The Bahamian has also been accused of raping the 8-year-old girl and leaving her for dead in an abandoned landfill.<\/p>\n
The young man, 18-year-old Milagro Cunningham, was declared mentally incompetent and unfit to stand trial, in a case that has grabbed headlines all across the southern state.<\/p>\n
According to Florida press, Palm Beach Circuit Court Judge Edward Garrison ordered Cunningham \uff96 who seems to have been in the US illegally \uff96 committed to a treatment facility, and required that the Department of Children and Families report on the boy\uff92s condition within six months.<\/p>\n
Cunningham\uff92s public defender reportedly argued last year that he comprehended and communicated within the range of a seven to 9-year-old child.<\/p>\n
Police reportedly discovered the girl under chunks of concrete at a landfill last May, about seven hours after she was reported missing from her grandmother\uff92s home. <\/p>\n
The child identified Cunningham as the attacker.<\/p>\n
Authorities reportedly said Cunningham confessed after initially telling police that five men in a station wagon took the girl.<\/p>\n
Two of the three mental health experts who examined Cunningham concluded he was incompetent, according to Florida press.<\/p>\n
Cunningham faced other counts not specified in press reports, but it appears he had had run-ins with Florida law enforcement before.<\/p>\n
Officials said he was arrested three times for burglary, but failed to attract the attention of immigration authorities because his cases were handled in the juvenile justice system.<\/p>\n
Cunningham seems to have been shipped off to Florida by a frustrated mother, and banished from the home of a fed-up aunt. He was apparently taken in by a sympathetic neighbour, Lisa Taylor.<\/p>\n
Taylor told the Palm Beach Post that Cunningham was “basically just floating. I couldn\uff92t put him in school. He couldn\uff92t get a job.”<\/p>\n
The Post reported that Cunningham\uff92s three burglary arrests happened within a one-month stretch.<\/p>\n
Art Bullock, U.S. Border Patrol chief in West Palm Beach, told the press that if Cunningham had been booked into the main jail, he would have been checked. <\/p>\n
Cunningham arrived in 2003 on a visitor\uff92s visa from the Bahamas and overstayed the short-term limit, said immigration spokesman Manny Van Pelt.<\/p>\n
By: Quincy Parker, The Bahama Journal<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Bahamian teenager has been charged in Florida with attempted first-degree murder, sexual battery and kidnapping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}