"We Were Never There": The Brother Recants, And The Jury Was Out

Three friends went out on a night-fishing trip outside Frostproof, Florida, on July 17, 2020, and none of them came home. Brandon Rollins, Keven Springfield and Damion Tillman were shot to death near Lake Streety Road. Tony Wiggins is on trial for their murders in Bartow, and the State of Florida is asking a jury to send him to death. He is presumed innocent, and he stays presumed innocent through every sentence of this piece. No jury has returned a verdict on anything.

From the first day of this trial, the case against him has leaned on two people who were charged with helping him afterward and who took pleas instead of facing the same charge he faces. One is his brother, William "Robert" Wiggins. The other is his girlfriend at the time, Mary Whittemore. Both resolved their own cases by plea to accessory after the fact to a capital felony. Neither of them is on trial for murder. Neither of them faces the death penalty. Only Tony Wiggins does.

On Day 6, one of those two people walked into the courtroom two hours before the jury, raised his hand, swore to tell the truth, and took it back.

"We were never there."

That is Robert Wiggins, under oath, with the State asking the questions. And the twelve people who will decide whether his brother lives or dies were not in the room to hear it.

This is the story of a day that turned on something the jury never saw, and of an afternoon in which the State tried to build, out of phones, Facebook messages and web searches, the case its own witness had just walked away from. I am going to walk you through all of it. I am also going to ask some questions, because the record raises them, and because showing you only what the jury saw would leave out the most important thing that happened in that courthouse.

The Morning The Jury Never Saw

Court sat at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, September 22, 2026. The jury was not due until 10:00. The State had asked for the early start so it could do something called a proffer.

A proffer is a way of hearing a witness before anyone decides whether the jury hears him. The witness is sworn and questioned outside the jury's presence, and the court and both sides find out exactly what he is going to say. It is a safety valve. Lawyers use it when they are not sure what a witness will do on the stand, and when the stakes of finding out in front of the jury are too high.

The State asked to hear its own witness before the jury did. That alone tells you something.

Robert Wiggins was sworn as William Robert Wiggins. His lawyer on this case, Cory Chastang, was at his side, and confirmed on the record that his client did not want his other attorney present. The prosecutor made sure the ground rules were clear. He was under subpoena. He was under oath. And he was bound to tell the truth, in the prosecutor's words, "regardless if that answer hurts your brother, the state, or helps the defense." He said yes.

Then the State put his plea agreement in front of him. Exhibit 469, signed April 25, 2024. He confirmed his signature. He pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact to a capital felony and to tampering with evidence, and his sentencing waits until his brother's trial is over. That timing is not an accident. A cooperating witness whose sentence is deferred until after he testifies has every reason to give the State what it needs, and the law knows it, which is why juries are told to weigh that kind of testimony with care.

The prosecutor read the heart of the deal into the record. Robert Wiggins agreed to testify truthfully, the agreement says, because he "has repeatedly truthfully stated that Tony Wiggins Jr. was the lone individual who shot and killed all three victims while William Wiggins and Mary Whittemore were present."

The lone individual. That is the State's case against Tony Wiggins, written into a contract, signed by his brother.

"Yes And No"

Before the recantation, there was a smaller moment, and I think it may turn out to matter just as much.

The prosecutor asked him a standard question. Had he been promised anything that was not included in his plea agreement?

"Yes and no."

Asked to explain, he said: "I was told by Mark Levine that I was to be time served on both of my other active cases besides this case."

Mark Levine is the Assistant State Attorney prosecuting Tony Wiggins. So under oath, in a proceeding the State itself asked for, the State's own cooperating witness testified that the State's own prosecutor had told him something that is not in the written deal.

The prosecutor on his feet followed up, and the follow-up matters, so here it is as the record has it. He asked whether Robert Wiggins believed his plea agreement was supposed to be amended to cover his new open cases. "It was supposed to." That was his belief? "Yes." And had his own attorney advised him that the State is not doing that? "Yes."

So I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of moment where it is easy to say more than the record shows. What the record shows is Robert Wiggins' sworn claim that a named prosecutor told him he would get time served on two other cases, the State framing that as his belief, and his agreement that his own lawyer told him the State is not doing it. Nobody on Day 6 put the prosecutor he named on the record about what was or was not said. It is one man's word, and he is a man who, a few minutes later, would tell the court that much of what he has said before was false.

