In Murder Trial, Stephen Monroe Takes Stand in His Own Defense Only to Face an Inquisition Into His Rap of Lies

Stephen Monroe gambled today and testified in his own defense in his jury trial on a charge of murdering 16-year-old Noah Smith in Bunnell three years ago. He did so by going up against Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis, a merciless cross-examiner who had Monroe grimacing, snorting, eye-rolling, huffing, gesturing, interrupting and talking over Lewis and so many times that he drew several rebukes from the judge, apologizing every time.

“You keep apologizing but you keep doing it,” Lewis told him at one point, calling out what by then had become theatrically obsequious apologies. (See complete video of the testimony below.)




It did not go well for Monroe. But he had little choice: his defense until that point had been nil, his attorney only cursorily cross-examining a few of the two dozen witnesses the prosecution put on. Monroe was on his own.

Despite seeing Lewis in action for three days until late this afternoon, Monroe at no point in the hour-long inquisition figured out that dueling with Lewis might not be a good idea. Lewis had devoted 58 minutes of the inquisition to pointing out every lie Monroe had told the cops in several interviews. He’d forced Monroe again and again to admit that he’d lied. The tactic was so forceful and unrelenting even long after the jury had gotten the point that it began to seem like badgering.

It could have played in Monroe’s favor had Monroe not paired exasperation with smugness, had he caught on to Lewis’s tactic and turned it to his advantage by looking more penitent and remorseful than performing: half a dozen times he’d said he was an artist, a rapper, a song-writer who put on acts t reflect his generation’s interests. This looked like one more act.

Monroe never readjusted. Lewis knew how to rile up his witness. And his witness just got more indignant.




Monroe, 26, faces life in prison if convicted. The night of Jan. 12, 2022, he, Tyrese Patterson and Devandre Williams drove from Monroe’s rental in Palm Coast’s R Section to Bunnell’s South Anderson Street, chasing after Ed Sampson, or Ed Boy, the man they’d been taunting, humiliating and threatening on social media for a couple of days, including in an Instagram video where Patterson and Monroe point guns at the camera–the guns they would end up firing, ostensibly in his direction, after he’d fired at them that night. They hit nothing, except Noah Smith.

Monroe’s bullet didn’t strike Smith. That’s been proven (he fired a different-caliber bullet than the one that struck Smith). One of  Monroe’s only strong moments on the stand was when he made that point, after Lewis inadvertently asked him how he knew his bullet didn’t kill “the kid,” as Monroe called Smith. Monroe, finger-wagging, laid it out.

But it doesn’t  make a difference. Under Florida law, and as the judge explained to the jury during jury selection, the fact that one assailant’s bullets didn’t strike the victim is irrelevant, as long as the assailant was involved in the same confrontation that caused the victim’s death. In fact, all four people involved in that incident were charged with firs-degree murder. Three have pleaded out. Monroe alone chose to go to trial.

Monroe’s only defense, never heard in his three or four interviews with detectives in the weeks and months after the shooting, never heard until Monday afternoon, when his attorney first argued it to the jury, is that he fired his gun in self-defense. That was difficult for the jury to believe even in opening arguments, before the evidence was in. It got much harder as the prosecution built its case. Today, Monroe himself made it almost impossible to believe.




In all his interviews with Flagler County Sheriff’s detectives in the months and weeks after the shooting, he’d fabricated a man who was supposedly in the car with him and his two friends, and who fired a gun that night. He’d transferred his own act to that man, making it seem as if he was not involved, never had a gun, never fired a shot. It wasn’t until the latter half of his last interview with detectives that he broke down and admitted that the man did not exist, that he’d made him up because he was scared, that just about everything he’d told detectives about that night had been a lie.

But now he was telling the truth. He was the one firing the gun. And now, on the stand, he was telling the truth, he said in answer to a question by his own attorney, Terence Lenamon.

He fired the gun. In self-defense. As he described it to the jury, there as another man in the middle of the street with a long gun or an assault rifle shooting at him, and he shot back. But it sounded as if he had once again conjured up  the same fabricated man and placed him outside the car, in the middle of the road, at an undetermined distance, that he’d armed this man with an assault rifle, and that the rifle was firing at him madly. He had to fire back.




It was quite a story, because by then Monroe had sat through the prosecution’s case for three days. He’d seen the evidence as shown the jury. It was very clear by then that no one was shooting at Monroe and his two friends in the car they were riding in Bunnell that night. That had happened minutes earlier, when Terrell Sampson, from a wooded area, had fired at the car after one of its occupants had exchanged words with him.

There was no return fire at the moment from Monroe or anyone else in th car. Devandre Williams, who was driving, spun around the neighborhood, with Monroe in the front seat and Tyrese Patterson in the back seat, and minutes later circled back to the scene of the shooting. Only then, Monroe and Patterson each fired their guns out the window in rapid fire (Monroe fired only once) before speeding back to Monroe’s place in palm Coast.

An incredulous Jason Lewis, the assistant state attorney who cross-examined Monroe for an hour, summed up that sequence after the hour-long badgering as he stood within a few feet of the witness box, the jury of 14 white men and women at his left: “Terrell Sampson fired at your car. You guys were pissed off. You were going to make sure and take care of it. You drove around the block, you had your gun ready, and you fired down that block and there was no one shooting at you. Isn’t that true, sir?”

“No, that’s not true, sir,” Monroe said.

“Okay, and you never told anyone before this day in court that there was a guy standing with a rifle shooting at you in that street, correct?”

Monroe claimed he had in one of the video interviews.  But that, too, sounded like another creation.

Toward the end of his testimony Monroe had an unexplained wardrobe malfunction. Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols allowed him not to stand when the jury walked in and out of the courtroom. He wore a dapper tan suit and tie. When he was done testifying, he returned to his seat at the defendant’s table, clutching his crotch and bunching up the fabric. It appeared to have had something to do with a belt or a restraining device. I wasn’t the only thing that had malfunctioned for him  today.

Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis’s Cross-Examination of Stephen Monroe: