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NEW PORT RICHEY — They never learned if the motive was jealousy or an argument or gang-related violence, but a jury on Thursday convicted Derrick L. Harris of killing his younger half-brother in 2008.
Harris hung his head with the jury's announcement. As a bailiff took his fingerprints, his mother, Alice Sutera, lingered silently nearby.
Authorities said the brothers were together in the afternoon on Sept. 26, 2008. Anthony Granton, an 18-year-old Ridgewood High School student with lots of friends, was last seen about 7:30 that night talking on his cell phone.
Hours later, at a party on School Road, Harris was seen with the phone. He flashed a gun. He was drinking, and that was unusual for him, witnesses said.
He worked the next morning at his job at a nursing home. Then he was seen driving through a parking lot on Orchid Lake Road, to a Dumpster. A minute later, he left, then made a 911 call to report a dead body in the Dumpster, using a fake name.
He went back to the scene and talked to detectives, who found Granton's blood in the trunk of the white Honda Civic he and Harris shared. He told conflicting stories over the next few weeks about how the night had unfolded and when he'd last seen his brother.
"The problem with covering things up is sometimes you just get a little lost," Assistant State Attorney Chris Sprowls told jurors.
Granton was shot in the back of the head.
The fact that investigators never found the gun, could not pinpoint when Granton was killed and did not determine a motive left room for reasonable doubt, Harris' attorney Willie Pura argued.
The state's pieces of evidence, he said, were enough to "raise an eyebrow but fall far short of being evidence of guilt."
He questioned why Harris would openly use the victim's phone after killing him. Why he would let other people at the party drive the car if there was a body in the trunk. Why he himself would drive it to the Dumpster where investigators were working when it still contained blood evidence.
"If he was thinking of keeping himself out of the investigation ... why in the world would he return to the scene?" Pura said.
Pura implied that the crime was gang-related. He said Granton had started "messing around with the wrong crowd" and may have been killed for stealing rims from a Valentine Bloods leader.
Harris, he said, was worried about his brother and his family's safety.
But Sprowls told jurors that Harris' erratic behavior was a sign of a killer in a panic: "He needed to see if the body was still there. He's freaking out."
Harris, who is 25 and has no prior felonies, faces a maximum of life in prison when he is sentenced on Nov. 4.
Molly Moorhead can be reached at moorhead@sptimes.com or on Twitter at @mollymoorhead.
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