No Body, No Jury: Proving a Death With No Body, Then the State Rests and Kosowski Calls No One

Lois Cozzi has been married to George Cozzi for more than fifty-one years. She helped plan her son's wedding. She told the court that once Steven moved out on his own they talked every couple of days, by phone and by text, and that holidays were almost always spent together, his husband Michael included. "You know, I wasn't a hover mom," she said.

Then the prosecutor asked the only question the State needed her for. Had she seen or heard from Steven since March 21, 2023? Had he texted? Called? A postcard?

"Nothing."

That one word is the State of Florida's problem and its answer in the same breath. Steven Cozzi walked out of his front door in jeans and a red sweatshirt on the morning of March 21, 2023, went to work at the Blanchard Law Firm on South Belcher Road in Largo, and has not been seen since. No body has ever been found. To convict Tomasz Kosowski of first-degree murder, the State has to prove, before anything else, that Steven Cozzi is dead. It has to prove it without the one thing nearly every other murder trial starts with.

Day 6, Tuesday 2026-09-22, was the State's last attempt. It called his mother and his father, the detective who ran the investigation, a former FBI forensic accountant who followed his money until it stopped, and the medical examiner for Pinellas and Pasco counties, who told the court he believes Steven Cozzi is dead and would call it a homicide "without any hesitation." Then, on cross-examination, the same medical examiner explained why he never signed a death certificate. "There's no body."

And then the State rested. Tomasz Kosowski, the plastic surgeon accused of killing the lawyer on the other side of a lawsuit he himself brought, called no witnesses and did not take the stand. The evidence is closed.

If you are new to this case, here is its shape. A plastic surgeon sued for money, stopped defending the case, and was weeks from losing it when the lawyer on the other side disappeared. Kosowski was the plaintiff; Cozzi was the opposing counsel defending the companies he sued. Kosowski has fired every lawyer he had, given up his right to a jury for both the guilt phase and any penalty phase, and now defends himself against the death penalty, with standby counsel at the table in case he changes his mind. So one person, Judge Joseph A. Bulone of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, decides whether Steven Cozzi is dead, whether Tomasz Kosowski killed him, and, if it ever gets that far, whether Kosowski lives or dies. Until he rules, Kosowski is presumed innocent, and everything below is written that way.

Hold on to that fact about one person deciding everything, because it runs through every hour of Day 6. Twice, the judge let evidence in while saying, on the record, what it could not be used for. Once, he taught Kosowski a motion, told him to make it, and denied it in the next sentence. Each time he was careful, and as far as I can see each time he was right on the law. And each time, the person drawing the line was the person who has to stay on the right side of it. In a jury trial the judge rules and the jury decides. Here there is one head.

So the question I kept coming back to all day was a simple one. When the judge who admits evidence for a limited purpose is the same judge who must ignore it for every other purpose, who checks the line?

A morning fight over files he says he could not open

Before a single witness was sworn, the prosecutor stood up to clean up the record. The week before, Kosowski had complained about a PowerPoint presentation a detective used on the stand. The prosecutor told the court it had gone to Kosowski's earlier lawyers from the start of the case, to standby counsel on a hard drive, and to Kosowski himself on paper on the first morning of trial, 2026-09-14. He also said, and this is worth noticing, that he had cut the slideshow from 184 slides to 145 himself, to take out anything he thought might be inflammatory. And he said the jail's custodian of inmate laptops had confirmed a PowerPoint file opens on the exact laptop Kosowski uses. "I guess this is acting as my Richardson hearing," he said.

A quick word on what that means, because it comes up twice on Day 6. In Florida, when one side says the other broke the rules about what must be handed over before trial, the judge holds a Richardson hearing to decide whether there was a violation at all, and if so, whether it hurt the other side's ability to prepare.

Kosowski had a direct answer. "If he's so confident that I was able to view all these files, then the simple thing to do would be actually bring the laptop here and demonstrate that I was able to actually open all these files." The State's reply was that its obligation "is to give it to him, not to play it for him," and then: "He chose to be his own lawyer."

Judge Bulone found no discovery violation. He noted that he had personally watched Kosowski follow along with the paper copy while the detective testified. And then he did something he did not have to do. He told Kosowski that if he wanted the jail custodian on the stand, he could put her there, "for the benefit of appellate courts just in case an appellate court somehow gets involved in this case." Nobody took him up on it.

I want to give that its due. A judge who invites a defendant to build the record that might one day be used against his own ruling is thinking about fairness. But the cheapest possible test of Kosowski's complaint was sitting in the same building: a laptop, a file, and a person who says she already opened it. Nobody opened it in the courtroom. The finding may well be right. It is also exactly the kind of question a pro se defendant cannot settle for himself, and it was left where it started.

One more thing was said in that stretch, and it matters later. The prosecutor disclosed that his last witness, the medical examiner, had watched a person get into a 39-gallon trash bag, something that was not in the doctor's deposition. Keep that in your pocket.

The State then recalled a Sheriff's Office forensic supervisor, Ashley Luth, to put one more swab from the men's bathroom wall into evidence. No objection. No cross-examination.

