An Edited Video Nobody Could Cross, A State Doctor Who Ran No Tests, And The Evidence Is Closed

Three friends went night fishing outside Frostproof, Florida, on July 17, 2020, and none of them came home. Brandon Rollins, Keven Springfield and Damion Tillman were killed near Lake Streety Road. On Tuesday, September 29, 2026, a Polk County jury found Tony "TJ" Wiggins Jr. guilty of first-degree murder on all three counts. His brother, William "Robert" Wiggins, pleaded to accessory after the fact. His girlfriend, Mary Whittemore, pleaded to accessory after the fact too. Neither was tried for murder.

That same jury is now deciding a different question, and on Day 12, Friday, October 2, 2026, it heard the last of the evidence it will get to answer it. The State of Florida wants a recommendation of death. The defense wants a recommendation of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The jury has made no recommendation yet. When it does, that recommendation goes to Circuit Judge Jalal A. Harb, and he imposes the sentence.

Day 12 was the day the defense put its childhood case to the jury and the State answered it. Four people who knew the Wiggins family took the stand. A mitigation video built from interviews with his family and friends, the piece of the defense case that sat on the bench without a ruling all through Day 11, was played twice: once in the morning for the judge alone, with the jury out of the room, and once in the afternoon for the jury, after a fight that ran through the middle of the day. Tony Wiggins stood at the podium and told the judge he would not testify. The defense rested. The State called one witness in rebuttal, a neuropsychologist, and then the State rested too. Before the jury went home for the weekend, the judge told the jurors to bring a pillow on Monday.

Here is the thread I want to pull through this whole piece, because the record hands it to us twice, once from each side of the courtroom. Each side asked this jury to accept evidence that the other side could not fully test. The defense asked the jury to weigh an edited video of people who were never sworn and could never be cross-examined, and the State told the judge it never got the original footage the video was cut from. The State asked the jury to weigh the opinion of a doctor who ran no tests of his own, met Tony Wiggins one time for about 30 minutes in the office of the prosecutors trying to put him to death, and told the jury the minutes before the killings were "kind of the opposite of impulse." A man's life is the subject of the weighing. I think the jury is entitled to know how solid each piece of the scale is, and so are you.

The ground rules, because they matter more in this phase than in any other. Everything below is the record of one court day and my read of it. A video interview is not sworn testimony, and I tell you when you are hearing one. A lawyer's argument to the judge is not evidence. A mitigating circumstance is anything about the defendant's life or character that a juror thinks weighs toward a lesser sentence; the defense has to prove it only by the greater weight of the evidence, which means more likely than not. No juror is named in this piece, and none ever will be on anything we publish. When I question how the process ran, that is all it is. What this jury should recommend is its call.

Forty-Eight Minutes For An Empty Jury Box

Court opened a little after eight in the morning, and the first thing on the record was the video. The defense called it Defense Exhibit 3, "video mitigation recordings." The jury was not in the room. The judge said so in his own way: "go ahead and we'll treat this as a" proffer. A proffer is a showing to the judge, outside the jury's presence, of evidence a party wants to use, so the judge can decide whether it comes in. Later in the morning the judge asked, "Anything else from the defense before the jury arrives?" That question settles it. For roughly forty-eight minutes the video played to the judge, the lawyers, the gallery and the record, and to nobody who will vote.

I am going to describe what is in it, because it played in open court, and because what it says is the core of the defense's case for Tony Wiggins' life. It is an edited compilation. One person speaks, and the video cuts to another who picks up the thought. None of the people in it were under oath when they spoke. It starts on a boy who was quiet. "He just kind of sits back and just watches everybody," one voice says. Another: "I think TJ felt like he had to protect his little brother and any other kids that might have been around because he was always like standing out in front of them." Someone describes him walking five miles to the store for water and carrying a five-gallon bucket back. Someone else says that at the table "he wouldn't eat because he wanted to make sure he was the last."

It moves into the family. A history of panic attacks on his mother's side, a mother who hid in closets and thought people were talking about her. A marriage that broke apart when TJ was about ten, in a way his mother tells at length and that I am not going to repeat here. Parents who split up but kept living on the same piece of land, "three or four RVs up there," one voice says, and they "switched them out here and there." His mother's later partner, a man the video calls Paul, who wanted the boys to have "morals" and to work for what they wanted, and who fought with TJ constantly. "Robert didn't fight," the video says. TJ fought him every day. There is a story about a fight over going to his room, TJ telling the man "you're not my dad," the two of them swinging at each other, and his mother getting between them. And there is the belt. When TJ was about fifteen and a half, as the video tells it, the man told him to do something, TJ refused, the man went into the house and came back with a belt, "And it went across his back. It was a metal belt." The mark, his mother says, "was still there when I got home."

Then the woods. The family lived, in one speaker's words, "like Amish people pretty much," on land they had bought with the plan of putting a home on it, until permit and impact fees ended that plan. RVs and trailers in a ring around one big light pole, with the generators underneath it. Water came from a natural pond through a hose: "So it was pond water, but it was clean pond water." One woman who knew them called it "a village of hippies." Dishes washed in buckets, baths in rainwater, and the line that stays with you, because it is the whole childhood in a handful of words: "no gas, no water, no food. How am I gonna do this?" His mother tells of being called in by a teacher who was worried that TJ "was coming to school in smelly clothes," and who also said "he was a good student, he had good grades."

