Presumptive Blood, a Paralytic, and Two Passports: What Four Forensic Specialists Put on the Record on Day 3

Day 3 of the Kosowski trial had no opening statement and no closing argument. It had no single dramatic witness the way Day 1 had Michael Montgomery or Day 2 had the detective who first named the truck. What it had instead was volume: eight witnesses, eight hours of testimony, one straight run through three different locations, and a word that came up so often I started marking every occurrence: presumptive. Presumptive-positive for blood, in a truck bed. Presumptive-positive for blood, in a bathroom. Presumptive-positive for blood, in the trunk of a second car. By the end of the day, that word had touched nearly every surface the State says Tomasz Kosowski ever stood in.

I want to open this the same way I open every one of these, because it stays true for as long as this case runs: nothing below is proof of anything. This is a bench trial. There is no jury and there never will be one in this case. Judge Joseph A. Bulone alone will decide whether Kosowski is guilty of anything, and if it comes to that, whether he lives or dies. Kosowski is presumed innocent right now, in this sentence, exactly as much as he was before Day 3 started. What Day 3 gave the court was testimony, not a verdict, and every witness who gave it did so without a single question from the man on trial for his life. Zero cross-examinations. Again.

Day 3 did not add a new fact to that frame so much as it filled it in with forensic detail, hour after hour of it. Where Day 1 gave the court the relationships and the motive, and Day 2 gave it the surveillance trail and the truck itself, Day 3 gave it the physical evidence three separate forensic teams pulled out of three separate places connected to Kosowski: the office where Cozzi was last seen, the residence where Kosowski himself lived, and the second car sitting in his own name. None of it, on its own, is a body. All of it, taken together, is the kind of case a prosecutor builds specifically because there isn't one.

A Landfill, a Cash Count, and the First Blood in the Truck

The day opened with Steven Allred, the Largo Police Department officer first assigned to the case, a 24-year veteran now with Investigative Services. He was the one who responded to 1501 South Belcher Road on March 21, 2023, on what he said was "initially believed to be a missing person" call, and he stayed at the scene "until the early hours of the next day." He canvassed for surveillance video, one nearby camera was sun-blurred and useless, but a neighboring welding business handed investigators footage that mattered later.

He then walked the court through the search warrant executed at Kosowski's own residence in Tarpon Springs, a warrant he said was prompted by a license-plate-reader hit on Kosowski's red Toyota Corolla. His own role there was perimeter security, nothing more. Two days after that search, on March 25, 2023, the Corolla itself was stopped and towed, sealed, to the county's processing garage, never "tampered with or touched" along the way, in his words. What came out of that car went into evidence over Kosowski's own objection: a count of cash that came to $282,120 in folded bills and banded hundred-dollar stacks, and, separately, a vial, a syringe and a needle containing a substance he identified, with visible uncertainty on the stand, as succinylcholine chloride, a paralytic drug.

He testified that jailhouse calls led investigators to a Miami address Kosowski had leased, and, separately, to a three-day search of a Collier County landfill beginning April 2, digging through what he described as "rotting food, animal remains... human waste," in a smell he called "horrific." Asked directly whether Cozzi's remains were found there, his answer was two words: "No, we weren't."

Robert Briggs, the CSI who documented the scene, testified next, 28 years in the county's forensic science unit, dispatched to Belcher Road around 4:30 that afternoon. He photographed the scene and ran a full 360-degree scan of it, both admitted without objection, and he located Steven Cozzi's own SUV, locked, with the keys left on his own desk inside, "somebody drove the work, parked it, and locked it, went inside," as he put it on the stand. He photographed Cozzi's office, desk, wallet, laptop and phone, but the bathroom and the electrical closet were a later shift's work, not his.

He came back into the case later for the Tundra and the Corolla. In the Tundra's bed, he found a luminol-reactive presumptive-positive reaction for blood, the first of many that day, and a crudely wired device concealing the truck's own license plate. He confirmed the chain of custody on both vehicles. Kosowski declined to cross-examine him, as he would decline with every witness across the entire day.

