A teenager charged with the murder of two British friends as they enjoyed a Florida holiday almost a year ago will go on trial on Monday as prosecutors hope to uncover the truth about the men's final moments.
Shawn Tyson, whose 17th birthday is also on Monday, is accused of shooting James Kouzaris, 24, and James Cooper, 25, both former students at the University of Sheffield, during a confrontation in Newtown, a ghetto in Sarasota, in the early hours of 16 April 2011.
Although Tyson was arrested and charged soon after the killings, detectives were unable to establish exactly what led the victims into the crime-plagued neighbourhood 12 miles from their holiday home in upmarket Longboat Key after a night out.
Inquiries were hampered by the community's distrust of the police and an atmosphere of violence and intimidation, while key eyewitness testimony against Tyson was secured from a neighbour only after she was moved into a home outside the area for her own safety.
"Witnesses were very reluctant at first, mostly because of the fear of retaliation or the no-snitching rule," said assistant state attorney Karen Fraivillig, who will present the prosecution's case.
"But I can't praise the detectives in the case highly enough. They told me the witnesses knew more than they were saying and they kept going back until they got them to talk.
"This is about justice for two beautiful children, bright, athletic, charming young men in the prime of their life who were killed for no reason."
Tyson, who denies two counts of wilful premeditated murder, faces a life sentence if convicted. The trial is expected to last a week and a half. Although he is being tried as an adult, Florida law prohibits the death penalty for anyone under 18 at the time of a crime.
Cooper, a part-time tennis coach from Warwick, and Kouzaris, a seasoned traveller from Northampton, who had recently spent time in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador, had been in the US for about 10 days of their three-week holiday and were staying at an apartment with Cooper's parents.
They ate a meal together on the evening of 15 April before the two men set off for an evening out in Sarasota, where they were captured on CCTV drinking and talking to women in several city centre bars.
Police released images of the pair in a bar called Smokin' Joes as they tried to piece together details of what they called the "crucial lost hour" between closing time at 2am and the first 911 call from a Newtown resident at 2.56am reporting gunfire and "a white dude laid out on the ground".
The first officers to arrive found the friends' shirtless bodies, each with multiple gunshot wounds, on opposite sides of the street. One witness reported seeing them running in separate directions while a neighbour, Wanda Farrior, told police she saw Tyson clambering through a window into his mother's house moments later.
Physical evidence to be presented during the trial will include bullet casings allegedly buried by the defendant and later revealed to police by an informant, and text messages said to have been sent to and from Tyson's mobile phone immediately after the shootings.
A former friend of the accused, Joshua Bane, will tell the jury that he helped clean and dispose of the suspected murder weapon, a .22 calibre pistol that Tyson is believed to have also used in another crime nine days previously.
Prosecutors scored a significant victory at a pretrial hearing last week when circuit court judge Rick DeFuria said he would allow jurors to hear details of an incident on 7 April 2011 in which Tyson is accused of using the same gun to shoot at the car of a family with whom he was feuding.
None of the victims' parents, Peter and Hazel Kouzaris and Stan and Sandy Cooper, plan to travel to Florida. Mrs Kouzaris said last month it was still painful to look at photographs of her son and that the thought of anyone forgetting him was unbearable.
But Paul Davies and Joe Hallett, friends of the men, plan to attend the trial. The two are co-founders and directors of Always a Chance, a charity set up in the victims' memory to tackle youth crime in Britain.
Community leaders say the murders have led to improvements in the Newtown area, including the installation of video cameras on street corners that they say have helped reduce crime.
"As unfortunate as this was, and as hard as it was that this happened here, the community has come together and is working together with a new feeling of optimism," said the Rev Wade Harvin, chairman of Newtown's community development board.
"People realise that we have to work collectively with the police to make sure that the crime rate drops and not live in fear of over-the-top individuals."
