Parents of Jeannie Ashley Ohlman Say Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno Buried Their Daughter’s 2020 Death as an Accidental Overdose

Jeannie Ashley Ohlman (left) and Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno (right). Her parents have never accepted the accidental-overdose finding.

LEE COUNTY, FLORIDA — Jeannie Ashley Ohlman was 31 years old on July 3, 2020. She was pronounced dead at 8:58 a.m. in Fort Myers. The medical examiner called it an accident: methamphetamine and fentanyl. Her parents called it a homicide the sheriff did not want on an election-year ledger. Six years later the official finding has not moved, the boyfriend who was in the condo has not been charged in her death, and Carmine Marceno is still the sheriff.

Jeannie had been on the dean’s list. In the fall of 2018 she met Eric Alexander Crawford. Her parents opposed the relationship. They say she relapsed after she met him, that he accused her of cheating, and that she was afraid of him. On Thursday, June 25, 2020, she texted her father that she did not want to park in front of her unit because she thought her boyfriend was going to kill her. Friday evening, June 26, her father dropped off food, hugged her, and left. He did not pry.

The story that did not match the courtyard

Crawford told Detective Ryan McKinnon he came over the morning she died to fix a leaking sink trap. Carman, the retired neighbor across the courtyard whom Jeannie’s parents had asked to watch the place, said Crawford’s black Cadillac sat in the front handicap spot for three days and did not move. Jeannie’s older sister came by on July 2 with $60 Jeannie had said she needed. The security chain was on. She called Jeannie’s name. Nobody opened the door. She saw a shadow moving inside and left.

When Jeannie’s father arrived at 11:30 a.m. on July 3 he was kept out. Around 1:30 p.m., after the coroner’s office had taken the body, he was allowed in. There was no repair. There was a trash can under the trap. The coroner’s paperwork said the father identified the body at the condo. He did not. The condo had been marked a crime scene. He saw her at the open casket. He and her mother say they saw marks on her wrists as if she had been bound, and bruises on her face. They say she used heroin, not meth. They believe Crawford injected her. They buried her at Jacksonville Memory Gardens in Orange Park.

Crawford’s Lee County record, which this newsroom pulled from the clerk at the time, included a 2011 marijuana, drug-equipment, and felon-in-possession case, and a prior manslaughter conviction from 2010. The AEGIS Alliance published that docket because a man with a body in the house and a prior killing on the sheet is not a footnote. He is the first person a homicide detective interviews. Jeannie’s parents say McKinnon had not interviewed him and had not returned her phone.

A county that got safer on paper

The original question this article asked in October 2020 was not subtle. Marceno had been appointed in 2018. Lee County’s reported crime fell 18.9 percent in 2019. Nearby Collier County fell 1.3 percent. Statewide murder was up. Lee’s was down. The News-Press printed the tables. Jeannie’s father had already filed a complaint accusing the sheriff’s office of narcotics trafficking out of the Glades. The family believed an accidental-overdose stamp was cheaper, in an election year, than a murder with a felon boyfriend sitting in the courtyard.

Marceno won that election. He won again in 2024. His next race is 2028. The FBI closed a separate kickback investigation of the sheriff on November 17, 2025, without charges, after undercover recordings and a cash video involving former consultant Ken Romano. The Florida Commission on Ethics then opened its own file on the same gifts-and-cash allegations, and a second sealed ethics matter — a 2024 Justice Department whistleblower letter from former commander James Bogliole about an off-duty deputy driven home instead of booked — was set for a closed probable-cause hearing in Tallahassee on August 29, 2026. None of that reopened Jeannie’s case. None of it has to. A closed federal letter is not a homicide review.

The death of Jeannie Ashley Ohlman remains classified as accidental. Crawford has not been charged in it. The parents still have the text, the neighbor, the chain on the door, and the marks they say the coroner missed. The AEGIS Alliance is not a medical examiner. We are the newsroom that printed their file when the sheriff’s office wanted it quiet.

Related: the Trump-Hannity-Rick Scott roster around this sheriff, the Marceno corruption file, the Amira Fox forgery cover-up, the Enzo Vincenzi case, and more in Crime News and Police Accountability.