Sandra Leigh Copeland, the forensic specialist who processed the electrical room and the men's restroom, and who would later conduct the body-warrant examination of Kosowski himself, arrived at the scene at 7:39 that evening. She lifted a latent print near the electrical room's doorknob. In the men's restroom she found what she called "reddish stains, possible blood" on the exterior door, later swabbed and tested presumptive-positive. She catalogued staining across the door, the stall, the floor, the trash can, the toilet and the walls, and she collected nearly 400 paper towels from that one small room, along with an unexplained bluish discoloration in one corner that looked, to her, like burned or removed paint. The urinal, she noted, was unflushed, and most of what she found was dry rather than wet.

Her testimony then turned to a second scene entirely: Kosowski's own residence, where she supervised luminol spraying in the garage. That is where the day's first recess landed, after the defense raised a blanket objection to all residence-search evidence, preserved for the record rather than argued on the spot.

The Body-Warrant Exam and the Wire Running to the Plate

Court resumed with Copeland still on the stand, finishing her account of the residence search. A trainee working beside her had collected a swab from the garage after luminol sprayed in darkness produced a glow, but only that presumptive luminescence went into evidence that day, no confirmatory blood or DNA result behind it. She confirmed she never personally processed the Tundra sitting in that same garage, and that the garage photograph itself was only an establishing shot of the address. The property's rear border, marsh land, yielded nothing to collect. She was on scene for seven to eight hours, and her role, by her own account, was documentation only.

The prosecutor then walked her forward to March 26, close to midnight, at the Tarpon Springs police station, where she photographed Kosowski under a judge-signed warrant authorizing a search of his own body. She could not recall who had read him that warrant. She described the protocol: clothes on, clothes off, clippings, scrapings, clothing collected. And she identified, one by one, what she found: an injury to his right hand's third and fourth fingers, an injury to his left thumb, a reddish mark on his right upper arm, and possible bruising and scrapes on both knees. She then described collecting a buccal DNA reference swab from him, admitted over the day's standing objection, and identified him in the courtroom, in his jail clothing, for the record. There was no cross-examination, and she was excused after roughly ninety minutes on the stand.

The State then called Robin Clark, a retired forensic supervisor with 25 years of service who had processed the Belcher Road restroom itself. She responded to the scene around 11 PM the night of March 21, relieving a colleague already there, and found two other investigators already working the hallway on shoeprints when she stepped into the men's restroom and found what she suspected was blood. She placed markers, in the hallway and inside the restroom, and ran presumptive tests on seven of them. Six came back positive. One came back negative. She was careful to draw a line the court itself underlined a moment later: she does not run DNA analysis and does not decide what gets sent for further testing, that call belongs to the case's lead investigator. A swab from one of the positive markers went into evidence over a defense objection made, in the defense's own words, "out of an abundance of caution," prompting the court's own aside: "That certainly is an abundance of caution." More sites followed, a paper towel dispenser, a toilet tank, a stall handrail, a door edge, even a blind swab from a sink edge taken on suspicion alone. Nearly all of them came back positive. Her involvement ended with the evidence delivered to Property and Evidence. No cross-examination, and she was released.

Then came Nikki Bole, a PCSO forensic specialist with roughly seven years at the agency, and the first witness of the day whose name I can actually print, because hers is the one that has been verified and confirmed on the record. She documented Kosowski's own residence: a two-story home with two garage bays, the Toyota Tundra parked inside carrying a Florida plate, not the New Jersey plate some earlier surveillance testimony had suggested. A wire ran from the truck's rear floorboard toward its own license plate. She toured roughly a dozen possible-blood spots across the truck bed but did not personally swab them and could not say, on the stand, who did.