"Nothing": the mother and father

Lois Cozzi's testimony lasted about ninety seconds. George Cozzi's lasted less. He spelled his name for the court reporter, confirmed Lois is his wife, and said Steven is his son. Had he heard from Steven since March 21, 2023? "No, I have not." Texted or called? "No, he has not." Any mail? "No, sir." Seen him? "No, I have not."

Kosowski asked neither of them a single question.

I think that was the right call, and I think he knew it. There is nothing to cross-examine in a parent's silence, and any attempt would have cost him far more than it could gain with the one person he has to persuade. These are two grieving parents. They were in court to establish an absence, and they did.

That is what their testimony is for, legally. With no body, the State cannot show the court a death. It has to show a life that stopped. A man who talked to his mother every couple of days, spent his holidays with his parents, and has not once reached them in three and a half years is the first brick in that wall. It proves nothing on its own. It was never meant to. It is the foundation the rest of the day was built on.

The lead detective walks the whole case, start to finish

Colin Bolton was the lead detective on this case for the Largo Police Department. He is now the department's accreditation manager, a post he moved into in January of 2026. On Day 6 the State used him the way prosecutors often use a lead detective at the end of a case: as the narrator who ties every earlier witness into one timeline.

He arrived at the law firm at about 1:50 in the afternoon on March 21, 2023. In the men's restroom of Building B he found what he described as a swipe of a dry, dark liquid "consistent with blood" on the outside of the door, shreds of paper towel and toilet paper across the floor, droplets on the stall wall, paint inside the stall that looked chemically stripped, and dark liquid "almost swiped across the floor." Cozzi's car was still in the lot. The vacant offices in the building were searched. He was not in them.

Then the cameras. People who knew Cozzi, his boss Jake Blanchard and a paralegal, Rebecca Watters, pointed him out on the property's surveillance video by his red sweatshirt. Anywhere in that day's footage, was the person in the red sweatshirt ever seen leaving Building B? "No, we did not." What did leave, at about 10:22 that morning, was a man pulling a dark wagon with a red covering back to a gray Toyota Tundra. The truck left the lot at about 11:16. Cozzi's own doorbell camera showed him walking out his front door at about 8:09 that morning, in jeans and a red sweatshirt.

Bolton described Cozzi's husband, Michael Montgomery, as "very cooperative": an hour-long interview in the parking lot, a consent search of his vehicle, and a return trip the next day to have his shoes photographed.

Other officers tracked the gray Tundra to a home in Tarpon Springs owned by Tomasz Kosowski. A detail that is easy to read past: the truck was not registered to him. His registered vehicles, Bolton said, were a trailer, a motorcycle and a red Toyota four-door. On March 23, when detectives went for a knock and talk, the voluntary conversation police try first, Kosowski was not there. Bolton wrote a search warrant that night and the Tarpon Springs Police Department served it.

In the garage was a gray Toyota Tundra with red badging. The New Jersey license plate that witnesses had seen on the truck at the law firm was not on it and was never found. There was a license plate rotator fixed to the rear bumper, a device that swaps one plate for another. Other plates were found, and not all of them belonged to Kosowski. Forensics told him the tailgate returned presumptive positive tests for blood, meaning a screening test that flags possible blood before a lab confirms what it is. When the garage floor was sprayed with luminol, a chemical that glows in contact with traces of blood, Bolton said there was "immediate luminescence."

There was also a wagon in that garage. Same brand as the one on the video, Bolton said, but black with yellow striping and a distinctive yellow accent on the handle. It was photographed and left there. Why? "It was obvious that it wasn't the one seen in the rear of the truck."

Kosowski himself was not found until March 25, when Tarpon Springs police stopped his red Corolla, and he was arrested that night. Recorded jail phone calls, part of one in Polish, led detectives to a house he was renting in Miami. Inside, Bolton said, was almost no furniture, the defendant's dogs, and in a back room a red gorilla cart. Photographs of it were admitted over Kosowski's objection. Was it seized? "No, it was not." Why not? "It was obviously not the cart that we had seen in the bed of the Tundra."

Stop there for a second, because this is the first watchdog question of the day, and it comes out of the lead detective's own mouth. The dark wagon with the red covering that the State says left the law firm has not, on anything I heard on Day 6, been recovered. The State's case about that wagon rests on what the video shows. Two carts of the same brand, in two homes connected to the man on trial, were looked at, photographed and left where they stood, both times because it was "obvious." There is a fair reading of that: warrants have limits, a cart that looks different probably is different, and it cuts toward the State that he owned this brand of cart in two places. But a decision made twice, on one officer's eyesight, about the only kind of object the State says carried a body, is one the finder of fact is entitled to weigh. If either cart held a trace of anyone, nobody will ever know.

Bolton went on. At the Kendall Surgery Center in Miami, where Kosowski worked, surgery logs showed he had performed surgeries on March 22 and March 23, 2023, and that he tended to work Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. In a refrigerator in a common area, unlocked, Bolton saw vials of succinylcholine, the paralytic drug the State's anesthesiologist testified about on Day 5.

On March 31, 2023, following location data, Bolton searched Loop Road off the Tamiami Trail with tribal police, the National Park Service, state wildlife officers and Collier County deputies. A dirt road, "desolate in all directions," swamp, alligators, snakes. No Steven Cozzi. There was a dumpster set back from the road, shut with a chain and a carabiner and no lock, that struck him as a place a body could be hidden. He believed its bottom returned a presumptive positive for blood. It had been emptied on March 23, and the collection truck's own video of that dump gave him cause for concern "immediately." The load went to the Collier County landfill, where detectives raked through trash sunup to sundown starting April 1. Nothing.

