Admitting to Role in Killing Him, Tyrese Patterson Called 16-Year-Old Noah Smith His ‘Dog’ and ‘Best Friend’

Caution: this article contains coarse, unfiltered language.

Six months after 16-year-old Noah Smith was gunned down in a crossfire he had nothing to do with as he was standing in front of his house in Bunnell, 20-year-old Tyrese Patterson admitted to detectives in his third interview with them that he was part of the fusillade that killed his his dog, his bro, his “best friend.”

He admitted it in great detail–how he was in the back seat of a Kia, driving around with Stephen Monroe (a.k.a. “Kreek”) with Devandre Williams (“Dre”) at the wheel, how Terrell Sampson had shot at the trio’s vehicle after the latest in a series of verbal fights and back and forth aggressions over the past days, how Williams drove the car around the neighborhood toward Carver Gym, then returned to South Anderson and East Booe, how he stopped a distance from Sampson’s car, how he gave a gun to Patterson and how Patterson “let it off,” as he described it, firing “one whole damn whole clip.”




“Like here, it’s ready,” Patterson told detectives, recalling how Williams handed him the gun. “I’m like shit, bruh. It just happened so fast, bruh. Like, that was like (indiscernible) situation like. The shots were not meant for Noah, bruh.”

Patterson, Monroe and Williams were all charged with Smith’s murder–Patterson and Monroe with first-degree murder, Williams with second-degree murder, though all three face life in prison if convicted. All three are heading for trial the first week of July, separately.

Three weeks ago, Patterson’s attorney, Tim Pribisco, argued a motion seeking to suppress–or keep from the jury–Patterson’s confessions in his videotaped interview with three detectives, because Patterson had twice asked at the beginning of the interview: “Where’s my lawyer?” The detectives did not stop the interview. Pribisco argued that they should have, making everything past that point inadmissible. (See: “Ahead of Trial, Lawyer for Man Accused in Murder of Noah Smith Says Interrogation Was Constitutional Violation.”)

On Friday, Circuit Judge Terence Perkins issued a ruling denying the motion. The ruling was not a surprise. Perkins tipped his hand at the Feb. 28 hearing, though he wanted to check whether the detectives had handled themselves appropriately when Patterson made his statement. They unequivocally had, Perkins ruled, still giving Patterson an explicit chance to stop the interview. It was Patterson who just as explicitly chose to go on.




In a footnote, Perkins–an obsessive researcher and note-taker who takes pride in his work’s rigors, which are usually unassailable–cites 13 cases backing his analysis that the question Patterson posed was equivocal and not an invocation of representation. Of course, in most cases, the defendants’ language (should I get a lawyer,” “do I need an attorney,” “where’s my lawyer”) reflects the lay vocabulary of individuals on the defensive, and the the unspoken chasm between their language, if not their ability to express what they intend on the spot, under pressure and without benefit of much reflection, and that of legal decisions’ precision and refinement resulting from hours, days, weeks of reflection, drafts, editing and the canonizing seal of legal citations. Against all that, a bumbling defendant with a measly grasp of the language has no chance.

In this case, however, even if Patterson had lost that chance because of the language imbalance, the detectives made that moot by almost immediately telling him that they had a pair of videos they wanted him to watch, and saying: “If you don’t want to talk to us you don’t have to talk to us, if you don’t want to watch this, you don’t have to watch this, and you do have the right to have an attorney and have him with you before we ask you.” At that point, one of the detectives had all but laid out Patterson’s option as if in a paint-by-numbers exercise: there was no language ambiguity, no opaque legal formulation. The detective was speaking to Patterson person to person. Patterson interrupted him: “I want to watch the video.”

From that point on, there was never again a mention of lawyers until the latter portion of the interview, after all the admissions, when Patterson, hinting that he did not, in fact, have a lawyer because he could not afford the $45,000 fee of a private attorney, said he would end up with a “weak ass fucking attorney,” meaning a public defender–an uninformed characterization better suited to his own condemnation of the public defenders of the Seventh Judicial Circuit.

“The detectives did not ignore the defendant’s question,” Perkins wrote in his nine-page order, “they did not engage in gamesmanship or try to steamroll the defendant. They responded directly and immediately. They responded with honesty and common sense. More importantly, their simple response was reasonable and true. Moreover, no evidence was presented which showed any ruse or trick by the detectives to get the defendant to talk to them.”




While the denial was expected, the transcript of the interview on which it was based nevertheless opens the widest window yet both on the details and history behind the shooting that ended Smith’s life, and on the intricacies the three defendants’ lawyers will have to navigate if they are to avoid a guilty verdict. The detectives involved–namely, Augustin Rodriguez, George Hristakopoulos and Adam Barkoskie–elicited confessions in such a way as to avoid giving any of them indemnity in exchange for incriminating the others: all three are made equally responsible for Smith’s death.

The interview, details of which are disclosed here for the first time, is just as broad a window into the methods, the skills and the wiles of two seasoned detectives essentially drawing concentric and constricting circles around their suspect. The interview with Patterson traces the detectives’ tactics as they manage to arrive at that crystal-clear and not quite frequent objective: “The defendants did exactly as the detectives hoped,” Perkins wrote in his order, “he incriminated himself by spontaneously and verbally responding to the videos.”