The truck was sealed and towed. Inside the house, paperwork tied Kosowski directly to the address: a filing from his own civil lawsuit, an addressed envelope, a tax document, a jury-duty summons dated April 17, 2023. Isopropyl alcohol sat in the master bathroom. Syringes with needles turned up on a shelf in the laundry-room closet, the same kind of item, in a different room, that had already surfaced in the Corolla's own search. Luminol applied to the garage floor glowed at two spots. Both were swabbed. Both came back presumptive-positive, and both were admitted over objection. She later swabbed firearms and knives recovered from the house and authenticated a photo of a backpack holding firearms "along with some other items of concern," a phrase the record never explains further. No cross-examination followed. Court broke for a one-hour lunch.

Four Specialists, Three Locations, One Blood Trail

What came after lunch was the longest, densest stretch of the day, nearly three and a half hours, and it is where the State's forensic case actually filled itself out. Four Pinellas County Sheriff's Office specialists took the stand in a row, and together they walked the court through evidence recovered from the Tundra's impound garage, Kosowski's own residence, and the Corolla, with a return trip to the Belcher Road restroom at the very end.

Kristen Stropes opened it, describing her own response to Belcher Road as scene supervisor, then her intake of the Tundra at the leased impound garage, arriving before 6 AM to find the truck already inside with its seals intact. Working with two colleagues, she ran presumptive tests on nine marked areas in the truck bed. Seven came back positive. A later luminol pass lit up the center area and a larger stain on the passenger side, and blind swabs from the driver's floor mat, the headrest, and both center consoles all came back presumptive-positive as well. She confirmed, like the witness before her, that she does not decide what goes to the lab for confirmatory testing. No cross-examination.

Dana Zucchetto followed, describing her own response to the residence after a tactical team had cleared the house. She swabbed the Tundra's tailgate interior, presumptive-positive again, then authenticated a full 360-degree walkthrough of the house itself, comparing it to a real-estate listing video: the garage, an empty freezer, eleven collected license plates (three from New Mexico, two from Florida, one Michigan trailer tag, two from Vermont, two from New Hampshire, and two motorcycle tags, no New Jersey plate anywhere among them), and the interior, including a closet holding a black bag with magazines, what she called "gun paraphernalia," a knife, and brass knuckles. Garage-floor luminol produced a chemiluminescent reaction between the two garage doors, swabbed for further testing. No cross-examination.

Ateka Sanford took over next, describing her own supervision duties at Belcher Road on March 21, then her processing of the red Corolla on March 25 alongside Ashley Luth, who followed her to the stand. Seven swabs from luminol-guided areas in the Corolla produced one presumptive-positive result, on the interior trunk's back wall. A trunk-lid swab on the driver's side came back negative but was sent to the lab anyway. No cross-examination.

Ashley Luth carried the bulk of what remained. At Belcher Road, she processed the men's restroom and collected a series of presumptive-positive swabs, a stain on the exterior door, a spot near the urinal, a baseboard, the drain area, alongside one negative result at the sink handle. Turning to the Corolla, she testified to finding two ballistic vests inside the trunk, one presumptive-positive near its velcro, and an EMS vest that also came back positive. The trunk also held a large amount of cash, a folding bicycle, an empty gas tank, a cleared firearm, and red fibers and white hairs she connected to the clothing Cozzi was reported wearing that day, and to hair already photographed in Michael Montgomery's own car.

Then came the floorboard bag. In sequence, over what the record shows as Kosowski's own repeated, unexplained objection, each one overruled: a black mask, a white mask, a black hat, ski masks, a baseball cap, unidentified medication and needles, binoculars, two passports, one of them a Polish passport carrying a name closely matching the defendant's own, checkbooks and credit cards in Kosowski's name, a stun gun, brass knuckles, a crowbar, duct tape, a GPS unit, a separate magnetic GPS tracker found in a different bag, law-enforcement patches, and a cash band tucked inside a pair of black socks. A device to conceal or flip the Corolla's own license plate was documented too, the same kind already described on the Tundra. In the spare-tire well, black trash bags prompted a pointed exchange about whether they could hold a body. Luth said she did not know their exact capacity, but agreed it was "not usually size of a human person." Nearly every item was admitted over objection. No cross-examination.

