OCALA — A jealous 23-year-old shot and killed a 17-year-old he met on a dating app, Florida authorities said.
Henry Jonathan Valencia is charged with second-degree murder in the death of Nosiah Santos on May 30, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office announced July 14.
Valencia met the teen on Grindr, an online dating app, about four months earlier, and they started talking and spending time together, deputies wrote in an arrest affidavit.
A week before the fatal shooting, Valencia went through the teen’s phone and found out he was talking to other men, and he became jealous, deputies said after viewing their text messages.
The jealousy escalated the day of the shooting when Valencia found out Santos was with a friend Santos had initially met on Grindr, according to deputies and Santos’ mom.
Valencia went to the teen’s family’s apartment in Ocala and was upset to find the two together, then he and Santos left in Valencia’s car and drove to a gas station, according to investigators.
Lydia Albino said after her son left, she got a call from him asking her to come pick him up, saying he didn’t want to “deal” with Valencia anymore, deputies said.
She started racing to the gas station about 15 miles away and overheard part of the altercation, she told WOFL.
“He’s telling this man, who is older than him, ‘I don’t want to be with you no more. I’m only 17. This is too much emotional distress. And my mom’s on her way to come get me,’” Albino told the outlet. “And he just kept repetitively telling this man, and this man’s like, ‘Get in the car. Let’s go.’”
While they were on the phone, she heard him swear, then he stopped talking, she told investigators.
Video surveillance from the gas station showed Valencia and Santos pull up to a pump and stop, then Santos popped the trunk and started taking his belongings out, according to the affidavit.
Valencia drove to a different part of the gas station and parked the car, then walked back over to the pump and started getting “aggressive” toward Santos as he was on the phone, deputies said.
Valencia again walked away and came back, yelling at Santos as the teen turned his back on him, according to witnesses and surveillance footage.
The teen sat down on the ground, and a witness told deputies he was shaking his head and covering his face as Valencia yelled at him, according to the affidavit.
Then Valencia shot Santos in the upper torso, and the teen fell backward as people at the gas station ran for cover, deputies said.
Valencia is then accused of repeatedly punching Santos in the head before running back to his car and driving away, according to investigators.
By the time Santos’ mom got to the gas station, her son had been shot.
“He was already laid out at the pump,” his mom told WOFL. “I couldn’t recognize his face. I started asking, ‘Is he alive?’ They wouldn’t tell me anything.”
Santos still had a pulse when fire rescue arrived, but he died at a hospital, deputies said. There was so much blood on his face, detectives said they couldn’t tell if he had also been shot in the head.
Valencia drove back home to Jacksonville, where law enforcement saw him loading belongings into his vehicle and his mom’s vehicle, as if they were “going to be gone for a significant amount of time,” investigators wrote in the report.
Deputies said they stopped Valencia’s vehicle once he left home and took him into custody, along with his mom.
The mom told investigators her son called her the day before “crying and upset,” and after their discussion, she told him he needed to contact law enforcement and an attorney, according to the affidavit.
During his interview, Valencia said he wasn’t the “aggressor” the day Santos died, but he didn’t provide additional details without an attorney present, deputies said.
Albino told WOFL her son was fun and “loved by so many people.” “
He was a very loving young man who had all this stuff he wanted to do,” she told the outlet. “And smart like you wouldn’t even believe.”
Ocala is about an 80-mile drive northwest from Orlando.
By OLIVIA LLOYD/McClatchy Neews
Olivia Lloyd is a National Real-Time Reporter for McClatchy covering the Southeast. She is based in South Florida and graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Previously, she has worked for Hearst DevHub and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
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