He finished with money and with a question. The county lab caps how many items a case can submit for DNA testing, he said; he went over the limit, kept submitting for a year or two, and still could not submit every swab. He subpoenaed every account on Cozzi's credit report and saw no sign Cozzi used any of them after he disappeared. Then the prosecutor asked the question that is, in one sentence, the State's entire first element:

As the lead detective, standing here now, had he received any information to support that Steven Cozzi is alive? "I have not."

"Walk me through your theory": Kosowski cross-examines the lead detective

Then it was Kosowski's turn, and it was some of the most effective courtroom work he has done in this trial.

He went straight to identification. In any of the surveillance videos, was there ever a positive identification of him? From the veterinary office cameras? "No." From the video of the truck driving? "No." The Corolla? "No." Did anyone collect a ramp, or see one in the truck, at the house, in any video? "Not that I'm aware of." "I don't recall." "None that I could see."

Then he asked the question most lawyers would never ask a lead detective, because it hands the witness the floor. "Can you walk me through your theory of the alleged murder?" An objection was overruled, and Bolton did. He believes the figure seen walking from the truck entered the building and waited in a back room, where, he said, Kosowski's fingerprint was found; that Cozzi went into the bathroom and was followed in; that "some kind of significant bloodletting event" happened there; and that his body was put in the wagon, loaded into the truck and driven to the Tarpon Springs house, then to the dumpster in South Florida, and from there to the Collier County landfill.

Kosowski walked him back through it, piece by piece, and got a "correct" at every step: clean the bathroom, load the body in the cart, get the cart onto the truck, drive home, stay about five hours, move the body into the Corolla, drive to the Loop Road dumpster that night, go home to Miami. Did he act alone? "Based on all the evidence I've seen, it appears that way."

Now he had what he wanted, the State's theory in the State's own words, and he went to the one step in it he thinks a jury, or here a judge, will not believe. "How did I get that gorilla cart onto the truck?"

Bolton answered honestly. He recalled Cozzi weighing about 190 pounds. "It's a movable amount of weight, it can be lifted." He added a detail from the scene: a large oak tree between the sidewalk and the parking spot where the truck backed in, whose roots, he believed, raised the ground and brought it closer to the tailgate.

Bolton had not been part of the State's trip to measure the truck in storage and did not know the results. Was he physically fit? "I would think so." Did he lift weights? "I do." Would he help with a demonstration? "I could, sure."

Here is what Kosowski proposed. The counsel table in that courtroom is 30 inches high. The State had measured the Tundra at 28 inches from the ground to the rear bumper, and he figured the tailgate adds about four more. So the table is a fair stand-in. There is a gorilla cart already in evidence. Put a volunteer of about 190 or 195 pounds in it, and let the detective lift the loaded cart onto the table.

The State objected. The strength that matters, it said, is Kosowski's in March 2023, not this detective's now, and it doubted anyone would find a 190-pound volunteer to be lifted onto a courtroom table. Judge Bulone sustained it. "I'll sustain the objection, but you made your point."

"I don't think I have," Kosowski said.

What he said next was the most direct thing he has said to the court in six days. "Their theory is that I took a hundred and ninety-five pound person in a cart and somehow lifted those two weights together and loaded it onto the back of a truck. He's telling you that I committed murder, and he's trying to kill me for it." And: "The least that they have to do is show me that this is plausible." He said his career has him moving 195-pound people from operating tables to gurneys all the time.

"All right, I understand your argument and I'll take it into consideration," the judge said, "but we're not going to have that type of demonstration in the courtroom."

So Kosowski asked Bolton directly whether he thought he could lift a 195-pound person in a cart onto that table. Bolton said he has dragged and carried people in various ways. "I believe so."

I want to be fair to the ruling, because it is defensible. A courtroom experiment is generally allowed only when its conditions are substantially similar to the event it recreates. This detective is not the defendant, 2026 is not 2023, and a courtroom floor is not a parking lot with a root-raised verge. Lifting a live person in a cart onto furniture in a capital courtroom carries a real risk of injury and of spectacle. And "you made your point" and "I'll take it into consideration" are not nothing when the man saying them is the one who returns the verdict.

But here is the part we are here to say. The only defense Kosowski has put in front of this court on how a body got into that truck is physical implausibility. He has no expert and no investigator on this record. The State measured the truck; he was not there. So when the one demonstration a pro se defendant can mount is refused, the question is less whether the ruling was legally correct, which it probably was, and more whether there was a middle the court did not reach for: a weight of the right mass in place of a person, a stipulation to the measurements, a test on video. Nobody proposed one, and Kosowski does not know enough to ask. Hold on to this. By the afternoon, the question of who gets to test that cart looked very different.

On redirect, the State made sure the court heard the other half. No one identified Kosowski's face on video, but the truck was followed back to his house. His phone hit the cell tower right by the law firm at about 10:30 that morning. A neighbor's camera caught the Corolla leaving his home, his phone moved with it on toll and plate-reading cameras heading south that evening, and before leaving Pinellas County, Bolton agreed, he drove by the area of the law firm.

