Gainesville police arrested a 21-year-old Keystone Heights man for attempted murder after he stabbed another man eight times in the torso during a brawl in downtown Gainesville on Sunday morning.
According to Gainesville Police Department spokesperson Art Forgey, the incident occurred around 2 a.m. on Sunday when Brandon Aaron Elijah Goodwin, 21, stabbed a 24-year-old male victim several times in the chest at 200 S. Main St. Goodwin was arrested and charged with attempted homicide.
The incident started after two groups of people left a bar in downtown Gainesville and were arguing with each other. Goodwin was in a third group that happened to be walking along Main Street near Second Avenue and, according to the arrest report, interjected himself into the argument despite not being a part of either of the two groups that initially left the bar.
The three groups then started fighting in the middle of Main Street and, during the brawl, Goodwin, along with two of his friends, targeted the victim. As Goodwin’s two friends engaged the victim, Goodwin approached the victim from the side and started stabbing him.
GPD officers arrived on scene and the victim pointed to Goodwin as the person who stabbed him.
Following a short foot chase, the suspect was detained by a GPD officer, Forgey told Mainstreet in an email.
The victim was transported to UF Health Shands Hospital on trauma alert with life-threatening injuries. He remains in the Intensive Care Unit.
Officers recovered the weapon and located multiple videos of the incident, according to Forgey.
Goodwin is being held in the Alachua County Jail.
Twenty-one years old. So young. And now he’ll have this on his record for the rest of his life. Some people’s prefrontal cortex never does mature.
Partly true.
Behavior is also recall training.
Sports, military,religion,kindness.
These so young?
No
Not young.
Lazy
Goodwin,b.a.e.
did a horrible act on a stranger….
Inmate numbers for now on…
Where the streets have no names!!!!
21 is not young.!!!
My point was not to defend or excuse Mr. Godwin. Far from it. What he did was horrible, unforgivable. I was attempting to point out how stupidly pointless it was and the consequence he will (deservedly) live with as a result.
Why did he do such a horrible thng?!? What was he thinking?!? Well, that’s the point: he probably was NOT thinking. In adolescents–and despite being 21, Godwin by all counts probably IS an adolescent–the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, planning, and risk assessment, is not yet fully developed. This results in a “mismatch” where the brain’s emotional centers, like the amygdala, are highly active while the rational prefrontal cortex is still maturing, making adolescents more prone to impulsive, risk-taking behaviors. Some of us really don’t mature mentally until our 40s.
That does NOT excuse Godwin’s reprehensible action. He could have and certainly should have controlled himself. But he didn’t. And the result is the senseless, undeserved death of one person and the ruin of the life of another.
By the way, from the perspective of having lived nearly 87 years, the age of 21 does seem very young to me.
A 1
A is for aggressive. Or attempted murder …
B 2
C 3
Prayers victim lives.