Miami-Dade man wanted a postal worker to open his box. He’s charged with attempted murder
The mail carrier walked up to Charlie Holley’s Florida City townhouse and tried to leave a small box addressed to “Whitey white.”
She’d been there before to deliver other mail addressed the same way, investigators say. But this time was different.
The carrier, whom authorities have not identified, saw Holley standing on the second floor balcony pointing a rifle at her and yelling at her to open the package, according to a criminal indictment filed earlier this month.
Holley — a convicted felon who according to the Florida Department of Corrections goes by several aliases including Whiteboy — then shot at her mail truck as she drove away in the Tower View Villas community, the United States Postal Inspection Service said.
Holley, 40, who is being held Monday at FDC Miami, is facing federal charges including attempted murder of an employee of the United States.
According to investigators, the mail carrier was on her daily route in the 600 block of Northwest Sixth Street at around 1 p.m. when she spotted Holley in the second floor front window.
Witnesses later told investigators that Holley had been seen earlier in the day pointing the rifle at neighbors, according to the complaint.
After seeing the gun and leaving the package, the mail carrier quickly returned to her truck and drove away. She got about 20 feet from the home and heard a thud, investigators said. The thud turned into being a bullet to the back of the truck, investigators said shortly after the shooting. The mail carrier, who was not injured, immediately called 911.
Shortly after the shooting, Florida City police — with the help of Miami-Dade police — took Holley into custody.
Investigators, armed with a search warrant, later found a rifle with a magazine with five live rounds, two additional loaded magazines and a loose round of ammunition. Also found, according to the complaint: a spent casing in a room that has a glass sliding door that faces the direction of where the postal worker’s truck was and a shirt that had the word “Whitey” printed on it.
Holley, 40, has a lengthy arrest record, but as for convictions and prison, he’s done only two stints in Florida prisons, according to online records.
The second time, originally charged in 2014 with one count of attempted second degree murder, two counts of aggravated battery against a pregnant woman, armed burglary with assault and possession of a firearm by a felon, Holley ended up doing time only on the firearm charge. One of the aggravated battery counts wasn’t prosecuted, and the other charges were dropped. By the time the case was finished; it was March 2017 and Holley had been in county jail since July 2014. He got three years for the firearm charge, but with his county jail time counted, spent only three months in prison.
A 2003 conviction for selling a controlled substance within 1,000 feet of a religious building earned Holley six months and 23 days in prison. In 1999, Holley got sentenced to two years of probation after a grand theft auto conviction.
