No Stand Your Ground: Palm Coast Teen Arrested in Connection with Double-Shooting at Beach Village Apartments

The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday arrested 18-year-old Micah McGill and charged him with three felony counts in connection with a shooting that left him and another man wounded at the Beach Village Apartments off of State Road 100 in Palm Coast last November. 

The Sheriff’s Office had initially characterized the shooting as a potential case of Stand Your Ground–at least that’s what’s what the two victims had claimed, as the sheriff described it at the time. In the end, one of the two men was charged with a misdemeanor for assaulting his girlfriend. The other, who’d been adjudicated a juvenile delinquent at the time, faces three second-degree felonies adding up to a maximum potential penalty of 45 years in prison. 

The night of Nov. 16, T.S.M., a 21-year-old resident of the Beach Village apartments in Palm Coast, called 911, crying uncontrollably and reporting that her 22-year-old boyfriend, Tyree Smith, had been beating her, that her 17-year-old brother Micah McGill intervened, and that a shooting resulted. She told the 911 dispatcher that both Smith and McGill were hit.

When Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies arrived, they found Smith at the 7-Eleven on State Road 100 with a gunshot to his chest and another to his left forearm. He was on his iPhone, face-timing someone, which he apparently continued to do while paramedics worked on him. He initially declined to answer deputies’ questions. Several sheriff’s detectives were assigned to the case. 

According to the investigative report as written in McGill’s arrest affidavit, McGill had stayed at the apartment with his sister, who was tending to his wound on his right calf. McGill told deputies he’d heard the altercation involving Smith and his sister, went to their room and opened the door. 

“What are you gonna do with the gun, shoot me with it?” Smith asked him, according to T.S.M., who ran out the door. 

“Now my boyfriend is coming to attack him,” T.S.M. said, “and he’s walking up on him saying, ‘shoot me, shoot me.’” She said she did not hear McGill make any threats with the firearm, only that he pointed it at Smith and said: “Do not hit my sister anymore.” She then heard several gunshots and saw the two belligerents wrestling on the bed. When she left to find her younger brother, she heard another gunshot. 

As McGill first described it to detectives, he’d heard his sister argue often before and that Smith had allegedly hit his sister four times before. When he confronted Smith, Smith tried to take the gun from him. “He already mad so I just wanted to shoot him,” McGill said. But his story later changed. He said Smith had the gun first and McGill lunged for it. They fought over the gun, he grabbed it, and when Smith reached for it again, “I pulled the trigger, and after that I just kept pulling it, but it kept jamming,” McGill said. 

The gun was a 9 mm HK detectives found to have been stolen in Indian River County. 

Smith acknowledged that he was in a fight with his girlfriend, snatching her by the hair when she tried to leave the room. (She put it differently, saying he “held her on the ground and proceeded to violently drag her into a dresser where she hit her head,” according to his arrest report.) As soon as he saw McGill pointing the gun at him, he rushed him and tried to knock the gun out of his hand. As they wrestled, he said McGill fired several rounds. 

“I don’t know what happened,” McGill’s younger brother told detectives, “but he grabbed a gun and I don’t know what they were saying because it happened too fast.” He didn’t know where McGill got the gun. McGill has an extensive juvenile justice record and was barred from possessing guns. “I heard a shot and then another and then they wrestled into my room,” the younger brother said, at which point he ran into his mother’s room. 

Smith and McGill were taken to Halifax hospital in Daytona Beach. The Sheriff’s Office publicly reported the incident the next day, saying no arrests had been made and that both individuals were invoking Stand Your Ground, the Florida law that empowers an individual not to retreat in a self-defense situation, and in fact to take offensive action against the perceived assailant. McGill’s and Smith’s arrest reports make no mention of Stand Your Ground. 

Based on his own confession to battering his girlfriend, Smith was charged with one misdemeanor count of battery. He pleaded to a deferred prosecution agreement, fulfilled the condition of the agreement–an anger management class–and the charge was dropped on March 19. 

McGill, the investigation found, had been adjudicated delinquent in 2023. He was deemed the primary assailant in the altercation, was charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, possession of a weapon by a delinquent, and firing a missile into a building, each a second-degree felony. The third charge was added by the State Attorney’s Office in June.  McGill was arrested at his home on Ripple Place in Palm Coast Tuesday afternoon. He is being held at the county jail on $105,000. He turned 18 on Jan. 6.