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Thread: Thomas Ford McCoy - Florida

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    Thomas Ford McCoy - Florida




    Thomas McCoy has had his pretrial hearing continued to Nov. 18.

    McCoy is accused of pre-meditated, first-degree mur-der in the April 2009 shooting death of Curtis Brown at Northwest Florida State College’s Chautauqua Center in DeFuniak Springs. McCoy and Brown were former co-workers at the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in Valparaiso.

    Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for McCoy.

    http://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/yates-31280-photos-defuniak.html

    Previous News

    McCoy facing death penalty after Coca-Cola killing

    State prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the man accused of killing a Coca-Cola employee at a Northwest Florida State College campus last month.

    Thomas Ford McCoy, 42, of Laurel Hill, was indicted this week for first-degree premeditated murder with a firearm. State Attorney Bill Eddins announced Thursday that his office will seek the death penalty.

    "Our decision to seek the death penalty in any case is based on whether there are aggravating circumstances under the death penalty statute that apply to the case," said Assistant State Attorney Bobby Elmore. "So what you can determine from our decision to seek the death penalty is that we believe there are aggravating circumstances that apply to this case that support the imposition of the death penalty."

    Elmore said McCoy's arraignment is scheduled for June 23. A tentative trial date has been set for Sept. 14, but Elmore said that date likely will change.

    McCoy is accused of killing former co-worker Curtis Brown, 38, of Baker, on April 10 at NWF State College's Chautauqua Center in DeFuniak Springs. Brown worked for the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in Valparaiso and was at the Chautauqua Center repairing a vending machine when he was shot twice in the chest.

    McCoy was arrested about two weeks after the shooting outside of a Tampa hotel. He was shot twice by United States marshals after he pulled a handgun on lawmen who were trying to arrest him. His wounds were not life threatening.

    Investigators found a fully loaded automatic rifle, loaded handguns and several rounds of ammunition in his hotel room.

    McCoy previously had worked with Brown at the Coca-Cola plant in Valparaiso, but he quit two to three years ago to start his own company, Cold Drink Inc.

    http://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/state-17407-mccoy-killing.html

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    Edited:

    The death penalty case of Thomas McCoy was also pushed back. It is now slated to begin June 6.

    Thomas is charged with first degree murder. Authorities said he planned the April 2009 shooting of Curtis Brown.

    Brown was a service repair technician for Coca-Cola. He was at the Chautauqua Center to work on one of the vending machines when he was killed. McCoy was a former co-worker who had opened his own vending machine repair company.

    Lawmen said a college employee found McCoy dead with gunshot wounds to the chest. A McCoy neighbor described him as “kind of unusual” and distressed over being passed over for a raise at Coca-Cola Bottling Company in Valparaiso.

    http://proxify.org/p/011010A1000100/...67732e68746d6c

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    EDITED:

    The former Coca-Cola route salesman accused of gunning-down a co-worker at the Northwest Florida State College campus in DeFuniak Springs in April 2009 also appeared before the judge today for pretrial motions. Thomas McCoy was transported to the Walton County Jail following an 11-day manhunt and a shootout with officers in Tampa before he was captured. His trial is set to begin June 6th.

    http://www.wjhg.com/news/headlines/S...118199579.html

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    McCoy pleads guilty to murder of former co-worker

    DeFUNIAK SPRINGS — Thomas Ford McCoy Jr. pleaded guilty to first-degree murder Tuesday in the fatal shooting of former co-worker Curtis Brown in 2009.

    He entered the plea before Walton County Circuit Judge Kelvin C. Wells.

    McCoy and Brown, 38, were co-workers at the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in Valparaiso until McCoy quit to start his own vending machine repair business.

    Brown, who lived in Baker, was killed April 10, 2009, while repairing a vending machine at the Northwest Florida State College’s Chautauqua Center in DeFuniak Springs.

    Wells asked McCoy, now 44, a few questions to verify that his plea was free and voluntary.

    The plea came with the full knowledge that the state will seek the death penalty, Assistant State Attorney Bobby Elmore said.

    “This is not the result of any plea agreement between the state and the defendant,” Elmore said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening. “The state will still seek the death penalty and the court has set a death penalty hearing for Dec. 5 at the Walton County Courthouse.”

