New witness gives graphic account of killings of two young British holidaymakers
A new witness has given a graphic account of the deaths of two British holidaymakers, describing how they tried in vain to run away when they were shot in a Florida street.
James Cooper, 25, was shot three times in the chest, ran from a driveway, ducked under a clothes line and tripped on tree roots before sitting down on a patch of grass where he died, the witness said.
Cooper's friend, James Kouzaris, 24, was shot in the head and ran across the street in the opposite direction before collapsing and dying in front of a pickup truck, according to the report published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune newspaper.
"I haven't slept since it happened because I feel I was the last person to see these guys alive," the witness said, recalling that he heard five shots. The man asked for his identity to be withheld because he feared retribution.
Police are considering a theory that the Britons, who were on a three-week holiday in Florida with Cooper's parents, stumbled into the crime-plagued neighbourhood of Newtown by accident as they made their way to a restaurant after a night out in Sarasota.
The bodies of Kouzaris, of Northampton, and Cooper, of Warwick, were found with multiple gunshot wounds at about 3am on Saturday in Carver Court, a street in a social housing project called The Courts, two miles from the last bar they were known to have visited. They would have passed the turn-off to a 24-hour restaurant about a half-mile earlier before reaching Newtown.
"We're more open to the idea that they walked," said Captain Paul Sutton of Sarasota police.
A 16-year-old Newtown resident, Shawn Tyson, was arrested 24 hours after the double shooting and is in jail charged with two counts of first-degree homicide.
The bodies were released to a funeral home to await repatriation to the UK.