Then the drugs. One speaker describes using every day for fifteen or twenty years. Another voice: "When I started using he was about four." The same speaker remembers sitting down to make the boys dinner one night and not looking back up. "I'm not gonna sit here and paint everything beautiful because it ain't beautiful." Another speaker: "There was never no food, never nothing in the fridge." His father, who has since died, talks about the mornings he slept through: "I don't know what he ate or if he ate." His mother tells of a heater that caught fire beside his crib when he was fifteen days old, and credits the baby with waking her: "He saved our lives one night." She says he has had ADHD his whole life, and that the school wanted him medicated and she said no. Someone says he "potty trained Robert." Someone says "Tony's not been the best dad. He's not stable."

It ends on the protector. People who knew him as a man describe a generator he and his family carried to a neighbor with no power, and when that one blew up, a second one, free of charge. One calls him "like a little daddy" to his brother. Another says of the way he looked after younger kids, "I mean, they didn't make him. He just kind of took it upon himself." And the last line is about how little it took to satisfy him, a pie, a burger, half a burger: "That was enough."

What is not in it matters too. Nothing in the video addresses the night of July 17, 2020. It is a childhood and a character, start to finish, which is exactly what the defense would later tell the judge it was for.

When the screen went dark, the defense renewed every penalty-phase motion it had already lost: its challenge to the victim-impact evidence, its argument that Florida's death penalty fails to narrow who is eligible as the Eighth Amendment requires, and its motion to keep the most recent amendments to the capital sentencing statute, section 921.141, from applying to this case. The judge asked if the law had changed since he ruled. It had not. The motions "have been renewed and will be the same ruling previously entered." The whole exchange took under two minutes. The court took ten.

WATCH: DAY 12, PART 47 (THE PROFFER), LIVE 9:00 AM ET SATURDAY, OCT 3 Frostproof Massacre Jury Out as TJ Wiggins' Family Describes a Childhood in the Woods | Pt 47

So the day began with the defense's most important exhibit already played, already in the record, and still not in front of a single juror.

Four Witnesses, One Household

When the jury came in, the defense did with live witnesses what the video had done with recordings. It called four people who knew the Wiggins family, and every one of them described the same place from a different angle.

The first was Heather Barber, by video link, sworn remotely, with the defense checking that the jury could hear her. She took TJ into her home twice. The first time he was about seventeen, going to Mulberry High School, and he stayed a while before deciding to go back to his father. The second time he was an adult, just out of custody, and he lived with her for a little over a year, in a house that also held his brother Robert, Robert's girlfriend, and their baby son. She described TJ changing the baby's diapers and feeding him when she was working. When TJ left her the second time, he went back to his father's place in the woods, and she called it "a junkyard," a yard full of "a lot of junk, really," with walkways through it and hazards on every side. She told the jury she had no real contact with him after he left at seventeen until he came back. Asked if he was ever the protective older brother, she said that if anybody had a problem with Robert, "he'd back him up a hundred percent, no doubt." The State had no questions for her.

The second was Stephen Betzel, who did scrap work with TJ's father. He described the trailer on a dirt road, stuff everywhere outside and "soft spots" in the floor inside, places you would not want to put your weight. TJ worked alongside his father: mechanic work, cleanup, sod, scrap. And then Betzel told the jury about the generators. His own family had been put off the place they were living and moved somewhere with no power. The Wigginses brought them a generator. "The first one blew up, and so they went and got another one and brought it back to us." The video had told that same story about an hour earlier, to an empty jury box. Now the jury heard it from a man under oath. The State had no questions for him either.

The third was Sheila Bedsole. She was a friend of TJ's father, close enough that she called him her best friend, and TJ called her "Miss Sheila." She told the jury the property had "no power, no water, you know, living in the woods, and um a lot of times no food." She worked at a food bank once a month making up boxes for families, and she said she usually made one up for the Wigginses: "as soon as I'd give them the box of food, TJ and Robert would go through it and get out snacks and stuff to eat." She told the jury about TJ's mother using meth, and about the two boys confronting her over it. By her account they smoked marijuana and K2 but "they were really against" the hard drugs, because they had grown up around them. She described TJ watching over his toddler nephew in the yard, calling him away from things that could hurt him.

It was during her testimony that the defense moved six photographs into evidence, Defense Exhibits 7 through 12: TJ as a boy, TJ with family, TJ grown. On Day 11 the State had questioned the relevance of the photographs. It objected again, pointing back to that argument. The judge went through them one by one and ruled: "7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 will be admitted into evidence over the state's objection." In a penalty phase, a picture of a defendant as a child is not evidence of anything about the crime. It is evidence of a person, and that is the point of mitigation.

Then came the only cross-examination the State did of any of these four witnesses, and it is worth watching closely because of where it went. The prosecutor did not dispute the woods, the water or the food. He went to temperament. Tony Wiggins Sr. would yell at TJ, the prosecutor established, and TJ would not have much reaction. Bedsole agreed: TJ might "scuff" or walk off and mumble under his breath, "but he didn't strike back like you know, lash back at Tony or anything. He had real good manners." She had never seen TJ attack his father. Then the prosecutor established that she had not known TJ as a child at all. She met the family after his father came home from prison, ten or fifteen years ago, when TJ was already an adult. "I didn't know him as a as a kid." And she agreed TJ and Robert were working then, unloading train cars in Mulberry, and that it was "fair presumption they were making their own money at that point." She added that the family pooled its money to take care of each other.

You can see the shape of the State's case in those few minutes. A man who could hold his temper when his father yelled at him is, the State will argue, a man who can control himself. That argument came back in the afternoon, from the State's doctor, and it is the hinge of the State's answer to the defense case.