A death certificate, admitted, and a judge who says it proves nothing

When Bolton stepped down, the State did not call its next witness. It spent the next several minutes moving paper into evidence, and those minutes are the center of this whole day.

First came State's Composite Exhibit 126, certified filings from a civil probate case opened over Steven Cozzi's estate. Among them was an order granting a petition for a presumptive death certificate under Section 382.012 of the Florida Statutes, plus a notice to creditors and a stack of creditors' claims. A presumptive death certificate is the paperwork Florida uses when a court in a civil case determines a person is presumed dead but the body has not been located. It is how the estate of a missing person gets administered: bills get paid, accounts get closed, credit files get shut.

Kosowski objected. The prosecutor explained why the State wanted it. A presumptive death certificate, he said, tells every credit bureau that there will be no more credit, "you're dead financially speaking as well," and that goes to the testimony of the forensic accountant who was about to take the stand. And then he offered a limit that nobody had yet asked him for:

He told the court that the element in question, whether the victim is dead, belongs to the trier of fact, "yourself, Your Honor," and that he was not asking the document to take that decision away.

Judge Bulone overruled the objection and drew the line out loud:

Then he said it again, more plainly: it is admitted for that purpose, "not as evidence that he actually is deceased." That, he said, is something the State has to prove during the trial.

Minutes later the State offered the certificate itself, State's Exhibit 127. The prosecutor said again that he was not making the argument that it proves the first element. Kosowski asked the obvious question. "If he's not making the argument, why bring it into evidence?" And the answer the State gave is worth reading slowly:

A few minutes before, the promise was that the State would not argue this document as proof of the element. Now the State was offering it as "more evidence that he is dead." Those two sentences do not sit comfortably next to each other, and I think it is fair to say so.

The judge admitted it anyway, on the same limit, and explained himself with an analogy. "It shows why they're doing what they're doing, and assuming that he is dead, but that doesn't mean that it's evidence that he is, because I have to look at the independent evidence of that." He compared it to a traffic ticket. Under Florida law, he said, traffic tickets are generally not admissible, because whether somebody drove recklessly or carelessly is not the police officer's call. "So it's the same sort of thought process." Overruled.

Credit first, because it is earned. Judge Bulone stated the limit three separate times, in plain English, on the record, with a reason a layperson can follow. If this case is ever reviewed, an appeals court will find the line exactly where he drew it.

Now the question a jury trial never has to ask. In front of a jury, a limiting instruction is a message from one person to other people, and everyone can see whether it was given. Here, the person who gives the instruction and the person who must obey it are the same person. The document recording a civil probate court's presumption about Steven Cozzi now sits in the file of the judge who has to decide whether Steven Cozzi is dead. The State told him it would not argue it for that purpose, and in the same stretch offered it as more evidence of exactly that. The judge says he will look only at the independent evidence, and I have no reason to doubt he means it. But nobody else in that room can see inside the one head where that line is being held. So who checks the line? On this record, the honest answer is an appeals court, years from now, and only if the case gets there.

The paper kept coming: Florida motor vehicle records listing Cozzi as deceased, admitted without objection as "part of the overall picture," and then credit bureau records. Kosowski objected to one set, saying it dated to a stretch in 2025 when he was representing himself and was never given it. The prosecutor said it had gone to his earlier lawyers and was on a hard drive delivered to him at the jail on 2026-08-21. The judge ran a second Richardson inquiry and found no violation, adding that nobody could be surprised Cozzi's accounts had gone quiet. "If there was," he said, "that would be rather huge news."

Then the judge made a point for the defense that the defense had not made. The records had to be current right up to trial, he told the prosecutor, because if they stopped in 2024 or 2025, "there could have been some account activity after that." The prosecutor conceded they were still waiting on two credit bureaus. The court broke for an hour's lunch so Kosowski could look through the rest.

When court came back, Kosowski was ready. The judge asked whether anything in the remaining records showed Cozzi was alive. The prosecutor said no, noting that one checking account was shared with Cozzi's husband and did show activity, but Montgomery's, not Cozzi's. Kosowski objected to the prosecutor "saying that there's no evidence of financial activity after the 21st, because there absolutely is." The judge asked him which exhibits. He named three from memory: 131, 138 and 140. The judge admitted everything from 126 through 140 and told him he could cross-examine the next witness on exactly that. He did.

The money stopped, and a charge on March 21 nobody can explain

Tiffany Gorman spent close to twenty years at the FBI, most of them as a forensic accountant, and now runs her own forensic accounting firm. She was given Steven Cozzi's bank records, card statements, loans, credit reports, wage records and the estate filings, and she built what the prosecutor called his financial life.

What she found was a man of habit. For about three months before he disappeared, roughly 85 percent of his card transactions happened in a corridor about three miles across, with the law firm at its center. The same handful of places, over and over, with one outlier in those three months, a single meal in Hillsborough County two days before he vanished. Her map went into evidence without objection.

His wallet, she had been told, was left behind in his office. That mattered to her analysis, she said, because anyone buying something in person with his cards would need the cards.