    The penalty phase trial will be argued before a jury.

    McCoy, who is from Laurel Hill, is represented by John J. Gontarek and Sharon Wilson. In a phone interview Tuesday evening, Gontarek said the plea was part of a defense theory that would help his client avoid the death penalty.

    McCoy pleaded guilty “because the evidence was overwhelming,” Gontarek said. “And we felt that he had some mitigation that would need to be brought out before a jury, so we opted for a penalty phase trial.”

    McCoy was arrested outside a motel room in Tampa about two weeks after the shooting.

    U.S. marshals shot and wounded McCoy after lawmen say he pulled a handgun on them while they were trying to arrest him.

    Last November, a Hillsborough County court found McCoy guilty of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer and obstructing or opposing an officer with violence.

    Because he used a firearm in the incident, McCoy had a mandatory sentence of 20 years. That sentence is being appealed.

    http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articles...#ixzz1TGQ8gXsh

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    McCoy case enters death penalty phase

    A Walton County jury will be asked next week to decide whether Thomas McCoy deserves the death penalty for killing of former co-worker Curtis Brown.

    Greg Anchors, the chief assistant state attorney in Walton County, said the death penalty phase of the case against McCoy will be comparable to a full-scale trial.

    Prosecutor Bobby Elmore and defense attorney John J. Gontarek likely will spend most of the day Monday attempting to find a jury to hear the sentencing phase.

    “You’ve got to explore potential jurors concerns about the death penalty, their feelings about the death penalty,” Elmore said. “It’s an extra step you have to take in a case of this nature.”

    McCoy and Brown worked together at the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in Valparaiso prior to the April 10, 2009 shooting, but McCoy had moved on and was working independently in the same business on the day he killed Brown.

    Employees at Northwest Florida State College’s Chautauqua Center found the 38-year-old Brown’s body after hearing a commotion. Brown was on campus responding to a call to service a vending machine when he was shot twice in the chest.

    McCoy’s Cold Drink Inc. company truck was spotted on campus and a manhunt began for him following the discovery of Brown’s body.

    McCoy was located in Tampa about two weeks after the shooting and pulled a handgun on U.S. marshals trying to take him into custody. McCoy was subdued after being shot twice.

    After the arrest investigators reported finding a loaded automatic rifle, loaded handguns and several rounds of ammunition in the motel room at which McCoy was staying.

    Gontarek was employed as McCoy’s attorney after the arrest.

    The two decided to have McCoy plead guilty to the crime of first degree murder, which is punishable either by death or life in prison without parole.

    Gontarek said at the time the plea was made the decision to do so was strategic, and made in an effort to spare McCoy from the death penalty.

    “We felt that he had some mitigation that would need to be brought out before a jury so we opted for a penalty phase trial,” he said after the plea.

    Elmore said he will spend next week arguing that McCoy deserves to die and present evidence of aggravating circumstances that bolsters his case.

    Gontarek will put forth the mitigating evidence he believes can spare his client from the death penalty, Elmore said.

    http://www.thedestinlog.com/news/ent...y-penalty.html

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    Death penalty case: Did McCoy commit murder out of senseless hatred or undertreated mental illness?

    Assistant State Attorney Bobby Elmore began pressing his case Tuesday for the execution of Thomas Ford McCoy.

    McCoy, Elmore told a jury selected Monday, was a man filled with hatred who bore a persistent grudge against two former co-workers.

    His rage turned to murder on April 10, 2009, when, after one failed attempt, McCoy managed to set up an ambush on the Northwest Florida State College DeFuniak Springs campus.

    Curtis Brown was not actually the co-worker McCoy most wanted to respond to his faked call for service on a break room Coke machine. A man named Ray Jackson was his primary victim.

    But he shot Brown six times anyway, Elmore said.

    “He went to the college and parked his truck, hoping Ray Jackson would show up,” Elmore said. “But he was pleased when Curtis Brown showed up. He hated them both, for no good reason.”

    McCoy’s defense team of Sharon Wilson and Jay Gontarek are hoping, in this sentencing hearing, to save their client from death by lethal injection.