"It's Hard To Put Trust In Anyone"

The fourth witness was April Contreras, and hers was the longest testimony of the morning. She started going around the Wiggins home when she was seven or eight, when TJ was "barely out of diapers," and the family raised them to think of each other as cousins. As an adult, she said, she would describe the place as "a cluttered um, a cluttered mess," and "very um run down." At that age, she told the jury, "We didn't look at our lifestyle at that age as something that was wrong."

She described the father of those years as a loving one. Of TJ's mother, she said: "I love Kim to death," but "she has never really had the motherly instinct uh that comes and goes with her." Hands-on parenting "was not her priority." Asked what was, she said: "being in her room with her friends."

Water was the thread of her testimony. It was carried from a pond in the woods in "milk jugs, sometimes Kool-Aid jugs," filtered through a cloth stretched over a bucket. And then the detail that I suspect stayed with the jury: "TJ was probably about nine years old the first time we went out to the back of the woods and he tried to filter the water for the toilet, and we all kind of like laughed at him like you don't have to filter it for the toilet." Clothes went unwashed. The well water, when they had it, smelled "like rotten eggs." She was careful to say that "the smell didn't always come from having neglect, like some would assume." His teeth "were really, really rotted."

She described a boy who "would stand up for you even if you wouldn't stand up for yourself," who stood up to bigger boys who picked on her even though he was smaller. And she described the other edge of that: "If TJ, if he felt that there was not proper justice done in his eyes, then whatever come about came about. It was consequences to actions, and everybody comprehends actions have consequences." I would expect to hear that line again from the State on Monday. It cuts both ways, and both sides know it.

And then the defense walked her into the drug use, and this is the stretch I want you to slow down on. Asked how often TJ was present when his mother used, she said it was on a regular basis, and began to describe both parents as functioning addicts. The State objected that the answer was not responsive, and the defense moved on. Asked about TJ's father, she said, "He was an active junkie." Asked to tell the jury about that, she began: "very first time I observed Tony Sr. doing drugs is in his semi." The State objected on relevance. Sustained. A few questions later the defense asked whether she ever saw how his father's drug use affected TJ. The State objected that the question was outside the scope of her testimony. Sustained again.

I want to be fair to the judge here. A witness has to testify from what she actually saw, and a defense lawyer cannot use a witness to put in speculation about what was in someone else's head. A relevance objection to a story about the father's own first drug use, told about the father rather than the son, is a reasonable call on its face. But think about what was being decided. This is a penalty phase. The statute and the judge's own instructions tell the jury a mitigating circumstance can be anything in the defendant's character, background or life, and the list of mitigating circumstances read into the record names parental substance abuse. The question this jury is answering is what shaped Tony Wiggins. A witness who grew up in that household was stopped twice on the subject of the father's drug use and what it did to the son. The jury will weigh the defense's mitigation without whatever she was about to say. Whether that loss was small or large, the record does not tell us. It only tells us the jury did not hear it.

The defense rephrased. How did TJ's relationship with his father change as the drugs got worse? "When they started losing everything and being swapped house to house, it's hard to put trust in anyone." He got quieter. She separated herself from that household as she got older. The last time she spoke with TJ was "roughly uh January of 2020," about six months before the killings. She said he apologized for things that had happened, and that he seemed different, and she found one way to say it: "TJ's always had these very bright blue eyes. When he feels lost, they aren't bright. That's the only way I can describe it."

The defense moved Exhibits 4, 5 and 6 into evidence; on the record I can hear, 5 and 6 came in, and I did not hear a ruling on 4. The State had no cross for Contreras. A fifth defense witness, a woman appearing remotely, was told to log off and stand by her phone. She would not be called. The jury took a break.

WATCH: DAY 12, PART 48 (FOUR WITNESSES), LIVE 11:00 AM ET SATURDAY, OCT 3 Frostproof Massacre Four Witnesses Tell TJ Wiggins' Jury of Pond Water and Rotted Teeth | Pt 48

The State Changes Its Mind

With the jury out again, the defense passed on calling the remote witness and moved Defense Exhibit 3 into evidence, and asked to publish it to the jury. This is the fight Day 11 left hanging, and on Day 12 the State came to it with a different position than the one it took the day before.

On Day 11, the State told the judge it was fine with the interviews of the two people in the video who have since died being played, even though it could not cross-examine them. Its objection was to the living speakers. On Day 12 the prosecutor withdrew that concession out loud: "the state objects to the entire video i i know we originally said that we wouldn't object to the deceased but the more i've thought about it and and well the more the states thought about it um this is edited video clips the state was never provided the original footage we don't know what they chose to include or not include."

That is a serious objection, and I want to state it at its strongest. The video is a defense production. Someone sat down with the raw interviews and chose which seconds to keep, which to cut, and which speaker to cut to next. The State says it never received the original footage. If that is right, the State cannot know whether a speaker said something just before or after a kept clip that would change its meaning, or that would help the State. It cannot cross-examine anyone in the video, because none of them are on the stand. And the prosecutor said that some of those speakers carry criminal records the State would normally use to impeach them, meaning to attack their credibility in front of the jury. "We're boxed out," the prosecutor said, especially as to "those with impeachables." And: "without having seen the original unedited video I have no way to authenticate that the redacted clips that they're presenting um haven't been altered in any way."