But here is why it cannot be left sitting there. When the State makes a deal with a witness, anything it gives or promises that witness is something the defense is entitled to know about, because it goes straight to why the witness says what he says. The law on that has been settled for more than fifty years, and it covers what a witness is led to expect, not only what ends up on paper. A cooperating witness who believed he was getting time served on two other open cases, from the prosecutor trying this one, is precisely the kind of thing that has to be on the table. So the questions write themselves. What exactly was said to him, and by whom? Was it disclosed to the defense? And if the State's key cooperating witness believed he was getting something the paperwork does not show, what does that say about every statement he gave while he believed it?

The court did not take any of that up on Day 6. It should not be allowed to disappear.

"I Just Told Them Whatever They Wanted To Hear"

Then the State walked him back through his own words, in order, and the order is the story.

In his first statements to detectives in July 2020, he said he never left home that Friday night. Then he said they all went to McDonald's. Then he added a stop at Dollar General. He denied going to Lake Streety Road. He denied that his brother killed anyone. He denied being in a white pickup truck.

By July 21, 2020, his story had moved. He admitted going to Lake Streety Road, but said he stayed at the end of the road while his brother walked off. On the stand on Day 6, he called that version false too.

And then, still on July 21, came the full account, the one that put him and his brother at the scene in the white truck and put the gun in his brother's hand. That is the account the plea agreement calls "repeatedly truthfully stated."

The prosecutor asked what made him stop giving partial versions and tell what he actually saw.

"I just told them whatever they wanted to hear."

The prosecutor asked whether that eyewitness account, the one he gave on July 21, was true as he sat there now. He said no. Asked which parts of it were not true, he gave the answer that will follow this case for the rest of its life.

"We were never there."

He confirmed that the recantation reaches all the way back. It covers his September 2020 statement, given with his lawyer present. It covers his sworn testimony to the grand jury that same month. It covers his later deposition. Then the prosecutor put it to him directly: what he signed in the plea agreement, was that "a deception that you were saying to the state?"

"Yes."

How The Account Was Built

The defense had one job on cross, and it was to show the court how that July 21 account came to exist.

Why did he feel he had to tell police what they wanted to hear in 2020? "Because every time I told them what I did that day, they told me I was lying." He said they picked him up from work in the early afternoon, after roughly six hours of hard physical labor, and that it was a couple of hours more before the questioning started. He said nobody else was in the room but him and law enforcement. And he said investigators showed him photographs of his young son during the interviews, and that it "pretty much made me want to tell them whatever the hell they wanted to hear so I could go home."

Read that carefully, because it is not an admission of anything by anyone and I am not treating it as one. It is his account of his own interrogation, given under oath, with the jury out. The investigators he described did not testify on this point on Day 6, and they are entitled to their side of it. But put it next to the timeline he had just walked through: a story that changed at least four times in five days, arriving finally at the version investigators most needed, from a man who says he was worn out, told again and again he was lying, and shown pictures of his child. That is the shape of a statement a jury would want to examine very closely before it relied on it to put a man to death.

And this jury will not get to examine it at all, at least not from him.

The Plea Agreement Goes In, But Not To The Jury

The State moved Exhibit 469, the plea agreement, into evidence as a court exhibit only. Judge Jalal A. Harb was precise about what that meant. It was, he said, "not for the jury's purposes at this point." He said it again: "Not for the jury's purpose at this point." And then he added two words.

"That changes."

I want you to hold on to that, because it is easy to misreport. The jury was not in the room. The jury has not seen that agreement. But the judge said twice that it is not for them at this point, and then said that changes. Nobody should tell you the jury will never see it. What is true is that, at the end of Day 6, they have not.

The State Will Not Be Calling Him

Then came the answer the whole morning had been building toward. Asked directly, the prosecutor told the court the State will not be calling Robert Wiggins at trial.

He was released from the courthouse and ordered to remain under subpoena.

Think about what just happened. The State's plea agreement with this man says, in the State's own words, that Tony Wiggins was the lone gunman and that Robert Wiggins saw it. The State went into this trial with that agreement in hand. In its opening on Day 1, the State told the jury that surveillance video would place the defendant's brother behind the wheel of the white Chevy pickup. Now the man himself says they were never there, that his account was a deception, and that he was told by a prosecutor he would get something the deal does not say. And the State's response is to not call him.