Katherine Hook, the day's fourth specialist, closed the segment. She described her own Belcher Road bathroom processing: fingerprints from the exterior door only, DNA swabs from a drain-cleaner bottle and a bar of soft soap, a presumptive-positive floor swab, and extensive luminol reactions across the floor, the stalls, the baseboards and the drain. She acknowledged, without being pushed on it, that ordinary cleaning products can trigger the identical reaction. She confirmed photographing shoe prints in the bathroom that belonged to Michael Montgomery and to two law enforcement officers who had walked through the scene before full forensic processing had even begun. No cross-examination, and the court recessed briefly.

I want to be precise about what this segment actually proved and what it did not, because a case built this carefully deserves the same precision back. Every one of these positive results is a presumptive test, a chemical color-change reaction, not a confirmed DNA match, and more than one witness said outright on the stand that ordinary cleaning agents can cause the same reaction luminol reads as blood. Testimony that the victim's own husband and two officers walked through that restroom before it was fully processed hands a future defense a genuine contamination argument, whenever that defense chooses to make one. And the trash-bag exchange, raised directly and left genuinely unresolved on this record, matters more than an ordinary exhibit question would in almost any other case, because Cozzi's body has never been found.

It is also worth naming what this segment does NOT settle. A presumptive-positive result is a screening test. It tells an investigator where to look harder, not what a laboratory will eventually confirm. Four separate specialists said versions of the same thing from the stand, unprompted: they collect and they document, they do not decide what gets sent on for confirmatory DNA testing, and they do not testify to what that testing eventually shows. No DNA result was introduced anywhere on Day 3. Every reddish stain, every luminescent glow, every swab that came back positive in a truck bed or a bathroom or a trunk is, right now, still exactly that: presumptive. The word carried the entire afternoon, and it is doing more work in this case than it would in almost any other, because there is no body to anchor a cause of death and no confirmed blood type to tie any of these stains to a specific person.

The Video Canvass and the Drug That Traced Back to His Own Job

The day's final witness was Detective John Sinni, who led much of the case's video canvass, a 24-year veteran of the Largo Police Department who testified he joined the investigation on its second day, back when it was still being treated as a missing-person case. His first assignment was administrative, chasing down transit-authority bus video, but that footage turned out to matter more than anyone expected. Reviewing it with a colleague, he identified what he called the "vehicle of interest," a dark gray Toyota Tundra, by a reverse light mounted differently than the model's own factory design, and by decals he later learned were not factory-installed either. The truck bed in that footage held what he described as a dark or gray-colored garden cart, covered by a red or orange blanket.

Tracking that truck's path became a multi-agency effort. He personally cleared one business's cameras as a dead end, found matching footage at two others, corroborated by another officer's own flag, and heard a colleague report a license-plate-reader hit near a road in Tarpon Springs, showing the vehicle carrying what looked like a New Jersey tag, a detail sitting in real tension with the eleven plates already catalogued in Kosowski's own garage, none of which was from New Jersey. He testified he'd heard early rumors of "an issue with a court case involving a plastic surgeon," but said he set that aside at the time to keep following the evidence on its own terms. The canvass eventually led to Kosowski's own neighborhood, a chokepoint with one way in and one way out, where he staked it out before being pulled away to help assemble a photo lineup that included Kosowski's own picture. At a neighboring home, he manually rolled back a malfunctioning security recorder roughly 48 hours by hand and found the same vehicle passing, the same cart, the same blanket, while another investigator independently found matching footage next door, narrowing the whole search down to Kosowski's own street.

