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Slain teenage girl's friend describes fatal shooting in newly released video

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — The State Attorney's Office on Monday released redacted footage of a 16-year-old girl describing to Orange County detectives the shooting death of her best friend.

The body of Melanie Medina, 15, was dumped April 11 on Ziegler Road near The Florida Mall, deputies said. Ramsys Cruz-Abreu, 22, was arrested in connection with Medina’s death.

Investigators said Medina’s friend admitted on April 19 to dropping a gun, accidentally pulling the trigger and fatally shooting Medina while the trio was in a car after a drug deal near Conroy Road and Millenia Boulevard.

After selling cocaine and heroin to someone in a parking lot, Cruz-Abreu told the girl to grab the gun and shoot anyone who approached them, investigators said.

The girl told detectives that she was seated in the middle of the backseat and Medina was seated in the front passenger’s seat.

The girl said she set the gun atop her leg but it fell because it was heavy.

“OK, and when you went to move?” a detective said.

“That's when it fell,” the girl said.

“All right. And then what did you hear?" the detective said.

“I just heard a big boom. It just went off, like, really loud,” she said.

The identified girl said she panicked, covered her ears and cried.

“And then she fell back,” the girl said in the video. “She tried to breathe, but she couldn't breathe at all.”

The girl said Cruz-Abreu told her to stop crying and to look at Medina.

“I looked at her and saw blood everywhere. And I tried to hold her face,” she said. “I just told her to hold on, hold on. And she just stared looking at me."

The girl said she begged Cruz-Abreu to take Medina to the hospital or to call police, but she said he wouldn’t let her.

“I told him, ‘Just leave me somewhere. Just let me out right here, and I can just call the police, and you can go,’” she said. “He said that he can't leave me there because if police come then what am I going to say? And I said, ‘I'll just say that somebody passed by and shot us or whatever.’”

Medina died in her friend’s arms.

“I was like, ‘I'm not going to tell on you. I just want her to get to the hospital, because she's going to die,’” she said. “He said she was already dead, so we can't do nothing.”

The girl told detectives that Cruz-Abreu removed Medina’s body from the car and dumped it along the road before driving the girl to a nearby gas station, where he allegedly threatened her and her family.

“He said that if I call the police, I was going to (be jailed) forever, and I wasn't going to see my mom, and something was going to happen to her,” she said. “I was really scared when he told me about my family.”

Investigators said that they blame Cruz-Abreu for Medina’s death because he told the girl to grab the gun.

In addition to manslaughter, he’s charged with failure to report a death and tampering with evidence.

Cruz-Abreu was freed from jail after paying bail. His trial hasn’t been scheduled yet.

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