In a grim retrial that has dredged up one of Florida’s most horrific crimes, a 76-year-old man is once again facing the death penalty for the 1998 murder of a five-year-old girl who was left near the Everglades to be attacked by alligators.
Harrel Braddy was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for the killing of Quatisha Maycock. But due to changes in Florida’s death penalty laws, his sentence was reopened, leading to a new sentencing trial that began this week with jury selection in Miami-Dade Circuit Court.
The 1998 Horror
In November 1998, Braddy met Quatisha and her mother, Shandelle Maycock, at a church. He later kidnapped them both, driving Shandelle to a remote sugar field where he choked her unconscious and left her for dead. Miraculously, she survived and flagged down help.
Fearing the little girl would identify him, Braddy drove Quatisha to a stretch of Interstate 75 known as “Alligator Alley” and abandoned her alive near a canal. He later admitted to detectives that he “knew she would probably die.”
Two days later, Quatisha’s body was found in a canal by fishermen. An autopsy revealed she had sustained alligator bites to her head and chest while still alive, though likely unconscious. Her left arm was missing, severed by an alligator after her death. The medical examiner concluded she ultimately died from blunt force trauma to the head.
A Legal Reprieve and a Second Chance at Justice
Braddy’s original death sentence was undone by legal challenges to Florida’s death penalty system. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state’s process unconstitutional because it allowed judges, not juries, to impose death sentences. Subsequent legislative changes created legal ambiguity, ultimately granting Braddy a right to resentencing.
Florida’s current law, revised in 2023, permits a death sentence with a jury vote of 8-4, a threshold prosecutors are now seeking to meet.
During the original trial, Judge Leonard E. Glick captured the atrocity of the crime: “Adults are supposed to protect children from monsters. They are not supposed to be the monsters themselves.”
Now, nearly three decades after Quatisha Maycock’s death, the state will once again ask a jury to ensure Harrel Braddy is held fully accountable for acting as that very monster. The proceedings are expected to revisit the harrowing details of a case that remains a shocking testament to brutality and betrayal.
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