There are two honest ways to read that, and I am going to give you both.

The State's way: a witness who recants on the stand is a disaster for everyone. He would say one thing, the State would impeach him with everything he said before, and the jury would be left with a man who cannot be believed either way. Declining to call him is a lawful strategic choice the State is entitled to make, and it keeps a sideshow out of a capital trial.

The other way: the State's theory of this case was written around this man's account, and the moment that account stopped cooperating, the State stopped wanting the jury to hear from him. If his recantation is true, it is the most important thing a jury deciding this case could hear. If it is false, the jury is entitled to watch him say it and decide that for themselves. Either way, a jury deciding life or death is now going to decide without ever seeing the man whose words the State's plea deal was built on.

The defense can still call him. Whether it will is its own decision, with its own risks, and nothing on Day 6 answered it.

Here is the question I keep coming back to. The State's own core theory, from the day this case was charged, rested on the word of his brother and his girlfriend. Before the jury was even seated on Day 6, half of that was gone. What should that mean for the rest of this case? And what should it mean for how the court treats everything the State tries to bring in to fill the hole?

Two Jail Calls, Heard By The Judge Alone

That question came up almost immediately, because the next thing the State did, still with the jury out, was play two recorded jail calls in full so the judge could consider whether they come in.

Exhibit 423 is a call from August 11, 2020. By the State's account, it is a call from the defendant to his father, who then hands the phone to Robert Wiggins. The audio was rough. You can hear talk of cars, money, a gun yard, bond conditions, and a stretch about lawyers and what the other side supposedly had.

The defense objected to the whole call on relevance, authentication and hearsay. And then it made the point that ties this call straight back to the morning. The State cannot use the brother's words on that recording without calling the brother, because there is nobody to cross-examine. That is the Confrontation Clause in plain English: if the State wants to use what a person said against the accused, the accused gets to question that person. The State had just told the court it will not call him.

The State conceded the call had not yet been authenticated. It also conceded that it is not proceeding on a co-conspirator theory, which is the legal doorway that sometimes lets one participant's statements in against another. The judge took Exhibit 423 under advisement, and tied any ruling to if and when the State actually moves it in.

Exhibit 424 came two days later, on August 13, 2020, after the brother's bond had been revoked. On it, by the State's description, the defendant tells his father the reason his brother is back in custody, and says his brother gave his statement for reward money. The State called that an admission by a defendant. The defense renewed every objection and added one more: other voices, apparently two women, are audible in the background, and nobody has said who they are.

The judge reserved on 424 as well. Neither call has been ruled on. Neither has been played to the jury. At the defense's request, the court did agree to give the jury the standard instruction on edited recordings if any of this ever reaches them.

I want to be clear about one thing, because this channel's standard on it is settled. These calls were played in full in open court. The court has not ruled them in, and that is a fact worth reporting, but whether a thing was admitted has never been the test of whether the public gets to hear about it. We are a watchdog. A rule that says the public may only know what a judge lets the jury see is a rule that invites suppression.

And there is a real question sitting inside these two calls. If the State will not put Robert Wiggins on the stand, where he can be cross-examined about everything he just recanted, should it be able to bring his story back into this trial through a recorded phone call where nobody can question him at all? The defense says no. The State has not yet asked the court to rule. When it does, that ruling will tell us a great deal about what this trial is going to look like.

Before the jury came in, two more things went on the record. The State told the court it expects to rest on the afternoon of Day 7. The defense said it expects to call at least four witnesses and will be ready as soon as the State rests. And the State asked that a law enforcement witness it expected to call later in the day not be shown on video, with audio allowed so the public could still hear him. The defense did not object. That witness turned out to be the lead detective, and he would carry the whole afternoon.

The Fingerprint That Took Six Years

The jury came back after the long weekend, and the State went to its forensic case.

Its first witness was Leggie Boone, the administrator of the identification section at the Polk County Sheriff's Office, fourteen years with the agency. She spelled her name for the record and laid out her credentials, and they are serious: a bachelor's degree in biology, master's degrees in forensic science and in research, a doctorate in public policy and administration in criminal justice, and more than a thousand hours of training in latent print and shoe and tire analysis.

She explained her section's method, which goes by the name ACE-V: analysis, comparison, evaluation, verification. An examiner studies a print, compares it to a known print, reaches a conclusion, and then a second analyst, and sometimes a third, verifies it.

