#How the millionaire CrossFit co-founder fell in love with an accused murderer
“#How the millionaire CrossFit co-founder fell in love with an accused murderer”
With four children, ages 11 to 14, the newly formed family goes bananas for celebrations.
“We jumped on Christmas early this year,” said Tucker, 49, who married the CrossFit co-founder in an offbeat Day of the Dead-themed ceremony on their front lawn in June. “Last Christmas, we spent days doing nothing but wrapping presents, so I’ve been getting ready since the start of October.”
Tucker does most of the cooking, ordering groceries in bulk to feed his wife and stepchildren — and the inevitable neighborhood drop-ins. Homemade Swedish meatballs, chili and fish nachos were recent dinnertime hits with their super-sporty kids.
Since the pandemic, Jenai has been homeschooling her children with a few neighborhood kids. They’re amazed by the family’s collection of five exotic parrots (including Applesauce, a scarlet macaw with a mouth like Tony Soprano), four dogs, a cat, a guinea pig, a bearded dragon, two snakes, a rat and a leopard gecko.
Jenai and Tucker get up around 5 a.m. to get a jumpstart on the demands of full-time parenting. In their spare moments, they’ve remodeled the family room and kitchen, bickered over the cabinets and cleaned out the overflowing garage.
“It’s been wonderful having Ty in the house,” said Jenai, 49. “He and I are so similar. It’s been really fun collaborating.”
But twice a day, at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m., the “Leave it to Beaver” routine gets a reality check. Every 12 hours, Tucker stops whatever he is doing, goes into the bedroom and charges the ankle monitor that keeps him under house arrest.
“I can go up to the sidewalk, but if I leave the radius without getting approval they’d take me back to jail,” said Tucker, who is awaiting trial in a highly publicized murder case in Florida. “Not only would I go back to jail, but Lauren would lose the house. She used it as collateral for my $2 million bond.”
Gossip travels fast in tight-knit suburban communities — faster when a tatted-up, purple-haired body builder like Jenai moves in with a menagerie of exotic animals and a brood of budding jujitsu masters. When that circus parades into town led by a ripped-from-the-headlines murder case, the buzz reaches terminal velocity.
“When I first came home in November, the whole neighborhood was skeptical of me,” said Tucker, who was arrested three years ago this month with two other men for allegedly stabbing a man to death in Key West in a robbery gone wrong.
The victim was Mathew Bonnett, a local eccentric known for riding a unicycle and allowing a crack dealer to live under a tarp on his property. Tucker, who claims to have been sleeping in a warehouse at the time of the murder, didn’t have a convincing alibi and was fingered for the murder by one of his co-defendants.
“We caused a little bit of a stir,” Tucker said. “One of our neighbors came up to our yard and said, ‘I know who you are. I read about you in the paper.’ It was just something about how he said it. It was the first time a stranger had approached me about any of this.”
Tucker’s case, known as the “Tree House Murder” — a reference to the stilt-style death house — received national attention after investigations revealed that both the local sheriff’s office and prosecutors bungled efforts to put Tucker behind bars for life.
Monroe County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Penny Phelps was fired last year for instructing a deputy to act like a “neo-Nazi” and put pressure on an African-American suspect who was later arrested with Tucker and is a co-defendant. Assistant State Attorney Colleen Dunne, who allegedly lied to a judge about the fact that a witness to Tucker’s case was actually a police informant, stepped down from her position after purported misconduct in another murder case. Last year, an internal affairs investigation shared with The Post found that hundreds of pieces of evidence and audio/video recordings were mishandled by detectives in Tucker’s case.
Through the confusion, Tucker has maintained his innocence. He believes that the corrupt sheriff’s office is framing him for the murder because he was homeless at the time and apparently without resources to prove his innocence.
If that wasn’t enough to whet the whistle of any true-crime junkie, Jenai’s stranger-than-fiction romance with Tucker fascinated onlookers. Jenai hadn’t laid eyes on Tucker since they were teenagers in Philadelphia in the late ’80s and their lives were worlds apart. The fitness lifestyle boom of the 2000s made Jenai a multimillionaire, while Tucker became a drifter, working as a cook in state after state.
With ex-husband Greg Glassman, Jenai grew CrossFit from a few high-intensity gyms to one of the most popular fitness brands in the world, worth an estimated $4 billion. The couple’s messy, much-publicized divorce in 2013 — she sold her half of the company at the time for $20 million — culminated in a disaster for the brand earlier this year, when Glassman was forced to sell the company after racist tweets and a #MeToo scandal. (Glassman denied allegations of sexual harassment.)