The March 23 search warrant at the residence itself was served by Tarpon Springs police alongside county forensics, and the detective testified he was present only to observe, barred from seizing anything himself, a restriction the prosecutor made clear to him, in his own words, "numerous times." In the garage, luminol was applied over a renewed, overruled defense objection. A garden cart found there did not match the one seen on surveillance: "it had a yellow trim... it certainly was not the same cart." The truck's registration traced back, oddly, to a person listed in the county's database as deceased, but its title history led investigators to its actual prior private owner, the Day 2 witness who had sold the Tundra for $32,000 and properly reported that sale to the DMV.

He then traveled to Miami on March 27, after Kosowski's own arrest, though he had no role in the arrest itself or in the earlier seizure of the Corolla. Local police served a warrant on a rental unit there, and inside, a back room looked freshly mopped. Luminol on the floor itself came back negative, but the mop that had done the mopping tested positive and was seized. A red garden cart turned up in that same unit, photographed but not taken, judged not to be a match to the one on the surveillance footage. At a surgery center, he found an unsecured mini-refrigerator holding vials of the same paralytic drug already recovered from the Corolla, and he matched a bottle from that car stop to the center's own lot number and manufacturer, "that was a match," he testified. A nearby waste bin at the same location held discarded vials of the same medication. At a related clinic, an office manager was hesitant to speak with him and referred him to the clinic's own attorney. He later learned Kosowski had seen exactly one patient there, for a pre-operative consultation, with a follow-up scheduled for the following Monday that never happened, because by then Kosowski was already in custody.

Finally, he corroborated the Collier County landfill search himself: GPS coordinates led investigators to a dead end near a wildlife sanctuary, and a three-day dig through what he described as "household trash to... feces, medical waste... and needles" failed to recover anything of Cozzi. Compressed trash refilled the excavated ground almost as fast as the crews could dig it out.

How This Channel Handles a Name Before It's Settled

Every person named in this piece, Steven Allred, Robert Briggs, Sandra Leigh Copeland, Robin Clark, Nikki Bole, Kristen Stropes, Dana Zucchetto, Ateka Sanford, Ashley Luth, Katherine Hook, John Sinni, spelled their own name for the court reporter, clearly, on the record, under oath. But for six of them, this piece could not have printed those names the moment Day 3 ended, because this case's own internal name file, the record this channel checks every single name against before it ever appears on a title, a description, or a page like this one, had not yet caught up. Some of those six weren't in it at all when the day closed. Two others had a spelling the record itself rendered more than one way, a stated pronunciation in open court that turned out to differ from the same witness's own letter-by-letter spelling a sentence later: Copeland's own middle name is Leigh, not Lee, and Hook's own first name is Katherine, with a K, not Catherine.

I could have guessed at publication and moved on, the way a lot of trial coverage does. I didn't, and the reason is the same reason "billing dispute" came off this site permanently after Day 1: get it right, or hold it back and say so, but never publish a guess and let it become the record simply because it went out first. All six names above cleared this case's own verification before this piece went out, so all six are printed here correctly, matching each witness's own sworn spelling exactly. That is the standard every name on this page meets, and it is why a handful of other people mentioned in passing during this trial, not witnesses, not central to Day 3 itself, still don't appear by name anywhere on this channel yet.

The same discipline governs the two passports found in the Corolla's floorboard bag: this is Kosowski's own identification, entered as trial evidence of his identity and his travel documents, not a private third party's contact information. I'm reporting that they exist, that one is a Polish passport carrying a name closely matching the defendant's own, and nothing more specific than that. What was actually legible on the courtroom screen for a few seconds, the passport numbers, the dates on them, stays off this page and off every other page this channel controls, on the same standing rule that keeps a home address or a phone number off text coverage no matter how clearly it was said or shown in open court. What is said or shown live is the public record. What gets amplified afterward, in a title, a description, or an article like this one, is a separate decision, and it is made deliberately, every time.