And then it stopped. His last in-person purchases were authorized on March 20, 2023. After that, she said, no in-person purchases, no debit withdrawals, no unexplained activity. Some recurring payments kept running, because, Montgomery told her, the estate struggled to get into the accounts to shut them off. One was a Grammarly subscription, renewed on March 21, 2023, for what she said was the annual amount. About ten days after the disappearance, someone applied for a store credit card in his name using a phone number and an internet address that were not his; it was rejected, and on its face she read it as fraudulent. And every open account on his credit reports but one reported him deceased, the exception being a card the estate could not stop paying.

Her conclusion: his financial activity "completely stopped after March 20th, 2023, which was very inconsistent with his financial pattern." In her opinion, "an unplanned event occurred," near the place where he habitually did his business.

That is a strong piece of the State's first element. People who walk away from their lives usually take their money with them, or at least use it. Nothing she described shows Steven Cozzi doing that.

Then Kosowski stood up, and did it again.

He started with what she did not have. Her own report said some card records were never produced. She agreed, and said most of those accounts were closed long before March 2023. She did not look at old card statements. She spoke to Montgomery, she said, "briefly," about the debit card, the recurring payments and the estate's trouble stopping them. Did she verify any of what he told her by contacting merchants? "No, I did not."

Then the Grammarly charge. It posted on March 21, 2023, the day Cozzi disappeared, on a card that was his alone. How did she know it was automatic? She said she looked up the subscription's annual price and it matched, and Montgomery told her they had had Grammarly since COVID. Kosowski drew a distinction a lot of people would miss: an automatic renewal is one thing, but an automatic payment is another. It might be, he suggested, that Grammarly sent a bill on the 21st and Steven clicked "pay now."

"It could have, but I did not... it did not appear that way to me, but it could have been."

He pressed the distinction. Her answer: "In looking at the transaction on the credit card statement, there's no way to tell one way or the other."

"So we don't know, basically," Kosowski said.

"Correct."

"There's no way to tell."

Did she know what time of day that charge went through? "No, I do not know."

Then he found two online marketplace purchases on the Wells Fargo debit card in Cozzi's name, posted March 24 and, as she pointed out herself, authorized on March 22, 2023, the day after he vanished. Click-to-buy, she agreed, not a card swiped in a store. Had she contacted the retailer? "No." Had Montgomery told her he made them? "We didn't talk about these specific transactions." Several more charges went the same way, each described as recurring and none verified with the company, until she said she would have to look back at her work product to know which were which. "I don't know."

The State repaired what it could on redirect. If a person's cards are in a wallet on his desk, he is not making in-person purchases, right? "Correct." He went to the same places over and over? "Yes." And after March 21, 2023, that activity stopped? "Yes, it did."

Here is how I read it, in both directions. The State's point survives: the in-person life of a habitual man ends on March 20. Nothing Kosowski did touched that. But he did something real. The State's own expert conceded that a charge on the day of the disappearance, on Cozzi's own card, cannot be told apart from the records as an automatic renewal or a man clicking a button. And two discretionary purchases authorized the day after were never checked with the retailer and were left for a pro se defendant to find in the exhibits himself. The account was shared with Cozzi's husband, which is the most likely explanation, and the court will surely weigh that. But the State has an investigative agency, a laboratory and an FBI-trained accountant. The defendant with a stack of printouts should not be the one who notices.

"It has no body. So there's just context."

The State's last witness was Dr. Jon Thogmartin, who spelled his first name for the court reporter, J-O-N. He has been the District Six Medical Examiner for Pinellas and Pasco counties for twenty-six years, is board certified in anatomic, clinical and forensic pathology, and guessed he has handled around 7,500 cases, a number he called conservative.

He opened with a lesson that the rest of his testimony depends on, so here it is in his terms. The cause of death is what killed the person, and there are countless causes. The manner of death is the circumstance, and there are only five: natural, accident, suicide, homicide, and undetermined. The same gunshot wound can be any of the first four, he explained. "You determine manner by context."

Then he said the sentence that frames the whole case. Usually, he gets the body and works backward for context. "This case is different. It has no body. So there's just context."

The context he was shown was the State's case: the law firm surveillance, a trash truck's video, a transit bus camera, doorbell footage, a license plate camera photograph, photographs of Kosowski's injuries, DNA results tying Cozzi to blood from that bathroom. And a gorilla cart.

On the bathroom, he gave the State its best testimony of the trial against a natural death. A catastrophic natural bleed, like a perforated ulcer, can be a large volume of blood, he said, but it collects in one place, a toilet, a sink, a pool. This bathroom had blood outside the door, on a urinal wall, on the floor, in the drain, and patterns that looked wiped and cleaned to him. And: "If you die a natural death like a GI bleed, you typically don't, your body doesn't just disappear." When a bleed is fatal, "he's there."

That is real forensic reasoning, it is inside his expertise, and it deserves to be said as plainly as the questions that follow.

On the law firm video, he described a person arriving with a box on his shoulder, Cozzi arriving at the same door a couple of minutes later, and at about 10:22 a person pulling a wagon that looked heavy and hard to pull. He was told Cozzi was about 190 pounds. He is 5-foot-11 and about 170.

Then the prosecutor asked him about the gorilla cart in evidence.