    Wilson assured the jurors during opening arguments for the defense that they should deliberate secure in the knowledge that McCoy would “never leave prison alive.”

    While the primary facts are not in dispute — McCoy pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in July — the portrait of the defendant painted by Wilson was vastly different from Elmore’s depiction.

    Mental illness runs in McCoy’s family, Wilson told the jury. She said he had been treated for depression and bipolar disorder by physicians, not psychiatrists, and suffered for the lack of mental health care.

    He “took things really seriously” and “couldn’t process things well,” she said.

    Wilson described McCoy as a man who loved his job at the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in Valparaiso.

    “He was the Coke man. He loved being the Coke man,” she said.

    She indicated too that McCoy, justifiably or not, felt somewhat picked on at work.

    “There were people he thought did not like him, that would say things to make him mad,” she told the jury.

    Wilson said in the months before the shooting, McCoy had lost the job at the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in Valparaiso. His efforts to run an independent business were failing and he was lonely, without wife or children.

    He started blaming former co-workers, primarily Jackson and Brown, for driving him away from his job, Wilson said, and the pressure inside his mind grew.

    She described her client’s mental state as “a fault line in the earth under pressure for years and years.”

    Wilson told jurors McCoy felt he’d been hurt by Ray Jackson for years, and “also felt he’d been hurt and tormented by Curtis Brown.”

    “Finally the fault line ruptured,” she said, and McCoy began contemplating a murder-suicide.

    “He decided he wanted to kill Ray Jackson before he died,” she said.

    In his opening, Elmore also discussed a Tampa shootout between McCoy and the U.S. marshals who found him after the Brown killing and were attempting to arrest him.

    The assault on the officers, along with McCoy’s “cold, calculated, premeditated” actions in killing Brown, made him a worthy candidate for the death penalty, Elmore said.

    Wilson said the shootout was McCoy’s aborted attempt at suicide by cop.

    The hearing that started Tuesday will be run nearly identically to a trial, with witnesses and evidence, and is expected to last about a week.

    At its conclusion, the jury will be asked to deliberate and return with a recommendation for either the death penalty or life in prison without parole.

    The ultimate decision on whether to sentence McCoy to die, however, lies in the hands of presiding Circuit Court Judge Kelvin Wells.

    http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articles...#ixzz1fquppmng

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    McCoy deserves death, jury says

    A Walton County jury has recommended that Thomas Ford McCoy Jr. be put to death for murdering a former co-worker more than two years ago.

    The 12-member jury took about two hours to sift through a weeks’ worth of testimony and evidence to arrive at an 11-1 decision.

    Its recommendation will be given strong consideration by Circuit Judge Kelvin Wells, who will sentence McCoy early next year. A date had not been set Friday.

    McCoy already had pleaded guilty to fatally shooting Coca-Cola vending machine repairman Curtis Brown on April 10, 2009, at Northwest Florida State College’s Chautauqua Center in DeFuniak Springs.

    Brown, a former co-worker of McCoy’s, was ambushed by a false service call and shot six times. Each shot would have been fatal, according to a medical examiner’s testimony.

    The jury was asked to determine whether McCoy should be put to death by lethal injection or spend the rest of his life in prison.

    “We respect the jury’s verdict,” said attorney John Jay Gontarek, who represented McCoy with lawyer Sharon Wilson.

    Gontarek said state law requires a death sentence would be appealed to Florida’s Supreme Court.

    After the verdict was read, emotions that had been held in check during the long week in court bubbled to the surface. Brown’s wife broke into sobs as she and other relatives of the victim left the courtroom.

    Assistant State Attorney Bobby Elmore, who argued for the death penalty recommendation, said Brown’s relatives chose not to speak to the media after the hearing.

    Elmore used his closing argument Friday morning to hammer home the cold, calculated nature of McCoy’s crime.

    “Hate, hate, hate made him do this. Hate drove him,” Elmore said. “We’d like to understand his hate … we’d like to understand it, but the point is not how he came to hate, the point is how that hate grew. He wasn’t full of sadness when he put that gun in his hand. He could have controlled it.”

    In her closing argument, Wilson tried to convince jurors that McCoy deserved compassion.

