Key West business owner charged with 1st-degree murder in Super Bowl Sunday shooting
The Key West business owner who shot and killed a man outside a local bar in the early morning hours after Super Bowl Sunday in February is now charged with first-degree murder.
A grand jury made the decision Thursday, and also indicted Lloyd Preston Brewer III on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and violation of the state’s concealed weapons law.
The case shocked the Southernmost City, the popular tourist town that’s not immune to crime — even violent crime — but where murder is rare.
Also, the victim, 21-year-old Garret Hughes, was a popular former standout high school athlete who came from a well-known family in town and whose father is the Key West High School head football coach.
The tragedy unfolded over Hughes’ urinating on the outside wall of a local hangout, Conch Town Liquor and Lounge on North Roosevelt Boulevard, at around midnight, Feb. 13.
Just a couple of hours before the shooting, most people in the bar had watched the Super Bowl, in which the Kansas City Chiefs narrowly beat the Philadelphia Eagles.
Brewer, 57, who owns the building that houses Conch Town Liquor and Lounge — but not the bar itself — was a patron that night and told police he’d had a total of three beers. Police and prosecutors, however, say he was intoxicated.
Hughes was also drinking at the bar that night, according to court records.
Security camera footage shows Hughes walking outside the bar, with no shirt on, and urinating on the wall.
Brewer approached him, lifted his shirt, pulled out a pistol and fired at least one shot into Hughes’ torso, according to prosecutors. His friends rushed to his side to render aid, police said. Medics took him to Lower Keys Medical Center, where he died while doctors prepped him to be airlifted to a Miami-Dade County trauma hospital, according to court documents.
Brewer, whose attorney Chris Mancini, could not immediately be reached for comment, has pleaded not guilty and maintains the shooting was in self defense, a claim Assistant Monroe County State Attorney Joseph Mansfield dismissed since the day after Hughes was killed.
“There is no justifiable claim to self-defense because the kid was never armed and never advanced on the shooter. The shooter advanced on him,” Mansfield said in February.
Hours after he shot Hughes, Brewer told Key West police officers in an interrogation room that he feared for his life in the moments before he pulled the trigger. He said he went outside because he noticed a large group of people leaving and gathering in the parking lot.
When he walked outside, he said he saw Hughes urinating on the wall and verbally confronted him.
Brewer told the officers that he said, “Can’t you just go in the bar and piss in the toilet.” That’s when he said Hughes “became more agitated,” approached Brewer in what Brewer described to police was a threatening manner, and reached to his waistband as if he possibly had a weapon.
“He came at me in a threatening manner and appeared he was reaching for something on his side,” Brewer said in the interrogation video that has been viewed by the Miami Herald/FLKeysnews.com.
Brewer told police he warned Hughes that he was armed but that the younger man kept coming at him. Brewer said he fired twice: The first shot hit Hughes, and the second went up in the air because Hughes was almost on top of him.
“I stood my ground. I feared for my life. Period,” Brewer told cops.
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The grand jury disagrees, saying in the indictment that Brewer shot Hughes with a “premeditated design to effect the death of a human being.”
The State Attorney’s Office had charged Brewer with second-degree murder by means of a document called an information in early March, but prosecutors needed a grand jury for a first-degree murder charge.
Brewer has been in Monroe County jail, held without bond, ever since. His next scheduled court appearance is July 6.
