Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Monday once again set his sights on Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell, this time to demand she drop the case against a woman charged with killing a man in a road rage shooting or face possible “further intervention” from the state.
Worrell, who has been under increasing state scrutiny since winning back the office Gov. Ron DeSantis had removed her from a year earlier, responded that the case “is a matter for judicial determination, not partisan politics.”
At question is the case against Tina Allgeo, 48, who was indicted by a grand jury in February for murder and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon in the Dec. 2 killing of 42-year-old Mihail Tsvetkov.
Allgeo encountered Tsvetkov as they drove along East Colonial Drive near Primrose Avenue, east of downtown Orlando, as the man followed closely behind her. According to reports by the Orlando Police Department, the two quarreled after Tsvetkov struck Allego’s car and then struck her during an attempt to escape after she got out of her car to survey the damage to her rear bumper.
It further escalated when Allgeo side-swiped his car — accidentally, she told police in a written statement — as she followed him to get a closer look at his license plate. Video surveillance then showed Tsvetkov exit his car, open her driver’s side door and punch her repeatedly while trying to drag her out her vehicle before she shot him in the face.
Allgeo was arrested and later released on bond.
On Aug. 15, her lawyer, Mark O’Mara, filed a motion to dismiss the charges, arguing she followed Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law that allows people to defend themselves with deadly force without a duty to retreat. A hearing to decide whether to drop Allgeo’s case is scheduled for Oct. 30.
But now, Uthmeier has entered the fray.
“We’re calling on State Attorney Worrell — fix this, right this wrong. Here in the AG’s office, we will stand strong for people who rightly engage in self-defense,” Uthmeier said in a video posted to his X account. The demand was followed by a letter to her office, dated Monday, insisting “she should be immune from criminal prosecution” and noted that a conviction “may very likely require my office to admit plain error on appeal.”
It also came with a stern warning: “Your actions likely constitute a breach of your ethical obligations. And they may also constitute misfeasance, malfeasance, neglect of duty and incompetence. I strongly urge you to reconsider your prosecution of Allgeo. And my office will evaluate whether further intervention is warranted.”
It’s not clear how Allgeo’s case was brought to Uthmeier’s attention. O’Mara, famed for successfully representing George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, denied flagging the case to the attorney general but declined to comment further on the matter.
Two hours after Uthmeier’s remarks were posted online, Worrell issued a statement of her own saying she used her discretion as a prosecutor to bring the case to a grand jury, and that the decision as to whether “Stand Your Ground” applies to Allgeo is up to a judge.
“Prosecutors do not serve as extensions of the Governor or the Attorney General; we serve the people of our circuit in accordance with Florida law,” Worrell states. “The Attorney General’s attempts to intimidate or override independent prosecutorial judgment erode public trust in the impartial administration of justice.”
While the public spats between Uthmeier and Worrell have been a staple since Worrell was reelected as state attorney, Monday’s exchange was the first to see the attorney general openly threaten her removal.
His accusation that her decision to prosecute Allgeo is a breach of ethical obligations echoes the language used in 2023, when Gov. Ron DeSantis removed her following complaints by law enforcement leaders that she wasn’t aggressively pursuing convictions for certain crimes — including drug trafficking cases brought by the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office, which a Sentinel analysis found to be dubious.
That year, DeSantis replaced Worrell with Orange County Judge Andrew Bain, who returned the bench after losing to her in last year’s election. Concerns that the governor would remove her again, however, have haunted Worrell’s return to office beginning with a grand jury probe ahead of her inauguration, the circumstances surrounding which are now the subject of a lawsuit.
This year, Uthmeier has mainly attacked Worrell over a policy addressing cases in which suspects were not immediately arrested before sending prosecutors to assist her office in clearing a massive backlog. Last week, DeSantis took aim at her record of prosecuting accused fentanyl traffickers, to which she responded by citing 100 drug trafficking convictions her office obtained since January, with 29 being defendants accused of trafficking the notorious opioid.
Worrell has repeatedly brushed off fears of being removed from office again, telling reporters last week, “I am concerned with doing my job, the job that I was elected to do and I do it every single day.”
In a quarterly update in April, Worrell said road rage shootings, like the one for which Allgeo faces a murder charge, were a “great concern” being tackled by her administration. The murder conviction against Nicholas Carrasquillo, sentenced to 50 years in prison for a 2024 shooting that took place a mile away from where Tsvetkov was killed the same year, was cited as an example of her office’s dogged prosecution of such cases. When Allgeo was indicted, she said shootings “stemming from senseless disputes will not be tolerated.”
An analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for stricter gun laws, showed road rages have increased nearly every year between 2018 and 2023, with a slight drop-off in the latter year. In 2024, Florida was second only to Texas in total road rage incidents around the country, with 36 such incidents resulting 12 people being killed, according to Gun Violence Archive data compiled and provided by the Gun Violence Data Hub.