    During the week she had provided evidence of a history of mental illness in the McCoy family and testimony from a clinical psychologist who found he was suffering from major depression with homicidal and suicidal tendencies when he shot Brown.

    “Mental disabilities are part of the diverse frailties of humankind … consider how they affected him over his life. He’s a flawed human being. He was born with a flaw, like a fault line in the earth,” Wilson said. “He sought help. He knew something wasn’t right. But finally the pressure on this fault line was too great. Something had to give, and it did, and here we are.”

    Wilson closed her argument with a plea: “Lock him up for the rest of his life, but please don’t kill him. We’ve had enough of that already.”

    No one from McCoy’s family was in the courtroom Friday when the jury’s recommendation was read. None of the people who testified on his behalf as friends were present, either.

    McCoy’s only reaction came shortly after the recommendation was read when he removed his glasses and used a handkerchief to wipe his eyes.

    http://www.thedestinlog.com/news/rec...ngs-death.html

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    McCoy gets death penalty

    DeFUNIAK SPRINGS — Thomas Ford McCoy’s face was still as the judge sentenced him to death for the premeditated murder he was found guilty of last year.

    Before issuing his verdict, Circuit Court Judge Kelvin Wells went over the timeline, pointing out several “cruel, calculated” choices McCoy made.

    “The human life at stake was considered in this decision, but based on the cruel, calculated manner of the premeditated murder of Curtis Brown, the defendant is sentenced to death,” Wells said Mon-day afternoon at the DeFuniak Springs Court-house.

    Brown once worked with McCoy at the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. Witnesses reported during his December trial that McCoy was upset when he could not get a job at the company after previously resigning.

    McCoy made multiple attempts to kill another co-worker and made a false call reporting a vending machine issue at North-west Florida State College on April 10, 2009, expecting that same man. When he saw it was Brown who responded, he decided to go ahead with his plan because “he hated” Brown too, Wells said.

    While Brown was out getting supplies to fix the vending machine, McCoy stepped into the room and used all six rounds of his handgun to kill Brown when he came back.

    “When Curtis Brown fell to the ground, the defendant stepped over him and drove away, proving that this was a cold and calculated premeditated murder,” Wells said.

    After driving away, McCoy bought spray paint to change the coloring on his vehicle, bought an arsenal of weapons and camped out at a hotel in Tampa to wait for authorities so he could “go out in a blaze of glory,” according to witness testimony.

    McCoy was taken into custody after a fire ex-change with Tampa police and was found guilty of the felony offense of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, before his murder trial.

    McCoy entered a plea of guilty to the premeditated murder of Brown in July and demanded a penalty phase jury trial, according to a press release from the state attorney’s office.

    This past December, a jury found McCoy guilty in an 11-1 vote in the death of Brown and recommended the death penalty.

    As with all death penalty cases in Florida, McCoy’s case will be automatically appealed to the State Supreme Court.

    Brown’s family sat silently in the front room of the almost empty court-room. As the sentence was read, tears slid down the cheeks of the men and women who knew Brown.

    “Throughout this investigation and prosecution, no one ever spoke an ill word of Curtis Brown,” said Bobby Elmore, assistant state attorney. “To take a good man’s life for nothing more than hatred or your own misfortune is deserving of the death penalty.”

    http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articles...#ixzz1qK3rXbcW
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  9. #9
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    DC Number:................D40377
    Name:.......................MCCOY, THOMAS F
    Race:........................WHITE
    Sex:..........................MALE
    Hair Color:..................GRAY OR PARTIALLY GRAY
    Eye Color:..................GREEN
    Height:......................6'01''
    Weight:.....................274 lbs.
    Birth Date:.................09/01/1966
    Initial Receipt Date:.....11/19/2010
    Current Facility:..........FLORIDA STATE PRISON
    Current Custody:.........MAXIMUM
    Current Release Date:..DEATH SENTENCE

    http://www.dc.state.fl.us/ActiveInma...onID=292816822

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    THOMAS FORD MCCOY, JR. v STATE OF FLORIDA

    In today's Florida Supreme Court opinions, McCoy's conviction for first-degree murder and sentence of death were AFFIRMED on direct appeal.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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