ORLANDO, Fla. — Newly released body camera video from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office is shedding more light on why murder suspect Keith Melvin Moses, ultimately, was not charged for possessing an illegal gun, following his 2021 arrest.

That arrest two years ago involved a gun thrown from a vehicle. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office told Spectrum News it did not conduct a DNA test on that gun in 2021, but new results from this year show they cannot tie Moses to that weapon.

Body camera video show Orange County Sheriff deputies arresting three suspects during a traffic stop in November 2021. Moses was one of those suspects. He was recently charged in the February murders on Hialeah Street in Pine Hills.

The 2021 arrest came under scrutiny following those murders, and while Sheriff John Mina says there were missteps on the Sheriff’s office end, he believes the State Attorney’s office should have taken a closer look at the case.

“So we are looking at how to fill those gaps and that’s the responsibility of the supervisor and the chain of command and also the State Attorney’s Office to say ‘hey you….state there was a gun…was that gun ever tested what were the results of that?’” Mina said.

As deputies stopped the car, they reported seeing someone throw a gun out the window. Deputies later recovered that gun and also found 4.6 grams of cannabis on Moses. Deputies arrested and charged him with misdemeanor possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia but no gun charge. Moses denied he threw the gun in the new footage.

Almost two years after this stop and arrest, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office attempted to right the misstep this year following the shootings in Pine Hills by running DNA tests on the gun deputies say was thrown from the vehicle. Results show it could not be tied to Moses, so, they could have never charged him.

Still, Sheriff Mina says prosecutors and law enforcement need to all work together in a “team effort” —including through “tasking,” an electronic communication method State Attorneys will sometimes use to request additional information from law enforcement about a specific case.

“It’s basically a request from the state attorney’s office: ‘hey, did you process this evidence? We’re going to need more before we move forward with this’,” Mina said, describing how the process of tasking works from his perspective as a law enforcement officer.

Last year, OCSO received more than 6,800 “taskings” from the State Attorney’s Office, according to an agency spokesperson. That means OCSO was “tasked” to identify additional information and evidence for less than half of the total 16,043 cases the agency submitted to state attorneys.

Mina said he thinks the 2021 Moses case might have gone differently if the state attorney’s office had “tasked” his officers to go back and finish processing evidence cited in the report — in this case, the stolen gun. 

“An arrest was made, so in certain cases like that, we need feedback from the state attorney’s office,” Mina said. “If we get that feedback back, and we’re able to complete that task, that helps for a successful prosecution.”

But State Attorney Monique Worrell says it’s not her office’s responsibility to make sure law enforcement officers are doing their jobs correctly. She said her office consists of just 148 lawyers, who are responsible for processing cases from 4,000 sworn law enforcement officers in her jurisdiction. 

“To say that we need to ensure that they dot their I’s and cross their T’s is just, it’s not reasonable, and it’s not realistic,” Worrell said. “As I said in the beginning, and I’ll say now: there is nothing that the State Attorney’s Office could have done differently in that case.”

Worrell reiterated, once again, that Orange County deputies never presented her office with any charges related to a firearm in the 2021 Moses case.

“Not only was the firearm not tested to see whom it belonged to, there were never any charges regarding a firearm presented to my office,” Worrell said. “So there would have been no reason for anyone in my office to ‘task’ for testing of a firearm, in relation to a possession of marijuana case. That just doesn’t follow; it doesn’t make sense.”

Worrell characterized Sheriff Mina’s comments as “finger pointing,” and said the agency needs to take responsibility for its actions, or inactions, relevant to the 2021 Moses arrest.

“We trust that when law enforcement brings us a case, they bring us the best case: with all of the information that they would have gathered in their investigation of the case,” Worrell said. “We wouldn’t use a ‘tasking’ to ask for something that would ordinarily be provided. We might assume that it doesn’t exist, if it wasn’t provided.”

Worrell said moving forward, she hopes to see less finger-pointing and blaming. Instead, she wants to see more energy directed toward solving systemic issues with Florida’s approach to juvenile justice. 

“We have a juvenile system that is totally inadequate to deal with children who commit violent offenses,” Worrell said. “So many things need to change.”