JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Police have arrested a man and a woman on charges connected to the beating death of a 37-year-old man Saturday night at the Lighthouse Bay Apartments on Atlantic Boulevard.
Merlin Williams Jr., 32, and Ashley Jerrell, 23, are charged with murder.
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Police said the pair went to Isaac Siliman's apartment to rob him. Jarrell allegedly pepper-sprayed the victim while Williams tried to use a Taser gun on him.
Detectives said Jerrell admitted she struck Siliman several times in the head with a hammer before they took his credit cards.
Siliman's brother, Paul Oyet, called police when he could not contact him, and police discovered the body late Saturday.
Oyet said Siliman had just become a U.S. citizen.
"If I knew my brother was a bad man I wouldn't mind," Oyet said. "But I knew my brother was a good man, a strong man."
Siliman's family and friends are all members of the Lost Boys of Sudan. They are refugees who fled the civil war in their home country.
Siliman was one of them. His brother said he was in shock for the first 24 hours, and now he's feeling the loss.
"I saw the body," Oyet said. "It was painful. But today, the truth is I love him."
Siliman had a wife and two children still in Africa, one a baby boy he never met.
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They were all preparing to move to the U.S. from Africa to be with him. Now that won't happen.
"He would work day and night for months straight, sometimes double shift, just to maintain his family over there, maintain himself here," Siliman's friend Paul Otim said.
The group of immigrants has lost a close friend.
"This is the first time we've heard of something like this happening," Otim said. "I don't know if it was a fight or something like that. It's something we don't know."