Found Guilty, Brian Pirraglia Is Sentenced to Life in Prison for Brian O’Shea’s Death by Fentanyl, a First in Flagler

It’s a small urn, only a few inches high. It’s elegantly engraved with silvery leaves on black, though it’s been weathered by time or circumstances, by the repeated touch or cradling of hand or two. It feels disproportionately heavy for its size when you hold it.

The urn contains the ashes of Brian O’Shea, who died in 2022 when he was 38. His mother Maureen O’Shea carried the urn with her all week as she attended the trial of Brian Pirraglia, who called himself O’Shea’s best friend, and who on Feb. 8, 2022, injected his best friend with a fatal dose of fentanyl, then robbed him of the money Maureen had sent her son just two hours earlier. Pirraglia was on trial on a first-degree murder charge coldly referred to, in court parlance, as “first degree murder by unlawful distribution of a controlled substance.”




At 1:30 this afternoon, after deliberating for three hours and 45 minutes, a jury of eight men and four women found Pirraglia guilty as charged. Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols almost immediately sentenced him to life in prison–the first time in Flagler County history that an individual facing that charge is sentenced to life. Many have been charged. Most have pleaded to long but not endless prison sentences. Only three opted for trial. One was acquitted. One was convicted on a lesser charge. Pirraglia alone would up with the maximum penalty.

He had sat ramrod, literally holding his breath, as the judge reviewed the jury’s document before handing it to the clerk to be read. The moment Pirraglia heard the word “guilty,” he visibly and dramatically deflated, sat back and shook his head. His facial expression did not change. He did not get emotional. He watched the jury as each juror was polled. He spoke briefly with his attorney, Donna Peterson, who seemed more shocked than he was, asking for an appeal right away.

Maureen O’Shea had sat diagonally from the defendant’s table in the gallery. She sobbed quietly in the arms of Knoeidia Hill, the victim’s advocate with the State Attorney’s Office who’d been with O’Shea all week. O’Shea had flown down from Pennsylvania for the trial, from her home in the Poconos form where she had sent that $800 to her son the day he came out of the Flagler County jail so he could fly home.




“I got justice for Brian, maybe peace for me,” Maureen O’Shea said after the trial. “Did anybody win? No, nobody won. I’m sorry that she–” She didn’t finish the thought: she was referring to Brian Pirraglia’s mother, who had also attended the trial all four days, including jury selection, except today: she had not turned up for the verdict. Maybe she knew, as some in the gallery knew–as they had seen–that the defense hadn’t been much of a defense even if such charges are difficult to prove. “But she could look at her son. I’m never going to look at Brian again. Brian is in my pocket. I carry the ashes with me.” She had dropped the urn once on her toe during the trial. “He made me bleed. I started laughing. I said, you make your mommy bleed.”

Maureen O’Shea, who now runs a grief counseling group called The Ugly Shoes (the trial did not allow much room for her sense of humor), also wanted to set the record straight. “My son suffered substance abuse disorder, and we fought our whole lives,” she said. “Brian Pirraglia is a known drug dealer. He has been a known drug dealer. He was always my son’s person to go to for drugs.” Maureen, who’d lived in Coral Springs for 20 years before returning to Pennsylvania in 2020, had known  Pirraglia for those 20 years.

“All you heard was lies from him,” O’Shea said of Pirraglia. “And if you listen to his tapes, all the stories he told was all lies from the get go. From the get go. He wanted my son’s money. That’s all he wanted.” Flagler County Sheriff’s detective Adam Gossett, who investigated the case, had recorded Pirraglia saying many of those lies, claiming O’Shea had fallen, struck his head, had a seizure, that drugs were not involved, that he wasn’t involved–stories that changed when Gossett learned from another drug user who’d just been arrested, and who knew Pirraglia, that took place in Pirraglia’s bedroom on O’Shea’s last day. Pirraglia had told the story to the inmate.

O’Shea had been clean at the jail for six months as he served out a sentence for cocaine possession. But when he was released on what was to be his first day back to freedom, it was Pirraglia who picked him, Pirraglia who took him to Publix to get his mother’s money through Western Union, Pirraglia who took him back to the B-Section drug house where O’Shea had known trouble before, and Pirraglia who, early that very afternoon, took O’Shea into his room and injected him.




Sober  for half a year, O’Shea’s tolerance was low. To describe the fentanyl hitting him like a bullet isn’t a metaphor. A bullet would have been no different. He immediately slumped over, struck his head on a marble slab, and never revived. Pirraglia panicked, tried to get Narcan from a roommate sleeping in another room, tried CPR, called 911, but also wheeled O’Shea out of Pirraglia’s bedroom, with all its spoons and powders and lighters, with all its clutter of drugs and recklessness. He locked the door before the cops showed up. O’Shea was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced deceased.

