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Swamp Creatures TERRIFIED
Last Updated: 2:25 p.m.
It took less than 20 minutes for a 12-member jury to find Stephen Monroe guilty as charged, just before noon today: first degree murder. Mandatory life sentence without parole. It was not a surprise, except maybe to Monroe. But the brevity of the deliberations told him all he needed to know even before the clerk read the verdict.
Maybe it was the rap song Monroe wrote describing the shooting months after it left 16-year-old Noah Smith dead on a Bunnell street that, in the eyes of the jury, did Monroe in:
these niggas bringing out my demons
fuck around and bust my pipe
I never seen yo ass get active
All you niggas do is hype if I come swinging down yo block
I swing my chop n take a life
You niggas acting like some hoes next time we meet bitch it’s on site
I could be smoking on Terrell but that boy be taking flight.
Maybe it was the Instagram Live video Monroe recorded with a friend five hours before the shooting, taunting Ed Sampson and daring him to a fight.
Maybe it was the lies that did him in, the hundreds of lies Monroe told detectives over months and a series of interviews.
Maybe it was his fabrication of a ghost shooter he claimed forced him to shoot back in self defense, a ghost shooter who supposedly fired a hail of bullets from an assault rifle but left not a trace anywhere on South Anderson Street or on the Kia Monroe was riding and the shooter was aiming at.
Maybe it was Monroe’s two-hour performance on the stand in his own defense Thursday, when his compulsion to have the last word in a duel with the prosecution drew several rebukes by the judge, and provided the prosecution with a trenchant illustration for its closing argument: The shooting was “about one thing, and that is: having the last word,” Assistant State Attorney Mark Johnson told the jury. “You saw this attitude in the defendant throughout all the evidence that was presented to you during this trial. And you saw this attitude from the defendant when he took the stand.”
Or maybe it was the fact, recorded on video–as much of the incriminating evidence in this case was–that Monroe was first to shoot out the window of a car as it drove back to the area of South Anderson Street where it had been shot a two minutes before, the first to shoot even before the car reached an intersection where Monroe’s friend Tyrese Patterson, in the same car, emptied his clip, with one of those bullets piercing Noah’s hip and killing him. He didn’t shoot more because his gun jammed. “Thank God his gun got stuck, because there could have been more dead people,” Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis said.
Whatever did him in, and there was so much for the jury to pick from, that jury of 10 women and two men, all white, this afternoon found Monroe guilty of first-degree murder in the shooting death of Noah Smith that January night in Bunnell, in 2022.
The conviction at the end of a week-long trial at the Flagler County courthouse left Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols no choice, no discretion, but to sentence Monroe to life in prison without parole. Only last week she had again encouraged Monroe to take a plea. He had been offered 25 to 50 years. The thee other men involved in the incidents all pleaded: Terrell Sampson (12 years in prison), Devandre Williams (55 years, reflecting his conviction for the murder of 16-year-old Keymarion Hall five months after Noah’s death), and Tyrese Patterson, who is scheduled for sentencing later this year.
The judge had all but predicted to him that a jury would convict him. Monroe declined. “I’m sorry for you, personally,” the judge told him today after she sentenced him to life.
He shook his head. He pursed his lips. He appeared to have shed a tear or two. He was fidgeting in his chair, swinging left to right. Gone was the pair of black-rimmed glasses he had worn since the day of jury selection, the first time he’d ever appeared to anyone familiar with him and the case with glasses. It had looked like just another act, an attempt to look more serious than he is. It was not lost on anyone that he’d discarded the glasses right after the jury had reached its verdict. He hadn’t discarded the unseriousness. After getting finger-printed, he threw out a snarky “good bye, Mr. Lewis,” to the prosecutor.
Unusually for local defendants, no family, no friends, no one turned up to sit behind him in the gallery.
Even after conceding that he had shot his gun that night–a gun he carried illegally–he had maintained his innocence. He never believed he was responsible for the death of Noah Smith. It’s doubtful he feels responsible for it even now. His attorney, Terence Lenamon, didn’t go that far. He stuck to the improbable self-defense theory, which was far enough since it implicated that ghost.
