Gainesville Crime Victim Speaks Out After SAO8 Drops Registered Nurse’s Sex Offense Case

In February 2025, 31-year-0ld Brandon Lee Mulling, a registered nurse at UF Health and Shands, was arrested at the University of Florida (UF) campus after UF police pressed charges against him for reportedly raping a 21-year-old woman he met on Bumble.

Prosecutors with the Eighth Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office (SAO8) never formally filed rape charges and dropped the case in June 2025.

In November 2025, SAO8 Assistant State Attorney Dean Zipes filed formal charges against Mulling for one count of indecent exposure after Mulling reportedly masturbated to his neighbor from his balcony on two occasions.

Gainesville Police Department officers did not arrest Mulling, and he was instead issued a summons.

Despite previously filing formal charges, Zipes dropped the case on April 21, 2026.

After SAO8 dropped her case, the victim in the indecent exposure case gave an interview with GnvInfo. “I did everything that I was supposed to do,” she said. “I called the police, I reported it, I did all of these things, because I didn't want him to go on about his life without consequences of his actions, and also, I felt like I would be doing the wrong thing by not doing that for potentially other victims of his. 
To see that they aren't gonna go through with the charges, it's upsetting… I worry that other women will be victimized by him…”

The victim said the responding officer was sympathetic and that GPD attempted to make contact with Mulling but were unsuccessful. However, she indicated the department could’ve been more discreet when they took her statement. 

“It was difficult because at that moment, it's 10 o'clock at night… They’re like, ‘We need you to come down to do the lineup.’” she described. “I was petrified to even leave my apartment… They're parked right in front of the apartment complex in the parking lot… Anyone walking around can see that they're there and see that I'm standing there… Which means [Mulling] easily could [see me] as well. When I asked the officer… ‘Is he gonna get arrested, or what’s happening?’ He pretty much told me no, like they couldn’t do anything. I kind of lost it because I felt unsafe, and all he gave me was like victim resources and stuff…” 

“I just felt like eventually there’s gonna be justice for this and it makes me upset that he can’t be held accountable for what he did to me,” she said. “And also the other young woman that was victimized by him. And God knows how many others that never reported it.”

Regarding the notification she received from SAO8, the victim said, “For them saying they weren’t able to ‘overcome the defendant’s theory…’ Their theory is probably that I’m making this up. That they can’t prove that beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, [it shows] you as the State Attorney's Office, [you] don’t want to put money into this prosecution and trial because you think you’re not gonna win it… Because you think you're not gonna win it, you're not gonna waste money and resources on it. Because why would you do that?"

“I've never met him before. 
This isn't something that one just makes up,” the victim said. “Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that a man has exposed their genitalia to me in public… This time, it happens in the privacy of my own room. It felt super violating.” 

Court Hearings:

Mulling's indecent exposure case never had a day in court. Judge Susan Miller-Jones repeatedly granted motions for a continuance from Mulling's defense. However, Mulling did have hearings for his first appearance and pretrial detention in his prior case.

At his first appearance, despite his attorney urging him to not say anything, Mulling acknowledged his position as a registered nurse in open court, saying he's cared for vulnerable populations for over five years.

Mulling's first appearance video reveals he has a criminal history out of Massachusetts for shoplifting, something unknown, and possibly a domestic abuse case in 2014.

Later on at his pretrial detention hearing, Mulling's attorney acknowledged that Mulling was terminated from his nursing position and said, "The Board of Nursing has taken action against his license." However, Florida Department of Health records show that Mulling retains an active registered nursing license.

Full Interview: 

Q: How would you describe how that made you feel, [getting the email about the dropped case], to someone who hasn't been through something like this before? 

