Brittany Nicole Holbrook shot and killed her boyfriend, Tyler Kinnon Nulisch, deputies said. (Mugshot: Monroe County Sheriff’s Office)
Days before being charged in her boyfriend’s death, a Florida Keys woman allegedly ranted about wanting to gut her ex, one of the victim’s friends told Fox News.
Brittany Nicole Holbrook, 34, was affable — except when she drank, Jessica Stiegel said in a Friday report.
“She seemed so normal most of the time, but when she drank, she’d become a monster, and a switch would flip, and she’d start screaming and throwing things and hitting Tyler,” the friend said.
She is charged with murder in the second degree. Deputies in Monroe County, Florida, claim she shot her boyfriend, Tyler Kinnon Nulisch, 30, early June 17 after the couple drank with their roommate.
According to Stiegel, Holbrook went out two days before with a woman dating one of the victim’s friends. The suspect allegedly imbibed alcohol and discussed an ex-boyfriend.
“I’m going to kill him and take a knife into his stomach and rip upward to his throat,” she said in Stiegel’s secondhand account.
The report did not note why Holbrook was allegedly angry at the ex.
“It was like she was describing gutting a deer,” Stiegel reportedly said.
According to deputies, they were called out that morning at 2:45 to the suspect’s and victim’s home on the island of Big Coppitt Key. They found Nulisch bleeding from his lower back. Initially alive but unconscious, he died at Lower Keys Medical Center, they said. The 911 caller, his roommate, told investigators about drinking with Nulisch and Holbrook on their patio after work and went to bed. He woke up to hear Holbrook screaming in the living room.
“The b— shot me in the back,” Nulisch told him in documents.
Stiegel told Fox that the defendant and victim had been in love.
“Everyone saw this,” she said. “They seemed like the perfect couple.”
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Holbrook allegedly told law enforcement she and Nulisch had been dating for about nine months and lived together in the home with their roommate. She said there was a gap in her memory, documents said.
Holbrook allegedly said she went to bed in the room she shared with Nulisch. During the investigation, she allegedly gave authorities different accounts. First, she said that the next thing she remembered, she was screaming and holding Nulisch, who was covered in blood, documents said.
Later, she allegedly claimed she remembered more — that Nulisch went to the bathroom and suddenly attacked her when he returned, choking her and holding her against a wall. She also claimed to have punched and scratched him.
“She continued to claim there was a gap in her memory, and she did not remember how she was able to get away from Nulisch,” documents said.
But deputies called her statements inconsistent. Noting the roommate’s account, Nulisch’s dying words, and the lack of injuries consistent with strangulation, the affiant concluded there was probable cause to arrest her for murder.
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Stiegel, who is dating Nulisch’s best friend from childhood, told Fox News that she, her boyfriend, and the roommate cleaned up the crime scene.
She said they soon realized the shooting was premeditated. Holbrook kept her gun loaded in the purse of her car; the purse was left open on the passenger seat, with the gun absent.
“She had to have gone down that flight of stairs, gone back up to the front door and shot him from the doorway as he was standing with his back to her,” she told Fox News. “That’s a lot of time to think.”
According to the affidavit, the roommate told law enforcement about Holbrook having a pistol and keeping it in the home, documents said. He also described having a handgun.
Authorities are charging Holbrook as lacking premeditation. She remains at a Monroe County jail on a $75,000 bond. She is scheduled for an arraignment on Wednesday.
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