ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday in the Orange County murder trial of a man accused of fatally shooting an ATV rider outside a Winter Garden apartment complex in February 2025.
Police said officers responding to the 1,000 block of Horizon Street found Ja’Keem DeShun Williams, 32, dead beside the ATV. Witnesses told investigators that Ralph Hensel, 57, approached Williams and yelled at him before firing twice. Surveillance footage showed Hensel walking from the leasing office with a firearm, moving around a nearby building and apparently waiting for Williams to pass before shooting him as he rode by.
Investigators said Hensel told witnesses after the shooting, “I killed him.”
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said Hensel had previously threatened people who rode ATVs at the apartment complex.
“Based on what people have told the family, who live there, he had a tendency to try to intimidate people from riding on their ATVs in the lot that was next to the apartment complex, and people did it on a regular basis and he kept threatening them, would call the police, and I guess the witnesses and the neighbors say he threatened that if the police weren’t going to do anything about it, he was gonna ‘handle it,’” Crump said in February 2025. “(…) I guess him ‘handling the situation’ meant that he waited for Ja’Keem to come riding on the ATV and he took the gun out of the office of the apartment complex and went and shot him in cold blood. And then, as I understand it, he went back into the apartment office where, apparently, an acquaintance — they said his girlfriend or someone — was there, and he just waited as if there was nothing wrong that he had did.”
Jury selection is scheduled to start at 8:30 a.m. Monday at the Orange County courthouse. Hensel is charged with first-degree murder and, if convicted, could spend the rest of his life in prison. He is being held without bond.
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