She identified the latent print envelope, Exhibit 425, by its chain of custody, and four printouts, Exhibits 529A through 532, as photographs of a print developed with superglue fuming, which is a way of raising prints that cannot be seen with the naked eye. The defense renewed its pre-trial objection, and all four came in. She identified Exhibit 550 as the elimination card taken from the defendant in July 2020.

Then the State asked for her conclusion, and she gave it: "The fingerprints that were on the images were made by the same individual as the fingerprints that are on the elimination card."

That is a real piece of evidence for the State, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. An examiner with those credentials told this jury that prints developed in this investigation belong to Tony Wiggins, and nothing on cross took that conclusion back.

What the cross did was show the jury how the conclusion gets made.

The defense started with the known prints themselves. Is there a protocol for cleaning a person's hands before rolling their prints? Not one she knew of. Her answers on how hands might be prepared ran to lotion or "corn huskers or some other slight film." She had not collected either set of prints herself, and she agreed she could not say every step had been followed.

Then the method. Is there a minimum number of matching features required before an examiner can call a match?

"There's no minimum, correct."

She agreed that two examiners could look at the same print and reach opposite conclusions, and both be doing their job just fine. She agreed her section records no count of the similarities or differences it finds, only the result. She agreed that verification in her lab is not blind: the second examiner sees the first examiner's answer before checking it. And she agreed that she was not comparing blind either. She knew whose name was on the card, and she knew it was a homicide.

Then the dates, and this is the part I would want explained if I were on that jury. Ms. Boone's name first appears on the chain of custody for the defendant's known prints on July 27, 2020, ten days after the murders. The report calling the match is dated, as read on the record, August 25, 2026. The defense put the gap to her plainly: the comparison saying it was a match did not come in until 2026. She agreed.

Six years. The prints sat with the lab for six years before anyone put a match on paper, and the match arrived a month before trial. Nobody in this block of testimony explained why. Maybe there is an innocent explanation: a backlog, a later request, a re-examination. Maybe there is a reason the comparison was not done or not reported sooner. The jury has not been told, and a finding this important deserves an answer to that question before anyone leans on it.

The defense closed by going photo by photo. Each of the four latent images shows only part of a print: a chunk that is hard to see in one, a side portion in another, a top portion you really cannot see in a third, only the bottom of a fourth. Ms. Boone did not dispute any of it, and she held her ground on the whole. "I see the same amount of information in each of them," she said.

On a short redirect, she told the jury the photos were suitable for comparison and that her identification rests on her training, experience and judgment. She was released on standby.

Here is the honest net. The State now has a fingerprint identification to the defendant's card in front of this jury, from a well-credentialed examiner, and it stood up. Against it, the jury also now knows there is no minimum standard, no record of what was compared, a reviewer who sees the answer first, an examiner who knew the name, and a six-year gap nobody explained. How much weight that identification deserves is exactly the kind of question the jury is there to decide, and the defense built every piece of the argument it will make about it.

Twelve Phones And A Plastic Bag

The State's next witness was Jessica Braun, a forensic technician at the Polk County Sheriff's Office with almost twenty years at the agency, about thirty forensic certifications, and a master's degree in digital forensics. She has extracted around three thousand phones in her career, twelve of them in this investigation.

Her job, as she described it, is to pull the data off a phone. She explained the three kinds of extraction: physical, file system, and advanced logical, which is roughly the difference between copying the whole drive, copying its file structure, and copying what the phone's own software will hand over. She walked the jury through the tools, Cellebrite and GrayKey, and authenticated the State's devices one at a time: a Motorola, an iPhone, Brandon Rollins' phone, and a Wiko handset that got a full physical extraction.

On each one she said the same thing. She spot-checks that the extraction worked. She does no substantive review of what is on the phone. That is the detectives' job.

The defense's cross started with how those phones were kept, and it did not go well for the State. None of the twelve phones was stored in a Faraday bag, the shielded pouch that stops a phone from talking to a network and changing its own data. The extraction room is not shielded either. Several of the phones sat in ordinary clear plastic bags, and she did not know how they got into them.

Asked whether she could say whose phones these were or who was using them, she said no, unless an email address happens to be attached to one. Hold on to that answer. Every piece of digital evidence the lead detective read to the jury later that afternoon came off phones that passed through her hands, and the question of who was holding those phones is the entire fight.

