On September 20, 1986, the **45-year-old male victim Cecil Branch** was discovered face-down on the floor of his Miami-Dade-County home. He had been bound and gagged with strips torn from bed-sheets, stabbed at least 25 times, and one ear had been severed. Investigators quickly lifted a latent fingerprint from the doorframe—later matched to former NFL defensive end **Robert Rozier**, then a member of the Nation of Yahweh religious sect.
Earlier the same day, the **45-year-old male victim** had reportedly shoved a female Yahweh follower who was canvassing his neighborhood for donations. Witnesses said the woman and two companions shouted “Yahweh! Yahweh!” while jotting down Branch’s license-plate number. According to Rozier’s later statement, sect members interpreted the altercation as an insult that required “retribution,” and he returned to the residence where the fatal assault on the *45-year-old male* was carried out.
The homicide occurred amid a wider campaign of violence orchestrated by sect leader **Yahweh ben Yahweh**. Between April and October 1986, Mitchell allegedly dispatched “death angels” to murder dissidents and random white victims; the *45-year-old male victim* was listed by federal prosecutors as Racketeering Act 14 in a later RICO indictment.
**Arrests and early proceedings**
* **Robert Rozier** was arrested shortly after the killing and, in 1988, cut a plea deal: 22 years in prison and entry into the federal witness-protection program in exchange for testimony about four murders, including that of the *45-year-old male victim*.
* On November 7 1990, the FBI simultaneously raided Yahweh properties in Florida, Louisiana, Georgia and the Carolinas, arresting Mitchell and more than a dozen followers on racketeering charges that encompassed the slaying of Cecil Branch.
**State murder trial**
After Mitchell’s 1992 federal RICO conviction, Florida prosecutors filed a separate first-degree–murder case that named **Yahweh ben Yahweh and three lieutenants** as co-defendants in the death of the *45-year-old male victim*. Rozier—whose fingerprint placed him at the crime scene—was their star witness; prosecutors sought the death penalty for Mitchell.
**Outcome**
On December 17 1992 a Miami jury **acquitted Yahweh ben Yahweh and the three followers** of murdering the *45-year-old male victim*. Mitchell returned to federal custody to serve the balance of his 18-year RICO sentence; Rozier, already sentenced on his plea, later violated parole in California and was imprisoned under that state’s “three-strikes” law.
No other suspects have ever been charged in the stabbing of the **45-year-old male victim Cecil Branch**, and—despite the brutality of the attack—the case remains historically tied to the broader pattern of Nation of Yahweh violence rather than to a standalone motive.