The defense's answer was short. If the State had a problem with how complete the editing was, it should have raised it before. The judge then narrowed the fight to one question, and his first move was to take one of the State's arguments off the table: "discovery is not a concern for this court." Discovery is the pretrial exchange of evidence between the sides. The judge noted the State had a chance to see the video before Day 12, "maybe not completely uh observed the whole thing, but the state sat through the proffer this morning as I did and you did." Then the question that mattered to him: "I need to know what is the relevance of this video." The defense answered that it "describes our client's uh character, his background, his family history," and "nothing else." The judge: "The question is, is this mitigation or not?" The defense: "Yes, it is, Judge."

The judge then read the catch-all mitigating circumstance already on the record, the existence of any factor in Tony Wiggins Jr.'s "character, background or life that would mitigate against the imposition of the death penalty," with a list that includes parental substance abuse. And he gave his conclusion in strong terms: "Quite frankly, for me to grant the state's objection is embodying an error in this case." He admitted Defense Exhibit 3. The State said it was not stipulating to the video's authenticity and expected the defense to put on a witness to authenticate it, "just like any other rule of evidence regarding videos or photographs." The judge ruled again: "Once again, over the state's objection, it would be admitted into evidence."

So what is the right answer? I think the judge's core ruling is hard to argue with. The law in a capital penalty phase leans hard toward letting a jury hear mitigation, because the Constitution requires that a sentencer be allowed to consider anything about the defendant's life that might call for mercy, and keeping out a defendant's whole childhood account because it is hearsay would be a real risk on appeal. That is what "embodying an error" means in plain English: the judge believed excluding it was the kind of mistake that could undo a sentence.

But "discovery is not a concern for this court" deserves a second look. The State's objection was never only about when it got the video. It was about what it never got: the raw footage. The record on Day 12 does not tell us whether the original footage exists, whether the defense was ever asked for it, or whether it would show anything at all. Those are questions the court could have asked, and on the record I watched, nobody asked them. The video went in on the strength of what it is offered to show, and the jury would later be told only that it had been edited.

Rebuttal Or Aggravation

Having lost on the video, the State asked for something in return. The State said it would intend after that, "since we are putting people's statements into the record to introduce certified copies of conviction since we don't have the opportunity to confront them with cross-examination." A certified copy of a conviction is the court record of a person's criminal conviction, and it is a standard way to impeach a witness. The State named who it had in mind. Stephen Betzel, who had testified that morning, also appears in the video. The State acknowledged he had testified, but said that in the video he is "offering some things outside of what he testified to," and that it had a certified copy of a conviction for him. The State named TJ's mother, Kimberly Keene, who appears in the video, and said it had certified convictions for her. And it named a man named Garza who also appears in the video.

The judge took the request under advisement, meaning he would decide later, and invited the State to find law that supports it. Then he added a warning that I think is the most important legal sentence of the day. "There are laws that um addresses mitigation uh evidence and um reaction by the state that can be construed as turning mitigation into aggravation." He said, "I don't think this is what the state is doing here," but "one has to be careful um as to the rebuttal and not to turn the rebuttal into an aggravation."

Here is why that matters. The State in this case is relying on a single aggravating circumstance. A jury cannot weigh anything else on the death side of the scale. If a defendant's mother says in a video that she loved him and failed him, and the State answers by showing the jury her criminal record, the State is impeaching her credibility, which it is allowed to do. But the jury hears, at the same time, more about the household the defendant came from, and a juror could easily treat that as one more reason to recommend death. The line between rebuttal and new aggravation is real and thin, and the judge drew it out loud before anyone crossed it.

He then sent the jury to an early lunch at about 11:15, and told them the presentation that afternoon might run about two hours, that they would be recessed until Monday, and that sequestration, the court keeping jurors together and away from outside contact, would begin once they went out to deliberate. "It will be my intent to give you the case as early as possible on Monday."

WATCH: DAY 12, PART 49 (THE VIDEO RULING), LIVE 1:00 PM ET SATURDAY, OCT 3 Frostproof Massacre Judge Admits TJ Wiggins' Edited Mitigation Video Over State Objection | Pt 49

Eight Votes, Not Twelve

While the jury ate, the judge and the lawyers built the form those jurors will fill out. It sounds like paperwork. It is the path twelve people will walk to a recommendation about a man's life, so I am going to walk it with you, in the words the judge read aloud.

There will be one section per count, one count per victim. Count one is as to Brandon Rollins. Section A is the aggravating factor: "We the jury unanimously find the state proved beyond reasonable doubt that Tony Wiggins Jr. was previously convicted of another capital felony." In plain English, the other capital felonies are the murder convictions for the other two men. For counts two and three, the form spells that out with options, select all that apply: for the count as to Keven Springfield, the convictions for killing Brandon Rollins and Damion Tillman, and so on through each count. If the jury does not unanimously find the aggravator, the form stops, and Tony Lee Wiggins Jr. "is not eligible for the death penalty and will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole."

Section B asks whether the jury unanimously finds that aggravator sufficient to warrant a possible sentence of death. Section C is mitigation, and its wording is different on purpose: "One or more individual jurors find uh that one or more mitigating circumstances was established by the greater weight of the evidence." A mitigating circumstance does not need a unanimous jury. One juror who finds one is enough for that juror to weigh it. The defense had wanted the full list of mitigating circumstances printed on the form. The judge said, "I can tell you I would not read that list," and the compromise was a pointer to the list in the final instructions, which every juror will have. Section D asks whether the jury unanimously finds that the aggravating factor outweighs the mitigating circumstances. A no there means life without parole.