The trial had its undercurrent of quirks and biases. Monroe had acquired his gun by buying it from someone else to whom the gun had been sold by the son of a public defender in the circuit. The public defender’s son testified Thursday by zoom, but his father was not mentioned, and the judge likely would not have allowed the defense to question him on that account: he had carried out the sale legitimately, down to drawing up a bill of sale and ensuring that all signatures were in the proper places, though the sale also shows how such unregulated transactions can lead to deadly consequences.
A vast gap gaped between the world of Stephen Monroe, his friends and enemies and the world of the jury or even the attorneys, as Lenamon himself told the jury. “Some stuff I saw and heard was distasteful,” he said, referring to a picture that kept being shown every day of trial, of Monroe and the others holding guns triumphantly, an image Monroe described as marketing for a rap video. “That’s not from my world. Not from my world at all,” Lenamon said. “But just because you see that doesn’t mean you have to reach these conclusions that my client intended to shoot his gun in a direction to try to hurt somebody.”
The prosecution wasn’t above race-baiting. Johnson and Lewis could have chosen to show a picture of Monroe the way he looked in court, or at least the way he looked most of the time, or not shown a picture of him at all: he was right there in court for the jury to see, in a tan suit and tie. He looked very good. Defendants on trial are allowed to wear civilian clothes so as not to have their prison garb prejudice the jury, so as to reflect their innocence until proven guilty.
Prosecutors routinely flout that convention by fishing out pictures of defendants as sinister as they can fine, or as prejudicial as they think the pictures will look in the eyes of the jury. So Johnson and Lewis kept showing the jury a portrait of Monroe flashing his dental grillz, a cultural fashion among young black men as common as young white women’s obsession with tumblers. But to an all-white jury, the grillz more likely has negative connotations, however false or ignorant. The defense never objected. (After all, even Noah Smith’s picture on the medical examiner’s table showed him with grillz of his own, in contrast with the cherubic portrait as a younger boy prosecutors also showed of him.)
And in the scheme of things, it was a minor detail compared to the grotesquely petty nature of the feud that escalated into a killing, and that was in many regards the product of a culture of perceived honors and perceived disrespects hat often get settled at the price of human lives.
“The mask came off and revealed Stephen Monroe, the same person that you saw in those videos where he was bragging, where he was taunting, where he was threatening. You saw that attitude in the courtroom this week,” Johnson told the jury in his closing argument this morning. “That’s the real Stephen Monroe.”
Terrell Sampson had fired the first shots at the Kia SUV Monroe, Williams and Patterson were riding, after Sampson’s brother had been taunted and humiliated by Monroe and Patterson. But Williams then drove off, circling around in South Bunnell. They were gone from the scene of the shooting for two minutes. “Two minutes to think about what they were going to do, two minutes to reflect how they were going to respond and what did they do. They decided not to leave the neighborhood. They decided not to call the police,” Johnson told the jury. “They decided to circle that block for one reason, and one reason only, and that was to have the last word, that was to retaliate. How dare you shoot at us. We’re going to show you. And so they circled that block, and they came to that intersection, and started shooting.”
Forget his grillz and potential prejudice. Monroe provided enough fodder in his lyrics to make him look like the stereotypical goon who then acted out his own words: “Bitch don’t get me hype cuz once I’m hyped I turn into a shooter.” He was writing retrospectively. By then, he’d fired the gun, Noah was dead, and Monroe was lying his way through sheriff’s detectives’ interviews or deluding his way out of responsibility–until today.
” I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a guilty verdict is never a sure thing, but I am pleased with the result,” Johnson said afterward, outside the courtroom. “It was a lot of hard work, and thanks to our partners with the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Commander [Augustin] Rodriguez, Detective [Darrell] Butler, and all the other investigators and detectives that worked really hard on this case, six months in the making, presented us a case that we felt very confident in taking a trial, and I believe that, more so than the efforts on our part, was the reason that we were able to see the verdict that we got today.” The Bunnell Police Department also participated in the investigation.
Johnson described a “treasure trove of videos and photographs, some on social media” that detectives marshaled methodically. “And you know that stuff’s out there, you can’t take it back, the investigators are able to find it. And you know that I think helped us a great deal today.”
Assistant State Attorney Mark Johnson delivered the first closing argument. He was followed by defense attorney Terence Lenamon’s closing, then, as provided by law, the second closing, delivered by Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis. That closing follows. Note, however, that the final two minutes were cut off in the video. Audio of that final segment is available here.