Then the software. She agreed that a report can be tagged, with names attached to phone numbers and the output limited to a time frame, without changing the underlying data. She agreed that the original extractions in 2020 ran on one version of Cellebrite and later extractions in 2026 ran on another. Two of the phones were extracted twice, six years apart. So which extraction does the jury rely on?

"Um, I signed off on the 2026 one."

That is the same six-year gap the jury had just heard about with the fingerprints. The evidence was collected in 2020. The version of it the State is relying on was produced in 2026.

The defense asked whether she was aware of hackers who had broken into Cellebrite's software. "I have been told, yes." She said it was Signal, and said it was reverse engineered from a unit rather than a hack of the company's own systems. She agreed that whoever can hack a program can change data. She said case data in her lab is stored locally, not in the cloud. And then she confirmed that the lab machine running that software is connected to the internet.

I want to be fair to her, because her best moments for the State came late and they were real. GrayKey forces a phone into airplane mode the moment it connects, which is designed to preserve the evidence, and phones in her lab are otherwise isolated by airplane mode or by pulling the SIM card. On redirect she said newer extractions can pull more data than older ones, that detectives curate reports but cannot modify the data, and that the raw data cannot be changed. She agreed that an extraction in 2026 could provide data one in 2020 did not.

That is a genuine repair. But it is a repair to a foundation, and a foundation witness is judged on the foundation. No Faraday bags. Plastic bags nobody can account for. No way to say who used any phone. An operative report from 2026 instead of 2020. Software the jury heard was broken into, running on a machine connected to the internet. The State needed her to be the solid floor under the afternoon, and by the time she stepped down the floor had some soft spots in it. She was excused, remaining under subpoena.

The Cameras Go Dark

Court came back from lunch with the jury still out, and the first thing on the record was the next witness.

The State confirmed it intends to split his testimony across two appearances, so he will be back. Then Judge Harb gave the direction that governed the rest of Day 6, spoken aloud on the record: "if you'll just cut photography, videography, um audio is fine."

The courtroom feed went to black within seconds and stayed black for as long as he testified. The sound was live the whole time. So if you watch the afternoon on our channel, you will hear every question and every answer, and you will see nothing. That is not a technical problem and it is not our choice. It is what the court directed, and the court is entitled to do it. The witness was to be heard and not seen.

He was the lead detective in the 2020 investigation, and for the rest of the day he was the State's voice. He is the person who read the phones, the Facebook records and the search history to the jury, and he is identified here, as he is on every surface this channel writes, by his role only.

Damion Tillman's Truck, And A Comparison That Never Finished

The prosecutor started with Damion Tillman's Chevy S10 pickup. It was towed on July 30, 2020, to a fleet facility so technicians could find its confidential identification number, which is hidden on the vehicle. The transmission had to come out before anyone could see it. Exhibits 404 through 408, the detective's own photographs, came in without objection: the truck, the transmission sitting in the bed, the wheel well he put his head into, and finally the hidden number itself, photographed by reaching the camera in because his head would not fit.

He read that number into the record. When the State moved to compare it against a reference number from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, the defense objected, the lawyers went to the bench, and the objection was sustained. The comparison was never completed in front of the jury.

So the jury has seen that the number exists, and it has not been told what the number proves. On Day 6, it was a very careful piece of work that stopped one step short of its point.

The Last Hour Of Brandon Rollins' Phone

Then the detective turned to Brandon Rollins' phone, from Jessica Braun's extraction. He generated two reports from it, one of selected contacts and one of the call log for July 17, 2020. Both came in without objection, and he took the jury through that night minute by minute.

Calls between Brandon Rollins and a contact saved under Damion Tillman's name, just before 10:00 p.m. Then, at 10:06 p.m., a 54-second outgoing call to a contact saved as "dad," and an unanswered incoming call from "dad" a minute later.

The prosecutor asked what significance that call had. The defense objected on hearsay grounds. After a sidebar, the detective was allowed to say only that it was as close to the time of the incident as investigators had been able to determine, and the objection was sustained anyway.

The jury has heard, from the first day of this trial, what a mother heard over the phone that night. So there is a very human reason the State wanted that call to carry meaning. The court held the line on what the witness could say about it, and that was the right call. A detective reading a log is not a witness to what happened at the other end of it.

