By WILLIAM SNOWDEN
Editor
A six-person jury returned a not guilty verdict against a Crawfordville man who had been charged with burning his girlfriend’s house down and killing a puppy.
Bobby Joe Sampson Jr. was found not guilty of arson and aggravated animal cruelty after a one-day trial on Tuesday, March 19.
Testimony at the trial indicated that Sampson was angry that a 9-month old puppy had chewed his headphones and continued to complain about it to his girlfriend, Tina Sanders, until she finally told him to get out of the house.
He left the house that day, Aug. 26, 2021 and his GPS monitor he was wearing for a criminal charge of failure to register as a sex offender tracked him leaving the house at 7:25 p.m., coming back at 8:01 p.m., then leaving again at 8:34.
A few minutes later, Sanders and some friends returned to the home and found it on fire. A call to 911 came in at 8:42.
The puppy was found dead in the home from injuries from the fire.
The state fire marshal’s office determined the fire was purposefully set in the bedroom. But the investigation did not find an accelerant like gasoline.
Sampson elected not to testify in his own defense at his trial.
Defense attorney Manny Garcia was obviously effective at casting doubt in jurors’ minds – questioning whether someone else had set the fire, including Sanders herself.
Wakulla Chief Prosecutor Andrew Deneen, in his closing, questioned that logic, noting that Sanders lost everything in the fire and was homeless for a period after the fire.
The jury deliberated for about an hour before returning a verdict finding Sampson not guilty of arson and animal cruelty.
In addition to the pending criminal charge in Wakulla for failure to register as a sex offender, Sampson was sentenced in May 2022 in Holmes County for perjury and sentenced to 5 years of probation.
Sampson’s criminal history includes charges in Holmes in 2011 for procuring for prostitition a person under 12 years old for which he was adjudicated guilty; and a case in 2018 for failure to register as a sex offender and was adjudicated guilty.
