” Jonathan Cook, Jaibreon’s father, said to Dumas during sentencing, adding that he had told the boys multiple times not to play with guns. He said his son was good, a multi-sport athlete awaiting college offers.

He was always home by his curfew, and Jonathan Cook said on the night Jaibreon died, he stood in the front yard waiting for the familiar sound of Jaibreon running down the street to make it through the door before 8 p.m.

Jaibreon’s mother, LaShannon Cook, said when police knocked on her door that night to say her son had shot himself, she didn’t believe it.

“I just wish Jordan would’ve told the truth,” she said, crying at the podium.

The impact on the Dumas family

Each member of the Cook family who spoke – Jonathan, LaShannon, and Jaibreon’s uncle and grandma – asked Boles to impose the maximum 30-year sentence for the offense.

“My heart is broken, for Jaibreon, for my family and for this young man,” Bessie Cook said. “All he had to do was put the gun down, there’s too much violence… just put the gun down, let this be an example.”

Dumas said he hasn’t slept well since Cook’s death. He still talks to him, still remembers the friend who, when Dumas fell on a broken glass bottle during a pickup basketball game in the neighborhood, took off his shirt to wrap around the injury until help came.

Neither boy had been in trouble before, Dumas’ mom, Vonetta Pike-Dumas, said in her statement to the judge, they were never violent. Dumas has started speaking at events for at-risk young boys about the dangers of playing with guns, she said.

Pike-Dumas said her house has been shot up, she’s been harassed by people in her neighborhood, and though she was told by Dumas’ lawyer, Patrece Cashwell, that she can’t speak to the victim’s family, she said she has wanted to tell them the whole time she’s sorry.

Sentencing, moments prior run high on emotions

In the break Boles took between testimony and reading his sentence, members of the Cook and Dumas family began physically fighting in the hall, causing security to rush out and break it up. When the sentencing was over, security escorted both families from the building separately.

Dumas said he never intended harm, nor to cause such derision between the families. He said he lied about what happened in that room because he was scared.

“I’m so sorry, I never tried to hurt anyone, I pray some day your family will forgive me and I’ll forgive myself,” he said.

Dumas walked over to his mom in the gallery and gave her a long hug before he was sentenced and taken into custody.

Dumas’ prison sentence will be served as a youthful offender, meaning he’ll be housed at a camp separate to prison with other young inmates so he’s not as exposed to the violence and environment of older prison inmates.

Cashwell said he’ll have the opportunity for more rehabilitation and educational programs than he would in a traditional prison setting.

Emma Kennedy can be reached at ekennedy@pnj.com or 850-435-8680.