And then Section E, the recommendation, and the sentence at the center of the whole phase. "If fewer than eight jurors vote for the death penalty, your recommendation must be for a life," the judge began, then corrected himself to a penalty "of life in prison without the possibility of parole. If eight or more jurors vote for the death penalty, your recommendation must be for the death penalty." A death recommendation is entered "by a vote of blank to blank."

Florida used to require a unanimous jury for a death recommendation. The Legislature changed that in 2023, and eight of twelve is now enough. That morning, the defense had renewed its motion to keep the most recent amendments to the sentencing statute from applying to this case, and the judge entered the same ruling as before. So at that last step, the arithmetic is this: if five of the twelve vote for life, the recommendation is life. If four vote for life, the recommendation is death.

Just before the break ended, the State asked for the edited-video instruction to be read before the defense played its compilation. The judge agreed, and then explained why the usual version would not work. The standard instruction tells jurors that irrelevant portions of a recording have been eliminated. The judge said he could not tell them that, because he "can't ascertain what relevant information or irrelevant information was was taken out." He would have to amend it. Hold that sentence next to the State's objection. The judge who admitted the video said, on the record, that he could not vouch for what had been cut from it.

WATCH: DAY 12, PART 50 (THE VERDICT FORM), LIVE 3:00 PM ET SATURDAY, OCT 3 Frostproof Massacre Judge Builds TJ Wiggins' Verdict Form Where Eight Votes Recommend Death | Pt 50

"Same Ruling"

When court came back from lunch, the State had done its homework, and it made its record before the jury returned. The prosecutor said the State understood the court had ruled on the video, but wanted one case on the record: a Florida Supreme Court decision about a penalty phase in which the defense had offered a written postcard from the defendant's daughter, saying she did not want her father executed. As the prosecutor read the headnote to the court, the daughter did not testify, the State had no chance to cross-examine her, and in a capital penalty phase both the State and the defendant "must be afforded opportunity to" rebut hearsay offered by the other side. The case is Sievers v. State, 355 So. 3d 871 (Fla. 2022), and we pulled the opinion and read it ourselves before naming it. In it, the Florida Supreme Court said that in the penalty phase of a capital trial, both the State and the defendant must be afforded the opportunity to rebut hearsay offered by the other side. The trial judge in that case cut three sentences in which the daughter hoped her father would not be executed, and the Supreme Court found no abuse of discretion. What matters for this piece is the principle the State put in front of the judge: rebuttal is supposed to run both ways.

The judge had a copy brought up and read it. Then he said he had read the relevant portions, and ruled: "same ruling as far as the admissibility of defense exhibit number three." The video stayed in.

Then the State's Eric Ebbole pointed the court to the statute on attacking the credibility of a hearsay declarant. In plain English, when a person's out-of-court statement comes into evidence, the other side may attack that person's credibility with the same evidence it could have used if the person had testified, which would include a prior conviction. He added that the statements in this video were unsworn. The State was not asking to keep the video out anymore. It was asking for the tool the law gives a party that cannot cross-examine.

The judge answered in two words. "Same ruling."

That was the last word on the subject that I can find in the record. The State's request to put in certified convictions had been under advisement since late morning. The judge did not explain the ruling further on the record I watched. And as far as the Day 12 record shows, no certified conviction of anyone in the video was ever put in front of this jury.

I think that deserves a hard look from both directions. The judge had warned, correctly, that rebuttal cannot be turned into aggravation, and putting the criminal records of a defendant's own mother and family friends in front of a death-penalty jury carries exactly that risk. But the State's position has real force too. It was told the video comes in because it is mitigation. It was told the jury will hear it without cross-examination. It pointed to the rule that lets a party impeach a hearsay speaker, and it got "same ruling." The jury is going to weigh what Kimberly Keene and the others said in that video without hearing anything the State says bears on their credibility. Stephen Betzel is the exception, and it cuts the other way: he sat on the witness stand that morning, and the State chose not to cross-examine him. Maybe that is the right call. Maybe the convictions were old, or minor, or would have done more harm as aggravation than good as impeachment. The record does not say, because the reasons were never stated, and a ruling with life on one side of it should come with its reasons.

"I Won't"

Before the jury came in, there was one more thing the judge had to do, and he did it carefully. He asked the defense whether it had had time to talk to its client about his right to testify in the penalty phase, or to make a statement. Debra Tuomey said she and co-counsel Rachel Wise had. The judge called Tony Wiggins to the podium and placed him under oath.

He reminded Wiggins of what the jury had already been told in the first phase: if a defendant chooses not to testify, the only thing jurors may take from it is "that in this case the defendant has exercised a right that is guaranteed to him by the constitution." The same thing applies in the penalty phase, the judge said, and the decision belonged to Wiggins alone. Had he had enough time with his lawyers? "Yes, sir." Had he made a decision? "Yes, sir." Had anyone pressured or threatened him? "No, sir." Did he need more time? "No, sir." The judge told him he could still change his mind up to the moment the defense rested.

"And what is that decision?"

"I won't."

"That's strictly that's your right," the judge said, "and the jury will be told in this case the defendant has exercised a right that is guaranteed to him by the constitution."

I want to be plain about what that moment means and what it does not. In a penalty phase, a defendant can take the stand and speak to the jury about his life, and some do. Tony Wiggins chose not to. That is his constitutional right, the jury will be instructed that it may draw nothing from it, and neither will I. It says nothing about guilt, and nothing about remorse. It means the jury's picture of his life will come entirely from other people: the four witnesses of the morning, the doctors of Day 11, and a video.