A: I've felt pretty detached from it all, to be honest with you, just because it's not like your typical, sexual assault case in terms of I was never touched. 
It was more… I was exposed to something that I didn't want to see. So it makes it easier to become a little bit more detached from it. But in terms of the email this morning—My first instant reaction was just, like, anger… I've been keeping up with what's going on with the case, and I kept seeing [pretrial conferences] being postponed… It just kept happening and happening, and so I just didn't know when it was ever gonna actually happen…

I did everything that I was supposed to do. I called the police, I reported it, I did all of these things, because I didn't want him to go on about his life without consequences of his actions, and also, I felt like I would be doing the wrong thing by not doing that for potentially other victims of his. 
To see that they aren't gonna go through with the charges, it's upsetting… I worry that other women will be victimized by him, and he is in a position of authority with being a registered nurse… Taking care of people when they're at their lowest and most vulnerable... It makes me think... If he's able to do that to someone he doesn't know? What is he capable of doing to someone that he's been maybe taking care of that doesn't have the capacity to express ‘No’? 

Q: I don’t know if you would know this–if he is employed anywhere as a nurse or if he ever got his job back at UF Health?

A: I know that he moved 
after that whole incident with me… He wasn't going to renew his lease anyways, but then I guess he hadn't been paying... 
He missed a month or two of rent during… which I would assume was probably because he lost his job, and probably couldn't afford to live in the complex anymore… From public records, I saw that they had issued him the charges, and he had a new home address, which seemed like it was in Sarasota, which I think he's originally from there. 
So it seems like he moved back home… I know he was an LPN when he was at Shands. 

I can’t figure out where he would be working. 

Q:  The only place I could think to look is—you can do a request to get the court hearing videos… A lot of times the judge will ask if you're working or something like that. 

That's the thing… I don't even think they ever had a pretrial conference… They didn't have that… It just kept getting rescheduled…

I found an Instagram post a woman posted… I'm not sure how credible she is, but she had put in her caption that the previous rape charge was dropped… because the police were dragging their feet to submit evidence information. She had written in her comment that she thinks that they were dragging their feet on purpose because his paternal grandfather is a cop…

When this happened to me, and then I eventually found out what his name was, and I only found out after the police report was given to me, two to three days after the incident… I was in my apartment, I was scared so scared to leave. 
Because I was scared that I was gonna run into him. 

Q:Yeah, he's like, your neighbor, practically. 

A: Right, and so, I was so scared to leave or anything, so then that morning, when I got emailed the police report, and saw that they put his name, and then that's when I did the Google search. And then I found out about his previous charge [from] a couple months before… I was like, ‘You've got to be kidding me.’ 

Q: Yeah, of all people. 

A: Yeah, so then, of course, I just felt even more unsafe, because I was like, ‘If he's capable of doing that to a girl, then he just did this to me…’ In my mind, I'm thinking of the worst…

Q: With your case, on the police report, I noticed it says ‘arrest report,’ but on the court records, it says he was issued a summons. Do you know if GPD conducted a formal arrest? 


A: I don't believe so. I think they were trying. Because when the officer responded to my call, which, by the way, I called, I think it happened, like, 2 o'clock in the afternoon. No one responded to my call until 6:00 [or] 7:00 p.m… Which I understand that there's actual emergencies…

Q: That is an emergency. 
It's a sexual offense case…

A: It was to the point that I was here so long that my father drove up here from Tampa, literally put up protective blinds for me… before the police ever even showed up. 
That's how long it took… When they finally came, the officer came up to my apartment, he interviewed me… That's when I gave the statement… He saw my balcony, how you could see how it overlays on top of my window, how you could kind of see into the corner of my room... I then asked him, ‘Are you gonna go up there and talk to him, can I get an update after you do that?’ He said, ‘Yes, I can give you a call after I go up there,’ and he said he had went up there, and he didn't answer the door, but he looked through the peephole, and he saw that he was in there. He just refused to open the door, which, of course, why would he open the door? 
Like, obviously, at that time, I didn't understand why he wouldn't. If he truly didn't think he was guilty, he would have opened the door. But obviously, he knows that something's going on, whether it be related to the incident that he had just done with me, or whether it be the incident with the other girl… 

The only way that the officer was even able to get some sort of information is because a neighbor had heard, I guess, him knocking and announcing himself, and she came out, and then he was able to ask her questions about him, if she knew who he was… she ended up admitting… ‘We exchanged numbers when we were at the apartment gym…’ That was the only way they were able to kind of verify who he was… following a couple days, they were in contact with the apartment complex, just to verify if that was the guy, if they knew who he was… 