Where Day 3 Actually Leaves This

By the close of the day, the State had built a dense, entirely unrebutted evidentiary record spanning three places: Steven Cozzi's Belcher Road workplace, Kosowski's own residence, and the red Corolla, tying presumptive blood evidence, a concealment-modified truck, and an extraordinary cache of items directly to Kosowski. Masks. Weapons. GPS trackers. A cash band totaling more than a quarter of a million dollars, spread across two locations. Two passports carrying a name closely matching the defendant's own. Vials matching a paralytic drug traced, by lot number, to his own workplace supply. The detective's trip to Miami supplied the day's single most concrete forensic link, a specific vial matched to a specific manufacturer's lot number at a surgery center connected to Kosowski, corroborated by discarded vials of the same drug found nearby. A coherent surveillance trail placed a matching truck and cart moving from the scene toward Kosowski's own street. Against all of it, the defense mounted almost no visible challenge in the moment. No cross-examination occurred for any witness across the entire day, and Kosowski's own objections were largely procedural or unexplained on this record, repeatedly overruled but carefully preserved for later.

Real openings remain, and I want to name them plainly rather than let the volume of the day drown them out. Every blood result introduced on Day 3 was presumptive, a chemical color-change test, not confirmatory DNA, and more than one witness conceded, without being pressed, that ordinary cleaning agents can trigger the identical reaction. Testimony that Cozzi's own husband and two officers walked through the restroom before full processing began hands the defense a built-in contamination argument for whenever it decides to raise it. The garage cart's explicit non-match to the surveillance cart, the unresolved New Jersey-tag discrepancy, and a scattering of chain-of-custody gaps, an unidentified swabber here, evidence photographed but never seized in Miami there, are genuine vulnerabilities the State's own witnesses acknowledged from the stand, unprompted. Cozzi's body remains unrecovered despite an exhaustive search, which leaves cause and manner of death unestablished from physical evidence alone. No verdict has been reached. Judge Bulone has ruled on nothing before him.

What Day 3 actually did was turn a case that had, until now, mostly been circumstantial and surveillance-driven into one carrying real forensic weight, volume, and a coherent narrative, while still resting, at bottom, on presumptive testing rather than confirmed identification. The gap between a color change in a test tube and a laboratory-confirmed DNA match is still open ground, and so is the suppression fight the defense has been quietly, carefully preserving all day, every day, without arguing it once in front of the judge on the merits. Both of those remain the defense's most viable terrain going into Day 4, and neither has been touched yet.

There is a version of this day that reads as overwhelming, eight witnesses, a truck bed, a bathroom, a trunk, a landfill, a drug traced to a surgery center, all of it moving in one direction. There is another version, sitting inside the same transcript, that reads as a case still built almost entirely on inference: presumptive tests standing in for confirmed ones, a cart that does not match, a tag that does not fit the pattern, contamination nobody has yet had the chance to argue. Both readings are honest. Judge Bulone is the only person in that courtroom whose job is to weigh them against each other, and he has given no sign yet of which way he is leaning, because a bench trial does not work that way. He listens. He rules on objections. He says nothing about where he stands, and there is no jury box to watch for a reaction, because there is no jury.

Day 4 starts Thursday at 9:15 AM Eastern, the judge's own words at adjournment, "so tomorrow everyone can be ready at 9:15," a small, ordinary sentence that closes out a day that was anything but ordinary in what it put into the record.

I'll keep coming back to the same discipline every day this trial runs, because it is the only honest way to cover a capital case with no body and no jury: report exactly what the record shows, no more and no less, hold back what isn't verified yet, and let the presumption of innocence sit at the center of every single page rather than at the bottom of a disclaimer nobody reads. Day 3 gave the State volume. It did not give anyone a verdict, and it will not, because that decision belongs to one man alone, and he has not made it yet.

For the whole day, gavel to gavel, with every recess cut out and every witness in order, watch the full edition below.