Highlights:
- Cory stays jailed until mid-July, pending Frasier Crane’s review.
- Broken leg. Four screws and a plate.
- One really tweaked up orbital bone for the tweaker.
- Wants to time-travel to 2027 to kill a future assassin. Verbatim from the record, not embellished.
- Caught with most of a half-ounce of crystal meth in his pocket.
- A finger, the deputy’s account, lodged where no deputy wants one. Memorably, per the deputy.
Cory Joseph Coddington U-turned into a tree on East Hillsboro Boulevard, carjacked the passerby who stopped to help, and went barefoot through two fast-food parking lots before deputies put him down on the asphalt. Along with, well, a finger up a cop’s ass. That was June 6. The relevant date is earlier, the one the father supplied under oath, the one nobody acted on.
Judge Frank Ledee took the bench in Room 4750 of the Central Courthouse, Seventeenth Judicial Circuit, on the State of Florida v. Coddington. No fireworks. A man came apart over the better part of a year in full view of the people closest to him, and the hearing was the first time any of it got written down.
Here is the timeline the defense put into the record. Coddington carried a bipolar diagnosis. A treating professional re-diagnosed him with “relationship OCD” and pulled his mood stabilizers roughly three months back. Three months later: tree, carjacking, the Chick-fil-A, the mother shielding her kids. The medication came out. The man came apart. The interval was a quarter of a year.
The wife testified. Genuinely nice it seems, she described a husband cycling through Airbnbs, unmoored, deteriorating in real time. She watched a man in crisis and said so on the stand, credibly, under oath. She is the witness in this story, not a defendant in it. Put her to one side.
Who knew that Cory was auditioning for Terminator 3: Ozempic: Judgment Day.
Now the father. Under oath, he recounted a conversation from before the worst of it. His son explained that he could time-travel, and that he planned to go back and kill the man destined to assassinate him on July 7, 2027. The father’s word for how his son delivered this was “believable.”
Read that again as the father did. A grown man describes a time-travel murder plan to his father, and the father files it under “believable.” Not under 911. Not under a Baker Act petition. Not under involuntary commitment. Under believable, and then apparently under nothing at all, until the asphalt and the deputies made the filing for him. The family held station at a distance while he “medicated himself” in a rotating series of short-term rentals, likely ice, and surfaced with a sudden interest in treatment beds only once the State had him in a cell.
The State wants him held. They point to the narcotics, which the record clarifies as 12.7 grams of methamphetamine, possession only. They point to June 6. On June 6 they are correct: the danger was real and is not theoretically resolved. The question the State does not answer is where the safety net was during the ninety days the medication was gone and the time-travel plan was on the table inside the family. Florida’s model is a cell, available on demand, and an intervention that arrives only once the cell is the sole remaining address. The State plays protector after the wreckage and runs the plea-and-pass shuffle that kept the man moving through the system right up to the point he stopped moving.
By the way, Cory wants to check into a rehab just north of Noland’s Swimming Pool Hall of Fame. Funny, the very same people that lambasted FHE (I am not counting Mrs. Cory here) … the same people who thought hell was coming to the old Brooks restaurant location, now will seemingly rise in support of Cory’s band camp vacation.
One notes, there’s a good likelihood Coddington might not have a car, and his office is a stone’s throw away from his sober retreat.
I will note my upcoming letter to Judge Ledee, outlining my concerns for Coddington’s stay within my city’s borders.
Ledee deferred the motion to detain. He declined to set release conditions until the jail’s mental-health division runs a standalone evaluation. He is waiting for a clinician to certify what the testimony already established: not a criminal scheme, a clinical collapse, with a family that preferred the quiet version until the quiet version drove through a wall.
If released, the conditions read like a sentence. Custody-to-custody transfer into a residential program. No departure for any reason. GPS. Zero tolerance, substances. A cage with a treatment label.
The evaluation pends. The judge is out two weeks. The machinery grinds on, having located its concern for Cory Coddington’s health at the exact moment he ran out of options and his family ran out of excuses.