The rest of the log ran out the night, and it is hard to listen to. Calls to and from contacts saved for his parents and others went unanswered. Outgoing Facebook calls from Brandon Rollins' account went to Keven Springfield's account and to Damion Tillman's account, and both were missed. Two calls, at 10:48 and 11:08 p.m., were answered. A last Facebook call went out at 11:15 p.m. and was missed. Asked whether he knew who had access to Brandon Rollins' Facebook account, the detective said, "No, sir." Asked whether law enforcement was on scene by 10:48, he said he did not believe so but did not recall.

The Phones The State Ties To Tony Wiggins

Then the prosecutor turned to the defendant.

A Motorola phone recovered in a search of the family property, which the State ties to Tony Wiggins, showed its cellular activity dropping off around the middle of June 2020 to what looked like Wi-Fi-only use. The detective said he had information the defendant was using another phone. A Facebook account was found on the Motorola, and Exhibit 465, the certified Facebook business records for that account, came in over the defense's standing objection. The State says those records tie the account to the defendant. The judge had the unnumbered pages numbered on the spot.

Then came Exhibit 467, and the fight of the afternoon.

A Picture Of A Gun Nobody Can Call The Murder Weapon

Exhibit 467 is a portion of that account's Facebook messages with a family member of the defendant, from late June 2020. The detective himself flagged, before describing it, that it needed to go to the bench. The judge sent the jury out on an early stretch break, and the argument ran for the rest of that part of the day.

Out of the jury's hearing, three things were said that matter more than anything else in this stretch.

First, the State's theory. It says a 9mm Smith & Wesson in one of the photos is the kind of gun it says was used in the killings. And the murder weapon was never recovered.

Second, the expert. The State's firearms examiner, who is expected to testify later, will not say the handgun in that photo is the gun. It was put plainly in the argument: "the expert will not say that this is the gun." And the answer that came back to the bench: "No, no one can say that, Your Honor." The defense added that the examiner's tool-mark testimony will describe a class of pistols, including a Taurus, and not one specific gun.

Third, the brother. When Robert Wiggins was floated as someone who could speak to the photos, the State shut that down. He is not testifying. You can see the morning's decision already shaping the afternoon.

The State's real target was one line in the thread, which it says the defendant wrote: "a Mossberg 500 gold trigger 12 gauge and a Smith and Wesson 9." It offered the thread for who was talking, not for the truth of what was said.

The judge ruled page by page. Pages one and two came in. Page four came in except its first post. And page three, the handgun, came in on a condition: there is to be no reference to it as the murder weapon, because no forensic testimony supports that.

Now I want to ask the question the ruling leaves on the table.

The court got the law right in the narrow sense. The photo is relevant to whether the defendant had access to a 9mm, and the condition stops anyone from telling the jury it is the murder weapon. But think about what a juror actually experiences. The weapon was never found. The State's own expert will not tie this gun to these killings. And yet a picture of a black and silver handgun is now in front of twelve people who are deciding whether a man lives or dies, with an instruction that nobody may say out loud the one thing the picture is obviously there to suggest.

Can an instruction really unring that bell? Courts assume jurors follow instructions, and most of the time they try. But the whole reason the State fought for page three is that the photo does work on a jury that words alone do not. If no witness can say it is the gun, what exactly is the jury supposed to do with it, other than wonder? That is a fair question to put to a court in a capital case, and the defense will keep putting it.

With the page needing a redacted reprint and no color printer at hand, the judge called a ten-minute break and reminded the detective he was still on the stand.

The Phone Trail

The jury came back to the lead detective, still audio only, and to Exhibit 467 in its admitted form. He read the thread to them.

On June 29, 2020, a message the State attributes to the defendant: "did I show you the new guns I'm picking up later?" A photo of a shotgun. A photo of what he called a black and silver handgun. Asked whether he needed his training to identify it, he said no, the photo reads on its face. And the answer to the family member's question about what they were: "a Mossberg 500 gold trigger 12 gauge and a Smith and Wesson 9."

Then a third phone, the Wiko handset. The State's position is that the defendant was using it, and the detective testified that the defendant had told him which number he used and that it was this phone's number. Texts on the phone were signed "this TJ" and "this is TJ," and one read simply "TJ." Who was actually holding that phone is disputed, and the defense would come back to it hard.

