A Florida teenager and her friends brutally murdered her ex-boyfriend after a twisted revenge plot that saw them stuff him into a sleeping bag and set him on fire . Seath Jackson was just 15 years old when his ex-girlfriend Amber Wright lured him to his death after plotting to kill him with her friends. Jackson and Wright had been dating for three months when they split in March 2011 as he accused her of cheating with 18-year-old Michael Bargo.
The breakdown of the relationship was made worse by their drug usage and attempts at making one another jealous as they played out the drama via their Facebook profiles. Bargo began to intensely hate Jackson and in April was overheard by Jackson's mother telling him at their home “I have a bullet with your name on it.”
Bargo and his friend Kyle Hooper, 16, had challenged Jackson and a friend to come to their mutual friend Charlie Ely's home - a rural trailer in Summerfield, Florida - for a fight. Upon approaching the residence Jackson and his friend heard a gunshot and fled the scene. Bargo - who had a .22 caliber Heritage revolver inside Ely’s home - later said he had shot at the pair “to scare them off a little bit.”
On April 17, 2011, Bargo told Hooper that he wanted to kill Jackson and they began plotting his death along with their co-conspirators, Amber Wright, 15, Justin Soto 20, and Charlie Ely, 18. Bargo asked Wright to get Jackson to come to Ely's home that night where all three men lived at the time and Wright would regularly stay over.
Wright texted Jackson saying she wanted to “work things out” and asking him to meet her there secretly. Jackson initially sensed danger and replied to her saying “Amber if you have me jumped I will never give you the time of day.” But she reassured him replying “I could never do that to you,” she said. “I just want me and you back.”
When he arrived at the trailer Hooper struck Jackson on the head with a wooden object and the girls hid in a bedroom. Bargo then began firing the .22 caliber wounding Jackson. Despite his injuries Jackson made his way outside where Soto tackled him down and Bargo shot him again.
Bargo, Soto and Hopper subsequently carried Jackson into the house and placed him in the bathtub. Bargo repeatedly fired at Jackson as well as beating him before finally ending his life by shooting him in the face. Bargo and Soto then wrapped his body in a sleeping bag before they threw him into a fire pit to burn his body.
Bargo and Wright then went to bed, as Hooper kept watch over the burning body until the early hours. The following morning on April 18 Wright's mother's ex-boyfriend James Havens turned up to help the group dispose of the evidence, shoveling the remains from the fire pit into buckets and driving Bargo and Soto to a quarry in Ocala where they sunk Jackson's remains into the water.
Later that day when a news report aired of Jackson's disappearance Hooper confessed what had happened to his mother. During police interviews Wright, Hooper and Ely all pretended they were shocked that Bargo had wanted Jackson dead. However, after detectives placed them in a holding cell together they discussed the murder and Hooper said Jackson deserved to die.
Bargo meanwhile had fled the town after Havens drove him to Starke, Florida, where he stayed with an out-of-town girlfriend's family. While he was there he made no attempt to hide what he had done and instead described in graphic detail how he had murdered Jackson.
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He told four separate family members and a neighbor every detail including how he broke Jackson's knees to fit his body into the sleeping bag. He was arrested the following day and having obtained a search warrant investigators found the murder weapon and ammunition at Ely’s trailer, as well as burnt human remains in the fire pit.
A diving team then found two buckets weighed down with cinder blocks in the Ocala quarry after a five-gallon bucket with a plastic bag was found floating in the water. While they were juveniles at the time, prosecutors tried each of Seath Jackson’s killers separately as adults.
In June 2012, each of the defendants received a life sentence for Jackson’s murder, with the exception of Havens who pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact in 2018. Charlie Ely was released in 2020 after nine years in prison after pleading to a lesser charge.
Michael Bargo became Florida’s youngest inmate on death row for his role as the main instigator in the killing, and in 2021 the Supreme Court upheld his sentence.
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