"But did you have occasion to actually get into the gorilla cart yourself?" "Yes." And a few minutes later, in the prosecutor's own words: "And when you sat in it, I lifted you up in it." "Yes, you did."

Read that twice. That morning, the State objected to Kosowski's proposed demonstration on the ground that a different person's strength in 2026 proves nothing about the defendant's in 2023, and the objection was sustained. That afternoon, the State put in evidence, in the prosecutor's own question, that the prosecutor had already run a version of that demonstration himself, out of court, with no notice to anyone that I heard, lifting a 170-pound man in the cart. The State's own morning objection applies at least as strongly to its own version. Kosowski did not object, so there was no ruling. It is simply in.

The prosecutor had him step down to watch the transit bus footage. The object in the wagon in the truck bed was "certainly" big enough to be a body, he said, and when the truck accelerated, part of whatever was under the blanket appeared to move on its own. That early, about an hour and twenty-five minutes after the events at the law firm, a body would not yet be stiff with rigor mortis, which reaches the large muscles after roughly four hours. What he saw, he said, was consistent with the appearance of a body. On the license plate camera photograph farther north: "it looks like a body to me."

That is an opinion from a man who has handled thousands of bodies, and the court may give it real weight. It is also an opinion about what is under a blanket in a still frame and a moving video, built partly on the rest of the State's context.

He explained that a body folded into a compact shape in the first few hours will hold that shape once rigor sets in, and that a body can fit in a large contractor bag. Then the morning's disclosure came back. "Did you also observe in my office someone get into a trash bag?" the prosecutor asked. "Oh yeah." A second demonstration, out of court, in the State's own office, put in through the State's own witness.

He said decomposition in a Florida dumpster in March would be significant within a day, and the smell very bad. Then he looked at photographs of Kosowski taken the night of his arrest: bruises on both arms, one with an abrasion over it, a scab on the right knee, scabbed marks on the back of his hands and knuckles, a bruise under a thumbnail. All, in his opinion, "older than three days," which fits a window around March 21. Were the hand injuries defensive wounds? No. Defensive wounds usually come from grabbing a weapon or warding off an attack, and these were on the back of the hands. "They're not defensive."

Then, in open court, with the cart in front of him, he showed how he would load a 190-pound body into a truck bed with it: front wheels up on the load floor first, then lift the back. The frame could press into the arms and torso, he said, and a collapsing cart could crush a thumb. It "could be a reasonable explanation" for the injuries. And he was careful to add: "These are just plausible scenarios," and "there are other plausible scenarios as well."

I give him credit for that care, and for "they're not defensive," which was not the answer the State was hoping for. But notice what just happened. A few hours after the defendant was refused permission to test the cart in front of the judge, the State's expert used the same cart, in front of the judge, to show how the State says it could be done.

Then came the two opinions the State called him for. To a reasonable degree of medical certainty, was Steven Cozzi alive or dead? "I believe he's dead." And, given blood in various locations, the man missing, a cleanup, and what the prosecutor listed as "a vile smell in a dumpster" and a time period consistent with decomposition, and a man "financially missing," what would the manner be? "I would do homicide on it. My opinion would be this is a homicidal type case without any hesitation." His reasoning: an accident, a natural death or a suicide in that bathroom does not make a body disappear, "and somebody doesn't come and clean it up."

That elimination argument is the strongest thing the State has put on the question of death all trial. Two things about it. First, the question that produced it included "a vile smell in a dumpster." On Day 6, no witness testified that anyone smelled anything at that dumpster; the doctor had only said, in general terms, that a decomposing body would. His explanation did not rely on the smell, so the opinion may well stand without it, but a hypothetical is supposed to rest on facts in evidence, and nobody objected. Second, and more important: nobody asked him for a cause of death, and he did not give one. Succinylcholine, the drug the lead detective had seen in an unlocked refrigerator that morning, was never put to him.

Kosowski went straight at it. "Did you fill out a death certificate in this case?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"There's no body."

His statute, he explained, gives him jurisdiction to determine cause of death but says nothing about certifying it. Most deaths in his jurisdiction he does not certify, and there is always a chance the body will be found, in which case the medical examiner where it is found should certify it. He had been brought in mainly as a consultant, on changes after death, Kosowski's injuries and handling a body. "I have an opinion, but I did not certify the death because there's no body."

Then the blood. Asked to define a "bloodletting event," the doctor said Cozzi lost "a decent amount," and then: "I do not believe it was enough external blood loss to kill him." It was not a half gallon. If he died of blood loss, it could have been internal. "I have no idea of what the source of the blood loss is." He did not think the pattern fit a cut carotid or femoral artery, and said the source could be anything "up to a gunshot wound." A nosebleed? "Yeah, but where's his body? That's the problem."

And then the cart, one more time. Did the prosecutor lift him to table height? "He did not elevate me to the table, but I have no doubt he could do it." And: "But again, I only weigh 170. To be fair."

Kosowski asked for his demonstration a second time, now with the medical examiner in the cart and the prosecutor lifting. The court did not order it. He asked a third time for something smaller: just show whether the empty cart's wheels can get up onto a 30-inch table with the other end on the floor. "I'm not gonna mandate any court demonstrations," the judge said. "You can make your points without demonstrations." Kosowski said it would take "Herculean strength." The judge told him to move on.