A report of the user accounts on the device came in without objection. The detective read off accounts on two gun-sale and ammunition websites, created in late June and mid-July 2020, which the State ties to the defendant, along with a Facebook profile he said showed the top half of the defendant's face. The account names, usernames, email addresses and phone numbers read into the record are not reproduced here or on any surface this channel writes. They were said in open court and they are in the audio as recorded. We do not print them.

Then the phone's web history. The State walked the jury through it in reverse order, from July 6 back to June 26, 2020: a Mossberg 500A shotgun, bulk 9mm ammunition, Smith & Wesson magazines, a Smith & Wesson SD9 pistol listing, and the SD9 model itself, alongside a gun-sale listing under the same account name. Then the detective volunteered that the history also held news stories about the killings. The jury heard the headline, three close friends massacred during a fishing trip in Frostproof, returned to again and again from that device on July 18, 2020, the day after the murders.

Laid end to end, that is the State's picture: a man arming himself in the weeks before the killings, and following the news the morning after. It is the most coherent chain the State built all day, and I understand why it saved it for the afternoon.

What The Court Kept Out

Then another run of rulings with the jury out, and these went in both directions.

A report of firearm images, Exhibit 450, was kept out on the defense's objection. The images themselves, Exhibits 451 through 458, came in, and on direct the detective agreed he could not say when they were taken or that they were taken with that phone.

A Google account found on the same device was the subject of a search warrant to the provider, and the return, Exhibit 461, carried image searches for the same guns. The judge sent the jury out again, and the argument ran most of an hour.

The defense argued that nothing on the Google return says who was doing the searching, that the phone was used by more than one person, and that some messages attributed to it may have been the defendant using his father's phone. On 461, the judge agreed the material had crossed into unfair prejudice under section 90.403 of Florida's evidence code, the rule that lets a court exclude relevant evidence when its danger of misleading or inflaming a jury substantially outweighs what it proves. He ruled it inadmissible. The State withdrew a similar exhibit, 460.

On the last one, Exhibit 462, the court kept out the gun-video and gun-research pages as cumulative and not relevant at this point, and let in exactly one search: "how to fingerprint bullets."

Those rulings sort evidence. They decide nothing about the defendant, and the jury was not in the room for any of them. The judge's reasons turned on relevance and on whether the material added anything to what the jury already has. That is a court doing the balancing it is supposed to do, and on 461 it came down against the State. That deserves to be said as clearly as the handgun ruling deserves to be questioned.

Which Day Was It?

Here is a detail from that argument that I think matters a great deal, and it is sitting right there in the record.

The State's theory for that one search, the one the court let in, is that it was run the day after the killings, July 18, 2020, by someone checking whether police could identify them from evidence left at the scene. But when the prosecutor first read the entry to the court in argument, he read the date as June 18, 2020. Then, later, as July 18.

Those are a month apart. One is the day after three men were killed. The other is a month before. Under the State's own theory, the search means something very different depending on which date it actually carries. The jury heard it as the day after. I want to know, from the exhibit itself and not from how a lawyer read it aloud in the heat of argument, which date is on that page and how it was established. So should the jury, and so should anyone following this case.

And when the prosecutor offered to show the court what that exact search returns on YouTube now, the judge stopped him cold: "You're gonna almost walk yourself into making yourself a witness here." Good. A prosecutor's own browsing is not evidence.

Back in front of the jury, the detective read the fingerprint search off the return, and the State ended its direct examination on it.

"Just That They Were On The Device"

Then the defense stood up, and its cross of the lead detective was about one thing. He is the reader of other people's work.

He did not extract any of the phones. He did not collect them. He did not package them. He agreed that what he reports is only as good as the information handed to him by the people who did. The State's call-log exhibit was a narrower version of the full report, which carries 241 calls the jury did not see. The YouTube searches on that Google account were not found on any of the phones in evidence. Two of the four items on the page with the fingerprint search are ordinary songs. And the search itself, on its plain words, asks how the process of fingerprinting a bullet works. It does not ask whether a print can be recovered from one.

Then the devices. Texts in which the sender has to tell the recipient who he is do not, by themselves, tell you who was holding the phone. Asked whether he knew who conducted the searches, he said: "Correct, just that they were on the device."

