Recording features voice of woman claiming to have seen body of one of two British holidaymakers shot dead on Sarasota street
Police in Florida have released the recording of a frantic emergency call made by a woman after she saw the body of one of the two British holidaymakers found shot dead on a street in Sarasota .
The rambling and often hard to decipher tape features the voice of a woman who claimed she was driving through the crime-plagued Newtown area of the city in the early hours of Saturday, when the Britons, James Cooper, 25, and James Kouzaris, 24, were gunned down.
"We seen a white dude laying, he's … blood everywhere, he's just laid out," the woman is heard telling a 911 dispatcher for the Sarasota county sheriff's office in the call made at 2.56am. "I don't know if he's dead or not."
It is not known which of the two bodies the woman saw. Police discovered the men, each with multiple gunshot wounds, lying about 15 metres apart.
But later in the recording, lasting one minute 47 seconds the woman tells the dispatcher: "He's just laying on the ground. I think he's dead, ma'am. I don't know. We just rode through there."
Apart from the woman struggling to tell the dispatcher the location, most of the rest of the recording is of the operator asking the caller to repeat information when her mobile phone cut out.
Detectives arrested 16-year-old Shawn Tyson 24 hours after the double shooting. The accused, who has been charged with two counts of first-degree homicide, lived in the social housing project known as The Courts where the killings took place.
Cooper, a tennis coach from Warwick, and Kouzaris, of Northampton, had been enjoying a three-week holiday on the upmarket Florida barrier island of Longboat Key.
Detectives have released CCTV images from a downtown Sarasota bar called Smokin' Joe's where the friends, who met as students at the University of Sheffield, were drinking late on Friday, just hours before their deaths.
Police want to interview several women seen talking to the men, but these people are not suspects. A police spokesman, Captain Paul Sutton, was unable to say if investigators had traced or spoken to any of the women, or had made any progress in agreeing a timeline for the men's "lost hour", between the bar's closing at 2am and the emergency call occurring less than an hour later.
Cooper's parents, Stanley and Sandra, paid tribute to their son in their first comments since returning from the Florida holiday to their home in Warwick. "As his parents, our lives have been shattered, but through us and his friends and family he will live on. God bless you, son, heaven has another angel, but this world is a colder and poorer place without you in it. He was gentle, kind, compassionate, clever and an athlete, but beyond all his achievements he was full of love."
Tyson, who has a previous arrest for gun crime, faces a grand jury within two weeks. He will be tried as an adult and faces an automatic life sentence if convicted.