Day after day the taunts “Ed Boy! Ed Boy!” rang out in Courtroom 401 during Stephen Monroe’s week-long murder trial last February as the prosecution repeatedly played an Instagram Live video to the jury.
The brief selfie video showed Stephen Monroe and Tyrese Patterson jiggling a gun and calling out to “Ed Boy,” humiliating him and daring him to come out and face them. He never did, though later that evening in January 2022, Monroe, Patterson and and Devandre Williams went looking for him and ended up firing hails of bullets on a busy Bunnell street, killing 16-year-old Noah Smith, an unintended victim.
Monroe is serving life in prison. Patterson is serving 30 years. Williams, who was also implicated in the similarly senseless murder of Keymarion Hall months later, is serving 55 years.
Ed Boy, a potential murder victim in that case, never made an appearance at the trial. He was serving a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence on unrelated drug charges. He was released on May 13–just six months ago–ending his fifth stint in state prison in 12 years.
But Ed Boy–Edward Gerard Sampson, 30–was in court today. He was facing a jury pool of 30, and by noon five women and two men (one of them Black) were selected to decide his fate in a trial, with opening arguments later this week.
Sampson is charged with a second-degree felony count of aggravated battery on a pregnant woman. The charge stems from a July 27 incident unrelated to his history with Monroe’s group. He’d shoved the pregnant woman, who tumbled backward onto a chair.
Sampson declined to accept a plea on the prosecution’s terms. “I’m aware of the offer he turned down from the State,” his girlfriend wrote in a letter to the court. “We were both just praying they’ll come with a better offer.” He was willing to do up to a year in jail then leave Florida for good. The prosecution was not willing to forego prison time.
Though a second-degree felony with a maximum penalty of 15 years, the charge he faces would, if applied to an offender with a previously clean or relatively record, ordinarily have resulted in something like what the girlfriend was asking for, along with some probation. Maybe less.
But if convicted, Sampson, for that one shove, could face up to 30 years in prison.
Sampson would face conviction as a “habitual” offender and a “prison releasee reoffender,” meaning that he’d been to prison within the last three years. Under those standards, penalties are disproportionately aggravated, usually–as is the case here–with no connection to the nature of the incident.
He has 14 prior felony convictions. Under the habitual felony offender designation he faces up to 30 years in prison on the single charge of aggravated battery on a pregnant woman. As a prison releasee reoffender, the usual sentencing guidelines that provide for a lower minimum sentence don’t apply. He must serve 15 years, day for day–no chance for early release or “gain time”–on the same charge.
Sampson unquestionably has a violent history, though the violence is more the moronic consequence of a thin-skinned hothead than of conspiratorial or calculated cruelty. He has a 2017 conviction for aggravated battery, aggravated assault and robbery. He’d pulled a gun on a 30-year-old man he was driving around with on East Booe Street late one night in September 2016. He wanted the man to give him money. The victim refused. Sampson pulled a gun, smashed it against the victim’s head, pulled him out of the car they were riding and attempted to steal whatever was in his pocket.
The charges were reduced in a plea. He got 210 days at the county jail and two years’ house arrest. But he violated his probation so many times that he ended up serving prison time. He’d also served three years on an aggravated battery conviction in 2013. He’s had numerous charges in between, including more assaults, many of them dropped.
He was re-arrested just six weeks after his last release from prison after a physical confrontation with his girlfriend, T.V., 23, the same woman who wrote the pleading letter to the court, cited above. He’d wrestled her phone from her and punched her several times in the face and the back of the head. He was initially charged with felony battery and resisting arrest without violence. The felony charge was dropped. He was convicted on the resisting charge, a misdemeanor, and sentenced to 45 days in jail. He got out on July 3.
Twenty-four days later, he was in the violent confrontation that now has him facing up to 30 years in prison.
It was July 27. The victim was leaving a friend’s house on South Peach Street in Bunnell when “Ed Boy,” as she referred to him, approached her on his bike and began “yelling about another male causing him harm and made threats of retaliation.” The other male was the woman’s uncle. The argument, oddly similar to the tenor of the feud he’d had with Monroe’s group, escalated.
Ed Boy’s reputation now precedes him. The woman told him she was tired of his behavior and urged him to leave. He said he didn’t have to, according to his arrest report.
“Shut the fuck up,” the woman told him, “nobody wanna hear that shit. Take your ass on somewhere.” Sampson jumped off his bike and got in the woman’s face. She warned him to back away. He pushed her in the face. She fell. Bystanders yelled at him that she was pregnant (20 weeks pregnant).
“I don’t give a fuck, she spit in my face,” he yelled back. The victim told him she was calling the cops. Ed Boy got on his bike and fled. He called 911, himself asking to speak with cops, but he was not at the location he gave when cops showed up, nor would he answer his phone when they called.
Bunnell police, which investigated the case, looked at surveillance video from cameras that crisscross South Bunnell (the city installed the cameras in the predominantly Black neighborhood but not in other neighborhoods) and saw the footage matching the description of the incident the woman had described.
The footage is expected to be shown to the jury. But it may be less than convincing, as suggested by a motion the defense filed last week, and the judge granted: “Officers shall not testify as to their opinion on the contents of video surveillance footage,” the granted motion states. “Whether or not the video contains a physical altercation is a question for the jury. Additionally, the officers are in no better position than the jury to determine the contents of the video.”
The jury will be told nothing of Sampson’s criminal history.
Jury selection was swift this morning as it unfolded before Senior Circuit Judge Terence Perkins, who’s sitting in for Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols, on assignment elsewhere in the circuit. Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark is prosecuting the case.
Assistant Public Defenders Melissa MacNicol and Spencer O’Neal are representing Sampson, who’s had his run-ins with them, too. “My attorney is highly disrespectful and told me I’m guilty,” he claimed in a letter to the court he wrote in mid-September and sent from the Flagler County jail, where he’s been held on no bond since his arrest. There’d initially been a $60,000 bond. Clark motioned for it to be revoked, citing Sampson’s past history. Nichols granted the motion.
In his letter to the court, Sampson complained of his attorney: “I’m telling her I’m innocent and is ready for trial,” he wrote. “She is telling me that she cannot win. What lawyer doesn’t fight or do the ground work first. No depositions have happened of anything. Please help me, my life is on the line.”
His girlfriend–his next-to-last victim–wrote the court: “I understand, to the public’s eye he may be guilty and a horrible person. But he’s not. He’s a father, he’s hard working, sweet, can cook, and knows how to preach God’s word. I’ve known him for 10 years and been with him since he got out of prison May of 2025. Not just him, but we both talk about a change and relocation for a better life and new start. Unfortunately this incident happened.”
Opening arguments are at 9 a.m. Thursday in Courtroom 401, where the overhead screens will once again taunt Ed Boy over his fate, this time through a police surveillance video.
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