Three arrests. Two counties. Seven months. One very busy gentleman.
Let me tell you about Cory Joseph Coddington, because the court file already did, and the court file does not stutter.
On Saturday, June 6, shortly before noon, somebody pointed a black Cadillac at a tree on East Hillsboro Boulevard and let physics do the rest. The Cadillac lost. Trees usually win these things — they’ve got the home-field advantage, the deep roots, the patience. The Cadillac ended up wrapped around the trunk like a Christmas ribbon, which is roughly where a bystander snapped a photo that made the rounds before BSO’s public information officer had finished her first coffee.
Here’s where it gets ambitious.
According to the Broward Sheriff’s Office, the driver didn’t wait around for AAA. Investigators say he carjacked a passerby, took the borrowed wheels, and drove off — abandoning the vehicle, per BSO, at a nearby fast-food restaurant. NBC 6 later photographed a car at the Chick-fil-A; make of that what you will. Then, the way these stories go, our man turned up at a gas station, where — and I’m quoting the spirit of the arrest report here — he declined the deputies’ generous invitation to surrender and got combative instead. He was taken into custody and shipped to a hospital, which is the universe’s way of suggesting that resisting armed law enforcement is a contact sport you lose.
The tally, per BSO: nine charges. Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Carjacking. Resisting with violence. Three — count ’em, three — separate batteries on officers, firefighters, or EMTs. Petit theft. Possession of more than ten grams of MDMA. And leaving the scene of a crash. The Broward clerk’s docket, ever the minimalist, lists only six of them, having apparently decided three battery counts were more than the website wanted to display. The paperwork and the press release are working from different scripts, which is a recurring theme in this man’s life.
Speaking of the paperwork: the State managed to cite the wrong subsection for its own marquee charge. The booking report tags the carjacking under the statute for carjacking with a weapon, while the charge title and felony degree insist it was without one. Somewhere a data-entry field and a deputy are having an argument, and the defendant gets to watch.
But here’s the part that turns a bad Saturday into a portrait.
This was not Cory Coddington’s first rodeo, his second, or — depending on how you’re counting — his third.
November 2025, Boca Raton. Police arrest him for robbery by sudden snatching. The victim is his wife. The alleged crime: taking her phone during an argument. The case gets the full Marsy’s Law treatment — victim information sealed — so we’ll leave the victim where the law put her, which is out of this column. In December, the Palm Beach County State Attorney looks at the felony, declines to file it, and swaps in misdemeanors. No file, the document says. That’s a prosecutor’s call, in writing.
March 2026, Port Everglades. He’s arrested again — this time for violating a domestic-violence injunction. The protected person is, once more, his wife. The detail that earns this one a spot in the museum: he allegedly boarded a cruise ship with her. The Radiance of the Seas. Adjacent staterooms. The arrest affidavit notes he was ordered to have no contact, then booked the room next door. There is a kind of commitment to a theme here that you almost have to respect, in the way you respect a hurricane for showing up on time.
June 2026, Deerfield Beach. The tree. The Cadillac. The rest of the greatest-hits album above.
And the judge, reviewing this discography at first appearance, set the obvious terms: no victim contact, a mental-health evaluation before release, GPS monitoring, no weapons, no controlled substances. Which is the court’s polite way of saying it has read the file and would like the next chapter to be shorter.
Now, the disclaimers, because we are a responsible publication and I enjoy not being sued.
Every one of these is a charge, not a conviction. Cory Coddington is presumed innocent of all of it, the way you and I would be, and he’s entitled to his day in court — three of them, apparently. The drug count is possession; nobody has charged him with selling anything, and I’m not about to start. The carjacked-vehicle details beyond what BSO released come from a TV station, not a sworn document, and I’ve labeled them as such. The victim in the domestic cases has a name the law says you don’t get, and I agree with the law.
What’s left, after all the caveats, is still a remarkable document trail: a man who in seven months allegedly went from a phone-snatching in Boca, to a cruise-ship injunction violation, to a felony demolition derby in Deerfield — and a justice system that no-filed him once, booked him twice more, and finally strapped a GPS unit to him and told him to stay away from his wife and the pharmacy.
The tree, for the record, is fine. The tree will outlive this column, the case, and possibly the Cadillac’s warranty.
Stay classy, South Florida.
— Chaz Stevens