Peterson’s defense was to cast doubt on every turn on what she termed the prosecution’s “assumptions.” But she cast such a wide net about so many details the prosecution spoke about, and about so many matters that weren’t even in contention, including the detective’s brief time as a detective or the medical examiner’s method or the lurking presence of Pirraglia’s drug dealer, nicknamed Monk, who she implied quite plausibly could himself have sold the drugs to O’Shea. But she could not establish any documented contact between Monk and O’Shea the way Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton, in the very last part of her closing arguments Wednesday, devastatingly proved with video and phone records how Pirraglia had just been in contact with Monk before the fatal dosage.

So Peterson’s drizzle of doubt ended up fogging up her case instead of sharpening it, while Dunton repeatedly focused on a few essentials: the very brief timeline between O’Shea’s release from jail and his death, who he was with during those hours and what he did–proven in part by surveillance video at Publix–and what Pirraglia subsequently told two witnesses. That the two witnesses were themselves substance abusers and felons didn’t alter the fact that on the stand, they proved impermeable to more of Peterson’s drizzle. Juries pick up on that.

Peterson showed her by-then soggy cards on On Wednesday in a brief segment of the rial out of view of the jury when she tried to get the recordings of two phone conversations between Pirraglia and O’Shea into evidence. O’Shea was about to be released from jail and had called Pirraglia (all jail conversations are recorded). Pirraglia was telling him about someone who wanted O’Shea sober, though Pirraglia himself, in the judge’s view, sounded impaired. The judge couldn’t understand what the defense was getting at–why Peterson wanted those conversations introduced to the jury. If anything, the conversations would hurt Pirraglia, the judge suggested, since he didn’t sound so clean himself. In the end the conversations stayed out.




Almost two hours into deliberations today, a jury question hinted at the difficulties the panel was struggling with. “Does the meaning of distribution mean,” the question read, “one, the physical exchange of Pirraglia directly giving substance to O’Shea, or two, if the substance is accessible and doesn’t belong to Pirraglia.”

The question indicated that at least some jurors were either confused about how the drugs ended up in O’Shea, or were not convinced that Pirraglia had injected O’Shea with them. Either way, the question was not what the prosecution wanted to hear. If some jurors thought either that the fentanyl wasn’t Pirraglia’s or that Pirraglia hadn’t injected O’Shea, they could not convict.

Dunton, the prosecutor (she tried the case with Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis), hadn’t left any doubt in her arguments to the jury that Pirraglia had not only acquired the drugs, but had injected them. Neither could be absolutely proved.

Dunton–trying her last case after a 20-year career, before taking a job in the private sector with a non-profit–relied on circumstances and the tight timeline to make it seem almost unreasonable for a scenario different than Pirraglia acquiring the fentanyl and injecting O’Shea. If in that timeline Pirraglia had been capable of acquiring it, then O’Shea might have been able to do the same. Pirraglia had told authorities that O’Shea had taken a walk outside the house, implying that he could have conducted a drug transaction during that time. But Pirraglia’s credibility was nil, and the defense never focused the jury on that detail, arguing instead that anyone in the house might have been responsible for the drugs. It was more drizzle, as the jury verdict indicated.

“I feel that he’s being punished for something that, to me, he’s  messed my son up for 20 years,”  Maureen O’Shea said. “In 2020, which they didn’t mention, he put my son in a mental institution for almost a year. I told him then, stay away from my son, or you’re going to be in trouble. My son somehow got back to him.”

Marica O’Shea is Brian’s younger sister–his only sibling. A resident of Pompano Beach, she, too, attended the trial with Maureen and other members of the family. She was prepared to speak her victim’s impact statement to the court had there been a sentencing hearing, but didn’t get the chance. She shared it: “I went into this trial with compassion and empathy for the defendant,” Marica O’Shea wrote. “I know who my brother was, I am also in recovery (God willing I will have 5 years sober next month), and I work in treatment as a primary therapist down in Delray Beach. But after what came out over the last couple of days, I believe wholeheartedly that my brother received justice for the defendant’s complete lack of respect for human life.




“I was appalled and downright furious while I watched him tell bald-faced lies to the first responders who tirelessly fought to save my brother. Not only do I believe in my heart of hearts that the defendant shot my brother that fatal dose, but I believe he carelessly wheeled him out to the living room while conjuring up a bogus story to tell law enforcement and ultimately let him die. The absolute least the defendant could have done was advise first responders to administer Narcan, and he didn’t. Although no one in my family will ever truly get closure, nor get my brother back, at least the defendant can no longer put other families through the hell he has put mine through.”

Corrections: An earlier version of this article reported that Maureen O’Shea lived in palm Coast for 20 years; she had in fact lived in Coral Springs. The reported number of jurors was also corrected.