Edited, By Whom?

Then the instruction. The judge had a proposed version of the edited-video instruction in front of him, and asked if there was any objection. Debra Tuomey had one: "what we would object to is that it has been edited, quote, by the defense." The instruction as drafted told the jury the defense had edited the video.

The judge's first reaction was that the statement was accurate, at the defense's request or with its consent "or what have you," and "it's not untrue statement, I uh one would suspect, correct?" The State agreed: "I think that's a true" statement. But the judge did not keep it. "All right, I will uh delete uh by the defense and I will read it."

When the jury was seated, the judge admitted the video for the third time, now in the jury's presence, "as defense exhibit number three," and read the amended instruction: "Members of the jury, you're about to view a video recording. The court advises you that the recording has been edited." That is what the jury was told. Not by whom. Not that the State never received the original footage. Not that the judge himself had said, before lunch, that he could not say what was taken out.

Here is where I come down, and I hold it loosely. Striking "by the defense" may well be fair. It could suggest to a juror that the defense manipulated the evidence, and the record does not show any manipulation; Tuomey's own words on the point began "I didn't" before the judge cut in. A jury told only that a video is edited knows to take it with care. But the reason the State wanted an edited-video instruction in the first place was that it could not test what was cut, and the instruction the jury heard gives them the fact of the editing without any of the reasons it matters. The fight over this video opened Day 11 and ran through the middle of Day 12, and the jury saw none of it. That is how trials work. The jury gets what the judge allows. What the judge allowed was one sentence.

The Jury Finally Sees It

And then, for about forty-eight minutes, the jury watched the same video the judge had watched alone that morning. The words were the same, so I will not walk you through it twice. But it lands differently when you know twelve people who will decide whether a man lives are sitting in the box, and when you know Tony Wiggins is sitting at the defense table watching his family describe his childhood to them.

"TJ is what held our family together." "TJ's like, you're not my dad." "Paul went in the house and got a belt." "It was a metal belt." "And then in the middle of all that, you had one big light pole." "So it was pond water, but it was clean pond water." "When I started using he was about four." "He saved our lives one night uh when he was 15 days old." "Tony is not the best dad. He's not stable." "He was like a little daddy." "I mean they didn't make him." And the last line, about a boy for whom half a burger was a feast: "That was enough."

When it ended, the judge asked, "The defense rest?" The defense said yes. The case for Tony Wiggins' life was in.

WATCH: DAY 12, PART 51 (THE JURY SEES THE VIDEO), LIVE 9:00 AM ET SUNDAY, OCT 4 Frostproof Massacre Jury Watches TJ Wiggins' Mitigation Video After He Declines to Testify | Pt 51

One Doctor For The State

After a ten-minute break, the State answered. It called one witness in rebuttal, and only one: Dr. Jason Andrew Demery, a Florida-licensed psychologist and board-certified neuropsychologist. Rebuttal is the State's chance to answer the defense case; it cannot add new reasons for death, only respond to what the defense put on. And what the defense put on, on Day 11, were two doctors. Dr. Scot Machlus, a forensic psychologist, tested Tony Wiggins and described ADHD and a history of head injuries. Dr. Joseph Wu, a neuropsychiatrist, described a PET scan, an image of how the brain uses energy, that he read as showing abnormal function. Dr. Demery's job was to take that apart.

He came with a long résumé. The Marines in 1995. A master's degree in psychology in 1996. The University of Florida's doctoral program in clinical psychology, on its neuropsychology track. Board certification in neuropsychology in 2014. Full-time private practice since about 2021. He told the jury he has testified "approximately 300 times."

His first theme was method. Neuropsychologists, he said, lean on objective tests, standardized measures scored against a large group of ordinary people, because "it takes my subjectivity as an individual out of it, because I'm going by what the objective test results are telling me." And: "It controls for bias." Keep those two sentences in mind. They are the standard he set for himself in front of this jury.

His second theme was the difference between a risk for something and proof of it. "A risk factor is just a factor that is present that increases the chance of something" happening. A hard childhood, a concussion, ADHD in the family, all of those raise the odds of a problem. None of them proves the problem is there.

Then he walked the jury through the defense's own numbers, and this was the strongest part of the State's afternoon. Using Dr. Machlus' 2022 testing, he put Tony Wiggins' full-scale IQ at 99, "entirely average." His memory score was 109, the 73rd percentile, pushing into high average. Where the defense had pointed to gaps between his scores as a sign of injury, Dr. Demery told the jury that an eight-point gap like that "occurs in 30.5% of the normative sample," and the normative sample is "comprised of people with no neurological injury." Going further back, the records showed a full-scale IQ of 107 in 2002, when Tony was eight, 107 again in 2006, and 99 in 2022. "Whether it's 2002, 2006, or 2022," the scores were average. On an anger measure, he read that Wiggins was "about as likely as the average individual to act out impulsively on his anger." He described Wiggins in their meeting as "polite, um, very respectful."

He went at the defense's broader ideas, too. ADHD does not mean a person cannot plan. A childhood trauma questionnaire "doesn't measure impulse control at all." And the idea that a young adult's immature brain explains a crime? "I've seen 60 year olds act immature and I've seen 19-year-olds act very mature," he said, and attributing an act to an immature brain "is just conjecture, frankly, in my opinion."

