The Florida grandma accused of conspiring with her dentist son to murder her son-in-law in a sinister contract killing plot was arrested just moments before she boarded a one-way flight to Vietnam, startling bodycam footage showed Wednesday.
Donna Adelson, 73, tried to hang onto her cell phone as police slapped handcuffs on her in front of her husband, Harvey, at Miami International Airport in Nov. 2023
“Oh here we go again,” Adelson told officers.
Adelson’s arrest came just one week after her son Charlie Adelson was convicted of hiring two hitmen to murder his brother-in-law and FSU professor Dan Markel in 2014.
Donning a blue t-shirt and gray hoodie — the same clothing she was wearing in her mugshot — police begin asking Adelson to see her passport.
As police secured the passport, Adelson was told that she was under arrest for Markel’s murder.
As an officer goes to remove her phone from her hand, the mother of the convicted killer resists, yanking the phone away, saying that her attorney said “not to.”
“I don’t want to give it to you,” Harvey Adelson says on behalf of his wife. “Why do I have to give it to you?”
Miami Dade police tell the couple that the phone was evidence in the case before the Adelsons begin to cooperate.
Adelson pleads with the officers to allow her husband to come with her.
“My husband is almost 80-years-old. He cannot come with me?” she asks the officers, who then reject the request.
She finally tells her husband to order an Uber before kissing him goodbye while cuffed.
“You’re making a mistake,” Harvey Adelson said. “That’s two mistakes. Please.”
Adelson is then paraded through the airport in front of confused travelers.
The 27-minute video then shows her sitting eerily emotionless, staring blankly ahead in the patrol car’s backseat.
She then appears in the parking garage of the jail for her processing before the video ends.
Adelson made her first appearance in a Leon County Court on Nov. 21, 2023, where she was formally charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy, and solicitation in connection to Markel’s death.
Markel was shot in the head inside his garage in Tallahassee.
At the time of the FSU law professor’s killing, he was in the middle of a bitter custody battle with Donna Adelson’s daughter, Wendi.
Prosecutors shared that Donna Adelson “hated” Markel and that emails with her daughters showed she was “desperate to find a way” to stop the law professor’s “adamant” efforts to relocate her two grandsons from Tallahassee to South Florida.
Days before Adelson’s arrest, she discussed “getting things in order” — with plans for either suicide or to flee to a non-extradition country — in calls with her son following his guilty verdict, according to an affidavit obtained by Law & Crime.
“Donna Sue Adelson has considerable financial resources to accomplish this,” the affidavit added.
Adelson allegedly revealed new details in her attempt to flee the county in a Nov. 7, 2023, jailhouse call to her son.
“We’ve been looking it up over and over because things change. If there is extradition from Vietnam? Because we, we’ve looked at all the places, I mean, I could go to Korea and China, but there’s no extradition, but looking for places where there’s no extradition,” Adelson said according to a recording released by ABC News.
Her 47-year-old dentist son is serving a life sentence for arranging the murder-for-hire through his then-girlfriend, Katie Magbanua, who hired her ex-husband and the father of her children, Sigfredo Garcia, and his friend, Luis Rivera — both members of the Latin Kings gang – to carry out the gruesome hit.
Magbanua and Garcia are serving life sentences after being found guilty in October 2019.
Rivera is serving a 19-year sentence after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and testifying against the others in 2016.
Adelson has denied any involvement in the murder-for-hire plot.
