Detectives said the suspect targeted the gas station clerk, while federal and local officials gave conflicting accounts of his immigration status.
FORT MYERS, Fla. — A man charged after a gas station clerk was fatally attacked with a hammer in broad daylight last week appeared in court Wednesday as detectives described a targeted killing that has grown into a wider dispute over motive, immigration status and what happens next.
The case has drawn unusual attention because it joins a brutal street-level homicide with a fast-moving policy fight. Fort Myers police have said Rolbert Joachin, 40, was arrested after the April 3 killing of Nilufa Easmin, known to friends and co-workers as Yasmin, outside a Chevron station and convenience store on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Since then, local television coverage, court proceedings and statements relayed from the Department of Homeland Security have offered different public accounts of whether Joachin was in the country legally when he was charged. As of Wednesday, he remained jailed without bond while the homicide case moved forward.
The public timeline begins early Thursday morning, April 3, outside the gas station at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Fort Myers police and local news outlets said surveillance video showed a man later identified as Joachin smashing a vehicle windshield in the parking lot shortly after 7 a.m. Employees told reporters the vehicle belonged to Easmin, who was working as a clerk inside the store. When she came outside, the video showed the suspect approach and strike her with a hammer, according to police and local station reports. Easmin died from the attack, and police began a large search through nearby streets. Officers found Joachin later that day on Mango Street near Dunbar Park and took him into custody. Police Chief Jason Fields later said, “We were not going home until we found him,” describing a search that used aviation support, K-9 units and officers on the ground. By Friday, Joachin had made an initial court appearance, and a judge ordered that he be held without bond.
At Wednesday’s pretrial detention hearing, the case took on a sharper and more deliberate shape. Detective Laner Rodriguez testified, according to courtroom notes reported by Gulf Coast News, that Joachin told investigators he went to the station intending to kill a gas station clerk. Rodriguez said Joachin told detectives he wore the same clothes he had worn during an earlier visit so the clerk would recognize him, then smashed her car with a hammer so she would come outside. Rodriguez also said Joachin was advised of his Miranda rights in Creole and appeared to understand them, answering some questions in English. That testimony matters because it shifts the public picture from a chaotic street assault to what prosecutors appear to be treating as an intentional act directed at a particular victim. Even so, some important questions remain open. Authorities have not publicly laid out a full motive. Detectives also said Joachin is a suspect in another case they have been working on for months, but they did not identify that case in open court. Public records available Wednesday also did not answer whether Easmin and Joachin knew each other beyond the earlier reported encounter at the store.
The killing has also shaken a part of Fort Myers where many residents know the store and pass through the area every day. Gulf Coast News reported that three schools — Success Academy, Young Parent Education Program and James Stephens Elementary — were placed on lockdown during the search before the restriction was lifted. At the station, neighbors and regular customers described the violence as hard to process because it happened in daylight at a familiar stop. Andre Harris, a customer quoted by the station, said it was strange to realize that someone people recognized from behind the counter was gone in an instant. Community members in southwest Florida’s Bangladeshi community said Easmin was a mother of two teenage daughters and a quiet, kind worker whose death sent shock well beyond Fort Myers. M.D. Islam, speaking to Gulf Coast News at a memorial outside the station, said the sadness was being felt not only locally but by Bangladeshis elsewhere who saw the reports. Flowers and candles gathered near the storefront as co-workers and relatives asked for privacy and tried to explain a crime that, for now, still has no public motive beyond what investigators say the suspect told them after his arrest.
What happened before the attack may become one of the central questions as the prosecution advances. Some local and overseas reports, citing the store owner and witness accounts, have said Joachin came to the business two days earlier, tried to withdraw money from an ATM, then demanded cash from Easmin when the machine would not work. Those accounts say she told him the store did not control the ATM. That version has not yet been laid out in detail through formal court filings available Wednesday, but it may explain why detectives said Joachin wanted the clerk to recognize him when he returned. If prosecutors use that account later, it could help them argue planning rather than impulse. For now, though, the strongest publicly aired evidence remains the surveillance video described by police and reporters and Rodriguez’s testimony about Joachin’s statements after arrest. The distinction matters because the case is still in an early procedural phase, and not every detail now circulating publicly has been tested in court. What is firmly established is narrower: a clerk was killed outside the station, Joachin was arrested the same day, and detectives say he later described luring her outside by damaging her car.
The immigration issue has added another layer and, as of Wednesday, a contradictory one. On Tuesday, reporting based on information from the Department of Homeland Security said Joachin was a Haitian national who first entered the United States in August 2022, had been released into the country, later received Temporary Protected Status and had an immigration history that included a final order of removal. Those accounts also said ICE had placed a detainer on him. But at Wednesday’s detention hearing, Gulf Coast News reported that the State Attorney’s Office told the court Joachin was in the country legally under Temporary Protected Status and that no ICE hold had been placed on him. Those two public accounts cannot both be fully accurate as stated, and the difference is not minor. It affects how the case is described politically, whether federal immigration custody is waiting at the end of at the end of the criminal process and how much confidence the public can place in early agency statements. The broader backdrop is also unsettled: Haiti’s TPS designation has been tied up in litigation in 2026, with federal court action temporarily blocking termination and leaving the program’s current reach contested in public debate. In practical terms, that means the homicide prosecution is moving ahead while the suspect’s immigration status remains a separate question that federal and local authorities have not yet explained in a consistent way.
Legally, the homicide case itself is moving more clearly. Court docket records for the 20th Judicial Circuit showed Joachin scheduled for a pretrial detention hearing Wednesday morning in case number 26CF15131 before Judge Nicholas Thompson at the Lee Justice Center. Local coverage before and after that hearing said Joachin was being held without bond. Early reports on the arrest said he faced homicide and property-damage charges, while later national and tabloid stories used the language of murder and criminal mischief. Whatever wording appears in each report, the immediate result is the same: he is in custody and the case is transitioning from emergency response to prosecution. The next major steps are likely to include a formal review of charging documents, additional discovery centered on surveillance footage and witness statements, and any further hearings on detention, competency, admissibility of statements or trial scheduling. The state will also have to decide how much of the alleged confession and any prior contact at the store it intends to use as proof of intent. Defense lawyers, in turn, are likely to scrutinize the interrogation, the language assistance used after arrest and the public narrative that formed before a fuller court record existed.
For Easmin’s family and co-workers, the procedural questions are unfolding beside a much more immediate loss. Friends and community members have described her as a working mother who had built a life in Fort Myers after coming from Bangladesh. The memorial outside the station has become the visible center of that grief, with flowers, candles and hand-written messages left where customers normally stop for gas or coffee. The ordinary feel of the location has become part of the story: a clerk finishing morning work, a car in the lot, a familiar storefront, then an attack violent enough to lock down nearby schools and send police through surrounding blocks. That contrast helps explain why the case has traveled so quickly beyond local crime coverage into national politics. Yet the central fact has not changed. Before there was a policy argument, there was a woman killed outside her workplace and two daughters left behind. Everything that comes next — the detention fight, the evidence hearings, the immigration dispute and any later trial — will unfold around that loss.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Joachin remained jailed without bond in Lee County, and the public record showed the case had entered the pretrial stage. The next milestone is likely to be further court filings that clarify the exact charges, the prosecution’s evidence and whether federal immigration authorities formally step in.
Author note: Last updated April 8, 2026.