The property manager let me know… since he wasn't opening the door, and they thought he was still in town, they were trying to set up where the apartment complex was gonna call him and say, ‘Hey, you have some mail here that we need you to bring,’ and they were gonna have cops there waiting… But he never even answered the phone when the apartment called him… 

I think a couple days after… 
It was two or three o'clock in the morning, and I just heard furniture moving above me, and he lived right above me. It was the middle of the night. 
’Oh, he's leaving’ [I think]. He is doing this in the middle of the night, so that no one can see him. He is gone. 

Q: So he was in the same complex as you and at the, an apartment above you? 

A: Yes. 

Q: Okay. 
In my head, I was thinking it was like a neighboring complex that was kind of overlooking your complex. That makes it even scarier to realize that he's right there. 

A: It's hard to kind of picture it in the police report if you can't really see it, but pretty much, in our apartment complex, all of the apartments are stacked up on top of each other and balconies. 
So they're all on top of each other. But the bedrooms are off to the side of the balcony. If I'm standing on the corner of my balcony, and I lean down… 
I can technically see into the neighbor below's window. And at the time, I had my blinds pointed down because I didn't want people below me looking into my apartment. But then I didn't think that I would have to worry about him above me. 
Basically having direct access to me... It's not that it happened once, it happened twice…

Q: What was your impression on GPD's investigation into him? 

A: I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, because they were doing the best they could… The officer was really nice. He was younger. I could tell he was pretty sympathetic with what I was going through. He ended up, after he left, when he interviewed me, he had called me—three hours later, and he was like, Can you come down again to try to pick him out from a lineup? I was like... 
’I can try...’ 

I went down to do the lineup, they had another officer conducting it… The officer working my case wasn't allowed to do it because it's like a conflict of interest… 

When they showed me the lineup, of course, you had to sign a paper saying, ‘I understand that these pictures might not be current, they may have facial hair in photos, and now they don't.’ That sort of thing. When they gave me the photos it was literally just a lineup of 10 black men, and the photos were in black and white… It was honestly kind of hard to really determine which one was him just because I had only seen his face for a split second when he crouched out and was looking at me, and then, of course, I got scared and moved away. 
It's really hard to identify someone that you literally saw for two seconds…

I ended up finding out… when I got the police report that was sent to me like two days later, that I didn't pick him out of the lineup correctly. I had picked another guy. 
At first, I thought that was really gonna hinder the case a little bit, but when I had gone to the [state] attorney's office, he made it seem like it wasn't a big deal, that I hadn't picked him out of a lineup… Just because of my statement and all the information I gave… It was difficult because at that moment, it's 10 o'clock at night… They’re like, ‘We need you to come down to do the lineup.’ I was petrified to even leave my apartment. I'm frantically running to the elevator, getting on the elevator, running down, and they're parked right in front of the apartment complex in the parking lot… Anyone walking around can see that they're there and see that I'm standing there… Which means [Mulling] easily could [see me] as well. When I asked the officer… ‘Is he gonna get arrested, or what’s happening?’ He pretty much told me no, like they couldn’t do anything. I kind of lost it because I felt unsafe, and all he gave me was like victim resources and stuff… 

My husband is active duty military, so he does not live near me. At the time, he was in San Diego, and I was here. Of course, he's distraught because he can't be here with me and this is happening to me.  I tell him they're not arresting him… and my husband legit went ballistic [and] called the officer himself… 

From what my husband told me, the officer was very apologetic and explained to him [that] he didn’t answer the door… they didn't have anything to enter… they can't really force him to come out… He tried to reassure my husband that he was still gonna go ahead and press charges against him… which he did abide by his word, he did submit all this evidence… It did get picked up by the [State] Attorney’s Office… I think [the officer] was doing the best with what he had but in terms of the justice system as a whole, it’s just sad that this happens to women if they don’t have enough evidence to support what happened to them… 

Q: As this case was ongoing did you have any communication with any specific prosecutors that would be consistent or was it pretty rare that you were talking to an attorney? 

