COCOA, Fla. – Anaya Smith and her sister Andrea Johnson have argued for a year that a profanity-ridden bomb threat on the answering machine at Cocoa High School was not Smith’s voice, nor was the phone number recorded hers.
On Wednesday, Smith and Johnson heard the message for the first time.
“I don’t sound nothing like that,” Smith reacted.
After sweeping the campus last year, Cocoa police blamed the threat on an angry caller complaining her son didn’t get all the food he wanted at lunch.
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“You better [expletive] run that damn cafeteria better or I’m going to slap the [expletive] out your dumb [expletive],” the caller is heard in the newly-released video.
Smith and Johnson said the voice sounded like a man.
In an arrest report, Officer Michael Cox wrote the phone number was Smith’s listed number with the school, and Officer Cox recognized Smith’s voice because he wrote he’d had numerous encounters with her.
Smith said she doesn’t know the officer.
“Never met him a day in my life,” she said.
On Monday, the state attorney’s office told News 6 it doesn’t think it can prove the voice was Smith’s, so all charges are dropped.
A statement reads,
“As the State began preparing this case for trial, evidence supporting the positive identification of the defendant’s voice was insufficient to overcome the anticipated defense that another unidentified individual had left the electronic message. Further, the conditional nature of the threat presented several legal challenges the State to was unlikely to overcome.
“Without a good faith belief that the crimes could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, prosecutors were legally and ethically obliged to abandon the prosecution.”
18th Circuit State Attorney's Office
Like last year when Smith was arrested, police didn’t do an interview with News 6 Wednesday as well.
Instead, a spokesperson said police stand by their investigation.
Smith now hopes prosecutors charge who she and her sister believe really left the message.
“We have always known that Anaya was innocent,” Johnson said. “Somebody has to step up and say this can’t happen because if it can happen to her, it can happen to you.”
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