Detectives had interviewed Patterson four days after the January 2022 shooting, and again in May 2022. Both times he did not confess. The first time he’d been in the presence of Steve Robinson, a private attorney. The third time he’d been at the county jail. He’d been arrested on a minor charge, but by then detectives knew two things: that Patterson was involved in the shooting of Smith, and that Patterson’s life may have been in danger. They needed to get him behind bars as much for their case’s safety as for his own.

“Honestly, Tyrese, we were very much convinced that you were going to be dead if we did not take you off the street,” Rodriguez told him.

“No, I was not going to be dead because I was going to be gone,” Patterson replied.




There’d been trouble between Patterson and Sampson for a while, and somewhere along the way some bad blood may have developed over a woman, though that theory was presented by detectives to Peterson, who did not confirm it. “I don’t know. I was just scared for my life. I don’t know,” he told them. “They had been making threats to me, to my family.” Sampson and others had jumped out of a car at the Bantam Chef with long guns and threatened him, wearing ski masks. Five hours before the shooting that killed Smith, there’d been an aggression at Carver Gym, where Sampson claimed Patterson had robbed him, which Patterson denies. There’d been smack talk on Instagram. Then the shooting.

In his earlier interviews Patterson acted as if he knew nothing about who had shot whom, though detectives had been inundated in tips since the earlier shooting death of Keymarion Hall, 16, on Bunnell’s streets weeks earlier. Sampson is facing a murder charge for Hall’s killing.

“So the next time you’re at a birthday party,” Rodriguez had told Patterson in an earlier interview, “and Ed Boy and those psychopaths drive by your house and laying blaze to your property and you get to duck down in your bathtub because you just happen to be brushing your teeth at that moment and then your mom or your brother or somebody else gets hurt, who is accountable for that? And what happens after that? So you pick up your stuff and you go and handle it yourself because that’s street justice. And then how many people are we going to pick up off the curb before we say we’re going to put a stop to this.”

“There’s people leaving me voicemails telling me to do my fucking job, you know, do your fucking job,” Hristakopoulos told him. “Everybody knows what happened, do your fucking job. And so, again, it is going to end up being like–and again, sometimes these things take time and we might not be done doing our jobs for months, and sometimes people, you know, they don’t understand the process.”

Patterson, whose street name is Pooh, came around after watching videos of Williams and Monroe incriminating him.




“That’s crazy right there. That video is crazy, bro. I wasn’t gonna say nothing but that’s crazy, bro,” he said, after watching one of the videos. ”

“Well,” Rodriguez said, “the guys that everybody thinks are going to stay ten toes down and not talk to the police are the same guys sitting here crying like a fucking bitch, putting everything on you.”

“That’s crazy how everything just go on me. Like come on, bruh.”

“But this is the position that you’re in. All of these guys have said you killed Noah Smith and they had nothing to do with it,” Rodriguez said.

“I ain’t made for prison,” Patterson said. “I’m telling you, Noah was my friend. If he was alive today he would tell you, bruh. That was my dog. Like every day I’m pulling up, going to his house, whatever.”

“That was an accident. Tyrese, that was an accident. We are aware of that. We also know who started this,” Rodriguez said.

“We were best friends, bro.”

“They’re making you out to be a cold-blooded killer,” Rodriguez told him. “Now, explain to the state attorney that Tyrese Patterson, Pooh, this kid who has never really had any violent charges, is sitting in here, going up the road for murder when these guys may have had just as much responsibility that night. But if you don’t tell us, then who’s going to tell us, because they are not going to snitch on themselves.”

It took a while, but Patterson came around, and once he did, the details poured out as he almost certainly never would have spoken had an attorney been in the room. “Dre gave me his gun. Dre gave me his gun. I let it off,” he said. “So y’all are saying that’s not like a self-defense situation? The dude shot at us first.” That, the detectives told him, would have to be something his attorney would have to work out with the state. It may well be the only defense he has left if he goes to trial, though it’s not much of a defense: Williams had deliberately driven the car around and positioned it in view of Sampson’s car.




“That shit was not intended for him, bruh,” Patterson said of Smith, the details now coming out as if in an ordinary deposition.

Patterson seemed at times oddly disconnected from his best friend’s killing. “Well, this changed your life forever,” one of the detectives told him.

“It didn’t change my life. I’m still the same me,” Patterson, now 22, said.

“Well,” Rodriguez told him, “you’re going to have to deal with the actions that were taken that night for the rest of your life, not just legally, but in your mind, you have to overcome all this.

He did not seem moved or much aware of what Rodriguez was trying to tell him. He spoke like a young boy still unaware of the weight of the tragedy–Noah’s killing, his own involvement. He was focused on the immediate, if also tragically so in its own way: “I can’t even see my mother fucking mama, bro. I don’t want to see my mama through no fucking computer screen, bruh. I want to hug my mama.”

Several times he returned on two thoughts: self-defense, and this: “I’m not just the one responsible for getting Noah killed.” And finally: “It’s my end of the world.”