On the Facebook photos, he did not know where they came from: "I do not know the original origin of the photo." He agreed he is not a firearms expert, and, shown a .40 caliber SD40 in a defense exhibit, he could not rule out that the gun in the photo was a different model. He agreed that the Motorola the State says went quiet in June still showed some Facebook activity afterward. When the defense asked whether Jessica Braun could say where the photos came from, the State objected and the court narrowed the question.

On redirect, the State went back to the words. Whatever anyone makes of the photo, the message names the guns, and the phone's number is the one the detective testified the defendant said he used. That is the State's strongest answer to the attribution problem, and it is a real one: an admission, if the jury believes it was made, about whose number that was.

The detective was not excused. He may be recalled, and the State has already said it will call him again. The judge sent the jury home, telling them 8:45 a.m. on Day 7, and then told counsel 8:30.

The Seam In The State's Chain

Step back and look at what the afternoon actually built.

On the State's side: messages it attributes to the defendant naming a Mossberg and a Smith & Wesson 9 a few weeks before the killings. Texts signed "TJ" on a phone the detective says the defendant claimed as his number. Accounts on gun-sale sites. A string of searches narrowing toward an SD9. News coverage of the murders pulled up again and again the morning after. And a search for how to fingerprint bullets. It is a picture of a man arming himself and then worrying about the evidence, and the State drew it carefully.

Now look at the seam, because every link runs through it. Every one of those links runs through a phone that is not simply his, or a Google account that nobody has put a person behind. The phones were stored without shielding, in plastic bags nobody can account for, and the version of the data the State relies on was produced in 2026. The detective who read all of it to the jury agreed he does not know who typed any of it. The fingerprint search asks how the process works, and even its date was read two different ways in argument. The YouTube history was not found on any phone. The gun in the photo cannot be called the murder weapon, and the State's own expert will not call it the gun. The court kept a large part of the gun research out as cumulative, and kept the Google image searches out as unfairly prejudicial.

The State has shown the jury what was on the devices. It has not yet shown who put it there. That is the question the defense will take to closing, and it is a fair one.

What The Jury Saw, And What It Did Not

Here is the part of Day 6 that I think matters most, and it is the part the jury knows least about.

The jury saw a fingerprint examiner make a match, and saw the defense show them how that match was made. It saw a phone technician authenticate twelve phones, and saw how those phones were kept. It heard a detective it could not see read messages, accounts and searches off those phones, and heard him agree he does not know who was behind them. It saw a photo of a gun that nobody may call the murder weapon.

The jury did not see the man whose account the State's plea agreement calls the truth say, under oath, "We were never there." It did not hear him say he told police whatever they wanted to hear. It did not hear him say he was told by a prosecutor he would get time served on two other cases, something his written deal does not say. It did not hear the State decide, a few minutes later, not to call him. It did not hear two jail calls the State may still try to use to bring his story back in without him.

I understand why the jury was out. Proffers exist for a reason, and the rules about what reaches a jury exist for good reasons too. But we are not here to show you only what the jury saw. We are here to show you what happened, and to ask what it means.

So here is what I think it means. The State asked a jury to send Tony Wiggins to death largely on the word of his brother and his girlfriend, both of whom took pleas to avoid the charge he faces. On Day 6, the brother disowned his word under oath and the State let him go. The girlfriend was not in court, and she is not on trial for murder either. What is left is a fingerprint called six years after it was taken, and a trail of devices and accounts that the State can put in front of the jury but cannot yet put a person behind.

That is not a verdict, and I am not offering one. Tony Wiggins is presumed innocent, the State has not rested, and the defense has not called a single witness. But the questions Day 6 raised are real, and they come straight off the record. What was its cooperating witness told he would get, and was it disclosed? Why did it take six years to call a fingerprint match? Which day was that search run? And can a jury deciding life or death really set aside a picture of a gun nobody is allowed to call the murder weapon?

What Day 7 Has To Answer

The State told the court it expects to rest on the afternoon of Day 7. Before it does, it still has a firearms examiner to call, the one who, by the State's own account, will not say the gun in the photo is the gun. It has a lead detective to recall. And it has two jail calls sitting under advisement, which it may ask the court to rule on before it closes its case.

Then the defense gets its turn, with at least four witnesses ready. Whether Robert Wiggins is one of them is the biggest open question in this trial. He is still under subpoena.

We will be watching all of it.