Video shows accused Miami hitman counting PPP cash for murder of TSA officer

On the selfie video, Javon Carter sits in the driver’s side of a car, shuffling a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills for the camera. He mumbles to himself, curses and pulls out another bundle. “Another day in the office,” he says twice.

The job he’d just completed, police say, was murder.

The selfie video, released by Miami-Dade prosecutors on Tuesday, shows Carter allegedly counting thousands paid to him to gun down U.S. Transportation Security Administration officer Le’Shonte Jones outside her South Miami-Dade apartment in May 2021.

The 35-second video was discovered on Carter’s cellphone when he was arrested on a murder charge last month. It’s now key evidence against Carter, who is facing the death penalty after a Miami-Dade grand jury indicted him and two others for the brazen murder.

Carter has pleaded not guilty. His defense attorney declined to comment on Tuesday.

Police say the mastermind of Jones’ murder was a woman named Jasmine Martinez, who’d harbored a long-standing grudge against Jones and paid at least $10,000 for the killing using a fraudulently obtained federal pandemic relief loan.

Arrest warrants allege Martinez received a $15,000 PPP loan — which she claimed was to keep her single-employee beauty salon afloat — last April. She then withdrew over $10,000 of that in the days leading up to the murder, according to the warrants.

South Florida has emerged as a hotbed for PPP fraud. The small-business loans, a signature plank in the federal government’s COVID-19 relief efforts, were forgivable if used for payroll and other approved expenses.

Jones had been a victim and witness in the robbery case against one of Martinez’s boyfriends.

Miami-Dade police and prosecutors allege that Martinez, through another jailed inmate named Romiel Robinson, arranged to have Carter commit the murder. Robinson is also charged.

Surveillance captured a man believed to be Carter brazenly walking up to Jones and shooting her dead, wounding the woman’s toddler daughter. Phone records placed Carter at the home at the time of the shooting, and during stretches on two previous days, an indication he was surveilling her.

Police detectives, in their arrest warrants, indicate that Carter was paid and made the video within two hours of the murder.

This story was originally published March 30, 2022 at 7:00 AM.