The doctor did say something that cuts toward the State: loading a body that way would be very hard and very uncomfortable, "but it is within the human ability to do it." He also did not know the cart's wheelbase. Asked whether he would get into a trash bag Kosowski said came from his own car: "I would rather not, but I know you can get a human being in one."

On redirect, the prosecutor asked whether the body he believed he saw in the truck had suffered mortal wounds. "I would say mortal wounds or fatal poisoning or something." Those were the only words about poisoning that the State's medical evidence put on the record.

So here is where I land on the medical examiner, in both directions. He was careful, credentialed and candid, and his reasoning that a natural, accidental or self-inflicted death does not clean itself up and walk away is hard to argue with on this record. It is also an opinion without a body, an autopsy, toxicology, a cause of death or a certificate, and he said so himself. And on the one physical question the defendant has built his defense around, the State ran its demonstrations privately, in its own office, and presented the results through its own witness, while the defendant's three requests to test the same thing in front of the finder of fact were each refused. Each ruling may be defensible on its own. Taken together, the State got to test its theory and the defendant did not, and the one person who can weigh that is the judge who made the rulings.

"State rests." "Do you know what that is?" "No, sir."

After a short break to make sure every exhibit was where it belonged, the State announced it: "State rests."

What followed took less than a minute, and it is the story of this trial in miniature.

The judge turned to Kosowski. Did he want to move for a judgment of acquittal? And then: "Do you know what that is?"

"No, sir."

A motion for judgment of acquittal is the defense telling the judge that, even taking the State's evidence in the light most favorable to the State, it has not made out a case a reasonable fact-finder could convict on, so the judge should end the trial with a not guilty verdict right there. In most trials a defense lawyer makes it by reflex, because failing to make it can forfeit the argument on appeal. Judge Bulone explained it in a sentence. Then: "I can give you a hint, it's always a really good idea to do that."

"Okay. Let's do it."

"It'll be denied, but it's preserved for appellate review, which is what you want to do."

Credit goes first, and it is not small. He did not have to raise it. A pro se defendant who never makes the motion can lose the sufficiency argument without knowing he had it, and in a capital case that argument may be the most important thing an appeals court ever looks at. This judge raised it on his own, explained it, told him to make it, and told him why. Some judges would have said nothing. And a denial is very likely correct on the law: the standard is only whether the evidence is legally enough to go forward, not whether the judge believes it. A denial is not a finding of guilt, and it is not a statement of what the judge thinks of the evidence.

Now the question. "It'll be denied" came in the same breath as the motion. No argument, no response from the State, not a word on any element of first-degree murder in a trial where the State is asking for a man's life. And sitting there, less than an hour old, from the State's own last witness: no cause of death, blood loss he did not believe was enough to kill, "no idea" of its source, "other plausible scenarios," "not defensive," and a cart never lifted to table height in front of anyone. A trained lawyer would have argued all of it, and it very likely would still have been denied. But the argument would be on the record, and the ruling would have answered it.

So what is a motion worth when the person who suggests it, the person who rules on it, and the person who decides the verdict are all the same person? It is worth exactly what the judge said it was worth: preservation. It keeps the door open for a court that does not exist yet. That is real, and it is also the whole of it. The sufficiency question itself will now be answered in the verdict, by the judge who just denied the motion without hearing it argued.

No witnesses, no testimony, no lawyer

Then the judge took Kosowski through his choices, carefully. He could call witnesses. He could testify, in a narrative, and face cross-examination on anything relevant. Or he could let standby counsel take over and question him, which the judge said would probably go "a lot smoother." If he chose not to testify, the court would not infer guilt or hold it against him in any way.

Did he want to keep representing himself? "I would like to keep representing myself." Call any witnesses? "No, Your Honor." Take the stand? "No, Your Honor." Did he believe that was in his best interest? "Yes, Your Honor." Was anyone forcing him? Was he under the influence of anything? No, and no. His own free will? "Yes, Your Honor."

He tried to put in one piece of evidence of his own: an excerpt of earlier trial testimony from the FBI cell-phone analyst, Kevin Corrigan, as a defense exhibit. The judge told him transcripts of trial testimony are not admissible as exhibits, but he is free to argue in closing what the witness said. Kosowski said he just wanted the court to have it in hand when he did. The judge said he already had a copy.

A little later the judge offered one more time. If Kosowski wanted standby counsel appointed for closing arguments and the rest of the trial, Jane McNeill or Daniel Hernandez, at no cost to him, the court would do it. "No, I'll speak for myself."

So the evidence in State of Florida v. Tomasz Kosowski is closed. The defense case consists of cross-examination, objections, and three exhibit numbers named from memory. The man on trial for his life did not tell the judge, under oath, where he was on March 21, 2023, or what happened to Steven Cozzi. That is his constitutional right. The judge has said on the record that he will not hold it against him, and I take him at his word. It also means the only account the court heard of that day came from the State.

Kosowski's last request of the day was that closings wait until the next morning. Granted.

The jury instructions for a jury that does not exist

What happened next is something you will almost never see. There is no jury in this courtroom. The judge wrote jury instructions anyway.