On the PET scan, he was careful, and I think the care tells you something. He agreed Dr. Wu "is the specialist" in PET scanning and that he was not there to reinterpret it. "The PET evidence is changes in cellular metabolism. What I do is way downstream from that." The State had him point out that the scan was taken in 2025, five years after the killings. But when the question came to what the scan means, he said: "I don't have an expert opinion about the significance of you know the PET scan and what it showed in 2025 and if it was there in 2020 or not." So the State's only rebuttal witness offered the jury no opinion on the defense's brain imaging, one way or the other.

On head injuries, he explained the grades of concussion, one through three, with grade three, a blow followed by a loss of consciousness, the most serious of the mild injuries. On the belt, he told the jury what Tony Wiggins told him: that he was hit with a belt, a metal belt, but on the ribs and the body, never the head. "So I have seen no evidence that he was ever hit in the head with a belt or hit in the head with a belt buckle."

"Kind Of The Opposite Of Impulse"

And then the opinion the State called him for. "Understanding that impulse is immediate," he said, "In my opinion, this was not an immediate or an impulsive act." Why? Because, as he understood the guilt-phase timeline, there were "approximately like seven, maybe eight to ten minutes" between a stop at a Dollar General and a call that the trial evidence placed in those minutes. "And so that gives a person seven, eight minutes is it's kind of the opposite of impulse, frankly. It gives a person to organize their thoughts, come up with a plan, execute a plan," and weigh the consequences. "I consider this to be a non-impulsive act."

The prosecutor then asked about the courtroom itself. Dr. Demery said he had watched Wiggins sitting at the defense table "completely normally, no signs of hyperactivity, no signs of impulsive responding in the context of highly emotionally charged content and information." He acknowledged there had been behavior in the courtroom that was "challenging to contain at times, but not from him."

Put those last two opinions next to the method he described at the start. A doctor who told this jury that objective test data "takes my subjectivity" out of it and "controls for bias" built his central opinion, the one about impulse, on something that is not a test at all: a reading of the trial's timeline of the crime. And he backed it with his own observations of a man sitting still at a defense table in a capital trial. Neither of those is objective data in the sense he described. That does not make the opinion wrong. Seven or eight minutes is real time, and a jury can draw that inference with or without a doctor. But it is the jury's inference to draw from the guilt-phase evidence, and the jury should know that is what it was hearing, a doctor's view of the facts, not a test result.

What He Did Not Do

The defense cross-examination was short on theatrics and long on facts, and it went straight at the foundation. Had he gone to medical school? "I have not." Was he a radiologist? "I'm not a radiologist." Experienced in reading PET scans? The person to read one is "a radiologist or preferably a neuroradiologist, I think."

Then the meeting. He met Tony Wiggins on Wednesday, September 30, after the guilty verdict and the day before the penalty phase opened. Defense counsel suggested it lasted about 26 minutes. "Uh around 30 minutes, yes." It was the first time he had ever met or spoken with him. "The intent was simply to do a brief interview." The room was surrounded by at least five guards: "Yes." Was Wiggins in handcuffs? "Um, I believe he was. I don't recall." And where did the meeting happen? At the State Attorney's Office. "The very office that's prosecuting," defense counsel said. "That's the location, yes."

Right there, someone asked for a sidebar on this line of questioning; the transcript does not mark who. When the questioning resumed, the defense was back on testing. The jury heard the location once, and that line of questioning ended there.

Then the question at the center of the cross. "Did you perform any uh tests on TJ?" "No, I didn't feel like I needed to given what Dr. Machlus did." No tests. No checklists. No scales. "No."

Think about what that means. The State's only answer to two defense doctors was a doctor who preached objective testing, ran none, and built his numbers on the defense psychologist's own testing. To be fair to him, that is a legitimate way to rebut an expert: take the other side's data and show it does not say what they claim. And he did that well. But it also means that on the question the defense cares most about, whether Tony Wiggins has ADHD and an injured brain, the State's witness gathered no data of his own, spent about half an hour with the man under guard in the prosecutor's building, and offered no opinion on the brain scan.

The defense pressed on the ADHD rating scales Dr. Machlus used, the Wender Utah scale and an adult self-report checklist. Dr. Demery said he had never seen the two used together, but "I have no problem with what uh with what the doctor did." Had they been validated? He hoped so. Counsel asked for a yes. "I don't know the answer." On the school records, he agreed the teachers' descriptions of a boy who was hyperactive and off task in class were "consistent with somebody who" would have symptoms of ADHD, while insisting the objective data contradicted it.

She asked whether a person with ADHD can hyperfocus on one thing. He said sitting and focusing is "a sign of normal behavior." She asked: "Well, have you ever been sitting at that table for five weeks?" "Never have." "Facing the death penalty?" "No, never have." It was the answer to his courtroom-demeanor opinion, and it did not need a follow-up.

On head injuries, she got the most important concession of the cross. "The lack of records don't imply that something didn't happen," he agreed. "And I do agree that he did sustain a grade three concussion." Counsel: "At least one." "At least one, yes, ma'am." The most serious grade of concussion, by his own scale, and he agreed Tony Wiggins had suffered at least one.

And she closed on who he testifies for. Of his roughly 300 times on the stand in criminal cases, "probably about sixty percent of the time I testify for the defense." But "over the course of the last three or four years, the majority of my testimony in death penalty cases has indeed been from the state." He added that he is currently working on a death penalty case for the defense, in this same circuit. Asked, "Would that be one case?" he answered, "At the present time, yes, I believe so." The one case is that current defense case, and on the question of whose side he usually takes, that answer cuts in his favor.

