Only days before the start of his retrial, YNW Melly has been charged with witness tampering in his double murder case.
According to an affidavit that XXL was able to get on Wednesday (October 4), Melly (real name Jamell Demons) was subject to the extra charge.
He has also been charged with witness tampering along with his purported co-conspirator in the case, YNW Bortlen (real name Cortlen Malik Henry).
The two are accused of speaking with Melly’s ex-girlfriend Mariah Hamilton and her mother Felicia Holmes over the phone using an inmate called Terrence Mathis in an effort to persuade them not to testify in the case.
The affidavit showed that between March and August 2023, Bortlen and Mathis made 60 distinct phone calls, using varied coded language to conceal their intents.
Melly’s phone rights have been limited for much of 2023, according to Law&Crime Network’s Bryson Paul, who also noted that the rapper is currently under 23/1 lockdown at the Broward County Prison.
Mariah Hamilton said last month that police had threatened to imprison her if she didn’t help them prosecute her ex-boyfriend.
Charges against YNW Bortlen for witness tampering were initially made public on Monday (October 2) during a Miami, Florida, house raid. After that, he was detained in Miami-Dade County.
The date of Bortlen’s court appearance has now been changed to January 12, 2024 because his trial was originally set to start on the day he was taken into custody by the police. Since August 2021, he has been free on bail with a monitor due to his suspected involvement in the 2018 homicides.
Melly’s retrial is set to start on October 9 after the jury was unable to agree on a decision during the original trial in July.
The 24-year-old is charged with shooting and killing his buddies YNW Sakchaser (real name Anthony Williams) and YNW Juvy (actual name Christopher Thomas Jr.) in October 2018 and then fabricating the scene to make it appear as though a drive-by shooting.
Despite three days of deliberation, Judge John Murphy III declared on July 22 that the case had resulted in a mistrial. He remarked of the ambiguous conclusion, “These sorts of judgments, they’re hard ones.
Since Melly’s arrest in February 2019, the first-degree murder charges have taken four and a half years to go through the judicial system.