A: I never got contacted by an attorney… The only time was when I was issued the summons that I had to appear on this day to give my statement to the attorney. 
That is the only time I ever talked to the attorney working my case. 

Q: Prior to them dropping it, did you have faith they would take the case to trial or did you get the impression the state was unmotivated?

A: When I had spoken to Dean Zipes, the attorney that was working on it, he seemed pretty adamant that he was gonna try to do as much as he could… He told me he was gonna give him a plea deal… It was barely anything… It was like 30 days in jail and then he’d be on probation for a year [with] mandatory psychiatry appointments. If he didn’t abide by the rules set in place by his psychiatrist within the first year then he could be found to be in violation of his probation, which could put him back in [jail] longer… 

I [asked] him, ‘He doesn't live here, how are you gonna find him?’ 
And [he] kind of was like, ‘Well, either we find out his new address, or… he gets stopped for a traffic stop, and it pulls up on the thing that he's been charged with this… So I was like ‘this could go on for years?’ and he was like ‘Yeah.’ He said he didn’t think he’d plead not guilty… [because] no jury would believe him over me. Especially because of his prior charge that got dropped…

All the rescheduling… it seemed like it was more of his attorney rescheduling them, because maybe he couldn't appear at that time, cause he doesn't live here anymore. I never really got the impression that they weren't gonna continue forward with the case. I never got any notification until, literally yesterday [April 21] morning, when I got the email, and then I went on the [court] record[s]... and it said, Instead of my case being open, it was closed. 

Q: Did that feel like a betrayal sort of?

A: Absolutely... this has been going on for so long… I just felt like eventually there’s gonna be justice for this and it makes me upset that he can’t be held accountable to what he did to me, and also the other young woman that was victimized by him. And God knows how many others that never reported it…

Q: Would you have preferred if they called you and had a conversation about it, or do you think the email was okay or appropriate? 

A: I mean, I understand that they have thousands of cases, I'm sure that they go through thousands of victims of crimes… Just me being a younger female, and having something like this happen... It feels like it would have been more appropriate to have given me a call… There was no communication after I met with him to give my statement. No one from his office ever reached out to me… 

Just to say you have ‘no information,’ like, you do have information. I am the information, I am the victim of a crime. I was cooperative… It worries me that he's still able to practice as a nurse, he's looking over patients that are in their most vulnerable state. It kills me to think that he is in that position that he could take advantage of someone else… 

For them saying they weren’t able to ‘overcome the defendant’s theory…’ Their theory is probably that I’m making this up. That they can’t prove that beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, [it shows] you as the State Attorney's Office [you] don’t want to put money into this prosecution and trial because you think you’re not gonna win it… Because you think you're not gonna win it, you're not gonna waste money and resources on it. Because why would you do that?

Q: Do you think they would have secured a conviction if that took it to trial? 

A: I think so… I've never been in trouble ever. I’m an outstanding student. 
I'm a graduate student. I'm going into healthcare… I've never met him before. 
This isn't something that one just makes up… Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that a man has exposed their genitalia to me in public… This time, it happens in the privacy of my own room. It felt super violating… 

The time before I [didn’t] call the police or anything because I was just so petrified that I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, but when you're in your own home, you never think that something like that is gonna happen…

He was doing it on his balcony, and we faced other apartments, and you can kind of see those balconies from the street. God forbid, a child was out there or walking around. That’s horrible. You have to be a sick minded individual to be doing that. 

Q: If there's someone who reads this article, who also reported sexual assault, and were also failed by the system, what would you want to say to them about how to move forward? 

A: I think it's important for women to still report these things. Even though the system is failed, but, I still think, just for you, in your mind, and for you to have a clear conscience, like, for me… I'm gonna report this because it's not about me in this moment. It's about others. 
It's about other women that could potentially be a future victim of his. I want to make sure that this is on his record, and people are aware of what kind of person he is… That’s why I reached out to you, because I need someone to know that this is not okay. I still encourage women to speak out about it… The system may not believe you, but you know it happened. Just try your best to continue to be proactive about it…