Jenai was “single and loving it” when she first learned via Facebook that Tucker had been arrested. She wasn’t looking for love or to “pick up someone else’s dirty socks.” But she admits to crushing on Tucker as a teen.
“I quickly contacted Ty,” Jenai said. “He was shocked. He said, ‘I knew one of my friends would come looking for me, but not in a million years did I think it would be you.’ ”
Jenai discovered that after months in jail, Tucker still didn’t have an attorney and was in desperate need of help.
“It felt like something shady was going on,” said Jenai, who began working with attorneys and investigators to learn more about the case. “And sure enough, the more I looked into the case, the shadier it got.”
Jenai was initially skeptical of Tucker but felt that he deserved a fair shake, regardless of guilt. Injustice, she said, doesn’t sit easily with her.
“My mom was very politically active,” she said. “She even took me out of school to go to the hearings for MOVE after their house was bombed by the cops.”
Jenai was 14 when the Philadelphia police used a helicopter to drop a bomb on a townhouse occupied by the black liberation group in 1985. The blast killed six MOVE members, five children and destroyed 65 houses in the area.
“We actually became friends with the organization because we would see them in court,” Jenai said. “The city was trying to charge Ramona Africa [one of two survivors of the bombing], but to us she looked like a victim. They bombed her family. Growing up in Philadelphia the cops were corrupt. It was a known thing. I would watch what happened in court and then I would go home and watch it on the news. It would be reported completely different. I had all of these first-hand experiences. It gave me a passion for seeking the truth and fighting abuse of power.”
Months of research and a mountain of ethics violations convinced Jenai of Tucker’s innocence, and during regular calls and video-chat sessions an unorthodox romance bloomed. Soon they were “giggling like teenagers” and speaking daily. Their relationship got so steamy that Jenai was banned from video-chatting with a prisoner for 100 years after repeatedly showing her breasts on camera. Tucker said he was given two months in solitary as punishment for the peepshow.
“The thing I couldn’t get out of my head with Ty was, ‘What if this happened to me?’ ” Jenai said. “I thought, ‘We grew up in the same neighborhood. It could happen to me. What if somebody framed me for murder and nobody was there to help.’ I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I had the potential to help and didn’t.”
She’s so committed to her ideals that in 2011 she commissioned a tattoo to cover the majority of her right arm that is “apropos AF,” she said. “It’s an eagle with roses, a shield and the words ‘Liberty and Justice for All.’ ”
Jenai estimates that she has spent in excess of $1 million fighting to prove her husband’s innocence. Her deep pockets upset the balance of power in the case and drew the ire of Florida prosecutors, who initially tried to stop Jenai and Tucker from marrying, according to a complaint they filed with the Florida Bar Association. The couple said that they are now so confident in Tucker’s case that they will soon push for a trial date.
“We are waiting on some really pivotal depositions,” said Tucker. “But if we declared ready for trial today, there is no way the prosecution could be ready. They don’t have a case.”
The prosecution, meanwhile, maintains that Tucker actually confessed to the murder to a police informant posing as a fellow inmate shortly after he was arrested.
“It upset [the informant] the way Mr. Tucker talked about the murder, that he had zero remorse or guilt,” Detective Matthew Pitcher of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office told the Miami Herald.
The ongoing murder case, the achingly long hours of legal research, the prolonged house arrest and the knowledge that soon Tucker could be convicted of murder and ripped away from his new family, all weigh like a nightmare, the couple said.
“There is so much at stake,” said Jenai. “It’s so scary because whether you are innocent or not, that doesn’t matter to them.”
Tucker said he still struggles psychologically and emotionally with his time in jail and nearly four months in solitary confinement. When he first arrived in Portland, he rarely left the bedroom, living in a self-imposed prison cell because he hadn’t mentally recovered from his experience in lockup. He’s starting therapy to deal with the stress and anger.
For now, the couple is trying to keep the clouds at bay and there’s reason to be hopeful. Tucker’s case had a break in September when Paula Belmonte, the former crack dealer and sole surviving victim of the attack, stated that Tucker was not at the scene of the crime in a deposition cited in court documents shared with The Post.
Even the neighbors have warmed up to them, Tucker said.
“Now they shake my hand and say they’re happy I’m their neighbor,” said Tucker. “So it’s all good.”
Tucker is even preparing to celebrate his new life and epic love story with a tattoo.
“I’m going to do the old-school thing and get Lauren’s lips tattooed on my hip,” he said. “I’d like to get a little bit of Lauren’s blood and have it mixed with the ink, because when I said, ‘till death do us part,’ I meant it.”
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