On redirect, the State brought him back to the numbers. The adult IQ test has a recognizable ADHD profile, he said, low working memory and processing speed against stronger verbal and reasoning scores, and Wiggins "does not have that split." On the concussion: "by definition, a concussion does not result in a permanent neuropsychological deficit," and people are expected to recover by about three months. And the last question: did he agree with Dr. Machlus that the defendant knows right from wrong? "Yes, I do agree with Dr. Machlus on that."

That last answer is worth understanding, because it can sound bigger than it is. Knowing right from wrong is the test for legal insanity, and nobody in this penalty phase has claimed Tony Wiggins was insane. The defense's mitigation is about impairment and childhood, things that can lessen a person's moral culpability even when he knew what he was doing was wrong. Both sides' doctors agree he knew right from wrong. The jury still has to decide what weight his childhood and his brain deserve.

WATCH: DAY 12, PART 52 (THE STATE'S DOCTOR), LIVE 11:00 AM ET SUNDAY, OCT 4 Frostproof Massacre State Expert Who Ran No Tests Says TJ Wiggins Did Not Act on Impulse | Pt 52

The Evidence Is Closed

After a sidebar, the judge told the jurors they would not be sequestered that night, and sent them on a short break. When court came back, the defense had one housekeeping item: Dr. Machlus' entire written evaluation, twenty-eight pages, marked as Defense Exhibit 13. It went into the court's file as a court exhibit. That is a different thing from evidence. It preserves the report for the record and for any appeal, but it does not go back to the jury room.

Then the jury came in, and the State spoke two words: "State rest." The judge told the jurors: "this will conclude the presentation of evidence for both the state and the defense for the penalty phase." He told them to come back Monday, October 5, at 8:45 in the morning, with their "favorite pillow, toothbrush, uh, vitamins, medications," whatever they need overnight, because once they start deliberating they will stay together until they reach a recommendation. No cell phones. No TV, radio or newspapers. Transportation to the hotel will be provided, and so will meals. Jurors asked practical questions, about books, cards and bags, and the judge answered them kindly: cards were fine, books he would take up with the lawyers, bags could come in Monday morning. Deputy La Capra would handle the rest.

With the jury gone, the last fight of the day was over a single line on the form. Under Section C, the mitigation section, the draft told jurors that if they answered yes, they should go on to Section D "regardless of your findings in section C." The State called that "unnecessarily confusing," because jurors move to the next section whatever they answer. In the exchange that followed, one of the lawyers put the reason on the record in a phrase I hope the jurors hear in some form on Monday: they still go on "because they can always apply mercy." The judge rewrote it so it cannot be misread: "Regardless of your findings in section C, proceed to section D." He restored the "select all that apply" language the defense had taken out of each count. The 27 pages of instructions were trimmed of an instruction about law-enforcement witnesses, "mitigating factor" became "circumstance" where it should, and a sentence telling the jury to choose a foreperson came out. "Let's gather Monday at 8.30."

WATCH: DAY 12, PART 53 (THE STATE RESTS), LIVE 1:00 PM ET SUNDAY, OCT 4 Frostproof Massacre State Rests and TJ Wiggins' Jury Is Told to Bring a Pillow on Monday | Pt 53

Where Day 12 Leaves The Case

For ten court days this jury answered whether Tony Wiggins killed Brandon Rollins, Keven Springfield and Damion Tillman. It said yes. For two court days it has heard what he deserves, and the evidence on that question is now closed. On the death side of the scale is one aggravating circumstance: that each murder came with convictions for the other two. On the life side is everything the defense could show about the boy who filtered pond water for a toilet at nine and the man his family describes, through four witnesses, two doctors and an edited video.

Both sides close on Monday. The judge reads the instructions. Then the jury deliberates, sequestered, with the form in front of it. If fewer than eight jurors vote for death, the recommendation is life in prison without parole. If eight or more do, the recommendation is death. Either way it is a recommendation, and the sentence belongs to Judge Harb.

What I will be watching for on Monday is how each side handles the piece of its case the other side could not test. Will the State tell the jury the video is edited, unsworn and one-sided? It has every right to. Will the defense tell the jury the State's only doctor ran no tests, met their client for half an hour in the prosecutor's office, and offered no opinion on the brain scan? It has every right to as well. The jury has heard both. It has not heard the fight about either one. A jury only ever sees what the judge lets in, and on Day 12 the most important rulings, on the video, on the impeachment, on the wording of a single instruction, were made with the jury out of the room.

Start with Part 49 if you watch one thing; the fight over the video is the day. Part 52 is the State's doctor, start to finish. The No Breaks Edition has the whole day without the waiting, and the Day 12 Top Moments premieres Monday morning, before closings.

WATCH: DAY 12, NO BREAKS EDITION (THE WHOLE DAY) THE FROSTPROOF MASSACRE Day 12, No Breaks Edition: Mitigation Video Plays, TJ Wiggins Won't Testify WATCH: DAY 12 TOP MOMENTS, PREMIERES 7:30 AM ET MONDAY, OCT 5 THE FROSTPROOF MASSACRE - FL v. Tony Wiggins - Day 12 Top Moments: The Mitigation Video Fight

Follow every Part of this trial in order in the Frostproof Massacre Trial Analysis Podcast playlist, and tell me in the comments: should a jury deciding life or death be told who edited a video it is weighing, and should the State have been allowed to answer it with the criminal records of the people in it? We are staying with this case through the recommendation.