"I actually created jury instructions that I would have given in this case if we had a jury," he said, and he offered copies to both sides so they would know what to argue: the elements of first-degree murder, two lesser included offenses, second-degree murder and manslaughter, and the standard instructions on the plea of not guilty, reasonable doubt, the burden of proof and weighing the evidence. He trimmed it out loud. Out went the instructions on accomplices, informants, a child witness and a defendant who testified. In stayed the instruction on a defendant who did not testify. The State agreed there were no statements from the defendant in evidence, so that instruction came out too.

He also drew up a verdict form, "since that's consistent with what a jury would do," with four choices: guilty of first-degree murder as charged, guilty of second-degree murder, guilty of manslaughter, or not guilty. Neither side asked for any other lesser offense.

He came back from a fifteen-minute break with copies for the State, the defense, the clerk and himself. "That's the law that I'll be following," he said, and he asked both sides to tell him if anything in it was wrong.

Then he told Kosowski the one tactical fact that will shape the next morning: the State argues first and last. If Kosowski gives a closing, the State gets a rebuttal. If he waives his closing, the State gets no rebuttal, "because there's nothing to rebut."

Credit where it is due. Normally a judge sitting without a jury simply announces a verdict, and the law he applied lives in his head. Judge Bulone wrote it down, put it in the court file, handed it to a pro se defendant who does not know the law, and invited corrections. That is a gift to the defendant and to any court that ever reviews this case.

And the question it raises is the day's question. A jury instruction is a set of rules one person gives to other people. Here the author and the audience are the same man, applying to himself the rule that he must set aside what he admitted only for a limited purpose, and the rule that he may not hold the defendant's silence against him. I believe he means to do exactly that. The instructions let everyone else check whether the verdict matches the law he announced. Whether it matches what happened inside his head, no document can show.

Where the evidence stands, element by element

This is the bridge. Stripped to its bones, first-degree premeditated murder asks three things: that Steven Cozzi is dead, that his death was caused by a criminal act of Tomasz Kosowski, and that it was premeditated. The State must prove all three beyond a reasonable doubt. Florida law allows death to be proved by circumstantial evidence, and no rule says a murder case needs a body. But the State still has to prove it.

Is Steven Cozzi dead? For the State: a man of fixed habits who has not reached his parents in three and a half years. His car left in the lot, his wallet in his office. His blood, by the State's DNA evidence, in a bathroom the medical examiner says was cleaned. His in-person spending ending on March 20, 2023. A medical examiner of twenty-six years who believes he is dead. Against it: no body, no autopsy, no cause of death, and that same medical examiner saying the blood lost in the bathroom was not, by itself, enough to kill him, and signing no certificate. A March 21 charge the State's own accountant cannot tell apart from a click to pay, and two purchases the next day nobody checked. And a presumptive death certificate that the judge has said, three times, does not prove the point.

Did Kosowski cause it? For the State, from Day 6 and the days before: the truck followed from the law firm to his garage, the missing New Jersey plate and the plate rotator, blood indicators on the tailgate and in the garage, his phone on the tower by the firm that morning, his Corolla tracked south, a dumpster on Loop Road with a possible blood indicator, injuries the medical examiner aged at more than three days. Against it: no one ever positively identified his face on any video. The wagon on the video has not been shown to have been recovered, and two carts of the same brand were left untested. And the one test the defendant asked for, three times, of how a 190-pound man in a cart gets into a truck bed, never happened in court.

Was it premeditated? Day 6 added little here directly, but it did not need to. The State's premeditation case was built on earlier days: the phone searches, the paralytic, the timing. What Day 6 added was succinylcholine in an unlocked refrigerator at his workplace, and three words from the medical examiner on redirect, "fatal poisoning or something." The State never asked its medical examiner whether that drug played any part.

And the verdict form gives the judge more than two choices. If he is convinced there was a killing but not that the State proved premeditation, second-degree murder and manslaughter are on the form. If he is not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the State proved Steven Cozzi is dead, or that Kosowski caused it, the answer is not guilty. Only a first-degree verdict opens the door to a penalty phase, and the same judge would decide that too.

What Day 7 has to answer

Closing arguments begin at 9 A.M. on Wednesday, 2026-09-23. The State goes first. Kosowski, if he chooses to speak, goes second, with his jury instructions and his exhibit numbers in hand, and without the lawyer he was offered twice more on Day 6. The State gets the last word only if he speaks. After that, there is no jury to send out and no jury to wait for. There is Judge Bulone.

Here is what I will be listening for. Will the State keep its promise about that death certificate in closing, or will "more evidence that he is dead" come back? Will anybody explain the charge on March 21 and the purchases on March 22? Will Kosowski turn the medical examiner's words, "I have no idea of what the source of the blood loss is," into an argument, and will he say out loud what the State's out-of-court cart demonstrations did and did not prove? And when the ruling comes, will the judge tell us how he held the lines he drew on Day 6? He owes no one that explanation. A judge who wrote his own jury instructions might give it anyway.

A man is missing. His mother says there has been nothing. The State says that nothing means he is dead and that Tomasz Kosowski made it so. Kosowski says the State never showed him how. The only person who decides is the judge who ruled on every piece of it, and on Day 7, we watch him do it.

Every Part of this trial, in order, lives in the Case Story Trial Podcast playlist. Start at the beginning if you want to judge the State's case the way the judge has to, from the first witness to the last.