Now Up to Jury to Decide If Brian Pirraglia Deserves Life in Prison for Overdose Death of ‘Best Friend’

After three days of trial that ended short of a verdict this afternoon at the Flagler County courthouse, a 12-member jury will deliberate Thursday morning on the first-degree murder charge against Brian Pirraglia, 39, in the death-by fentanyl of 38-year-old Brian O’Shea in their B-Section house in Palm Coast in 2022. If convicted, Pirraglia faces life in prison.




Cluttered as it may have seemed by the defense’s attempts to raise questions of reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind, it’s not a complicated case. Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton made it even less complicated for the jury as she revealed a 90-second video clip in the last minutes of her closing arguments this afternoon.

The clip substantially–but not entirely–erased some of the most substantial doubts that had loomed over O’Shea’s death: where had the fatal fentanyl come from, since O’Shea had that very morning just come out of jail after a six-month sentence (for cocaine possession)? Pirraglia, the clip showed, was on the phone with his drug dealer.

In his last hour or two that he was alive that Feb. 8, 2022, O’Shea, then 38, is seen in a Publix surveillance video at a counter collecting the $800 his mother sent him from out of state through Western Union. He’d been clean those six months. His mother was trying to convince him to fly home.




Next to O’Shea the surveillance video captures Pirraglia, 39 at the time. Pirraglia would later describe himself to detectives as O’Shea’s best friend. Pirraglia was on the phone with a drug dealer nick-named Monk, the drug dealer Pirraglia, a drug addict who liked heroin and fentanyl, regularly used, and who lived near his house. Phone records proved that Monk and Pirraglia were talking, and the Publix video proved where Pirraglia was at the time.

The video and the records don’t indicate what Monk and Pirraglia were talking about. Less than two hours later, Oshead was dead of a fentanyl overdose and Pirraglia, his best friend, had robbed him of $640 in cash, which he hid in his closet safe. (Donna Peterson, Pirraglia’s attorney, never pointed out to the jury the discrepancy between the $800 O’Shea retrieved and the $640 his alleged best friend found on his person less than two hours later.)

Either before or after robbing him, Pirraglia knocked on the door of a roommate, Stephanie Raimundo, to ask her for Narcan, the neutralizing agent used to reverse the effects of an overdose. She’d been on a meth binge for days, she was asleep, she had no Narcan, and she shut the door in Pirraglia’s face.




O’Shea called 911 and did CPR on his best friend, but to no avail. He also wheeled the unresponsive O’Shea out of his own room on an office chair before authorities arrived at his house, so they wouldn’t find O’Shea in his (Pirraglia’s) bedroom. He locked that door, and refused to let deputies in there until they got a warrant.

Then the lies began. He made up stories about where O’Shea had been, how he’d taken a walk, fallen and struck his head and started seizing. He didn’t mention the fentanyl.

Pirraglia would later tell another addict who frequented the house, Cody Iglesias, that he had shot up O’Shea with the fentanyl, and that O’Shea had slumped over and hit his head on a marble slab next to the desk. When Raimundo asked him why he’d taken O’Shea’s money, he said: “I took it from him because he was dead, he couldn’t spend it anymore,” the prosecutor told the jury, quoting O’Shea. “With best friends like Mr. Pirraglia, who needs enemies?” the prosecutor told the jury.

Iglesias would subsequently be facing his own grand theft and drug charges, just as Stephanie Raimundo would. Iglesias and Raimundo would end up being the two central witnesses in the state’s case against Pirraglia, both hoping to lessen some of the penalties they face.




The defense made much of their past–too much, during Peterson’s closing, as the defense attorney threw a kitchen sink of doubt–including reams of facts of doubtful relevance–at the jury, hoping it would have an effect.

It may. But as Peterson’s closing dragged, too much of her argument focused on the backgrounds of the state’s witnesses, again and again describing their criminal past in ad-hominem after ad hominem–attacking the witnesses’ person rather than the evidence, attacking the lead detective on the case for having been on a detective only a year (detective Adam Gossett was on the force many more years than that, and last year was CrimeStoppers’ Officer of the Year in Flagler County), attacking him for not collecting this or that evidence, even attacking the medical examiner for not having known why or how O’Shea had ingested the fatal drug (irrelevant facts as far as the medical examiner’s responsibilities are concerned, but the jury doesn’t necessarily know that: even irrelevance is grist for doubt).

It was not necessarily a mindless gesture when Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis, who was assisting Dunton and was leaning back in his chair, facing the jury, held up his left wrist to look at his watch as Peterson droned on laconically. Lewis then seemed very briefly to nod off, again in full view of the jury. Peterson meanwhile let her scorn do the talking–scorn for the detective, for the witnesses, for the state’s evidence, accusing the prosecution of wanting the jury to make “assumptions.”

“But the state tried to present this evidence in just one light, just like the lead detective, Gossett, tried to just focus on one area,” Peterson said. “How about the fact that you just assume it’s not even worth interviewing Monkey, or attempting–it’s not even worth trying, the known drug dealer that lived out back within walking distance whom everybody said would commonly drop off drugs to whoever wanted them at the house.”

Peterson had a point, which the prosecution did not quite refute though it didn’t need to, either: Dunton reminded the jury that the only four things the state had to prove, other than that O’Shea is dead, was over 18, and died of a fentanyl overdose–all of it demonstrated beyond doubt–was that Pirraglia delivered the fatal dose.




“No assumptions. That’s the evidence,” Dunton told the jury. “That’s what we have to prove, and that’s what we’re asking you as the fact finders to look at and make a decision beyond a reasonable doubt.”

It’ll come down to how believable the jury found Iglesias, who came across on the stand today as an earnest, blatantly forthright ex-addict who hid none of his sordid past and whom Peterson could not trip up. When she kept circling back to the same questions about his past, it may have appeared to the jury that she was scraping for something, anything, that might make him look shady, other than the few months sooner he might get to take off his ankle monitor by cooperating with the prosecution. Still nothing. When he got impatient, answering questions at a clip and she asked him to slow down, he said: “I’m just trying to get to work.” It wasn’t the words the defense was looking for from a witness it was attempting to smear.

Closing arguments ended just before 4 p.m. When Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols asked the jury whether it wanted to immediately deliberate or return in the morning to do so, the jury retreated to its room for a few minutes, then opted to go home for the night.

On Thursday, it’ll have a few choices. The state wants Pirraglia convicted of first-degree murder. The jury may also choose to go for lesser charges: second degree murder (still a life felony), or manslaughter (up to 30 years in prison). It could also acquit.

Most individuals charged under Florida’s law against drug peddlers who cause or contribute to users’ deaths, end in plea deals. Prosecutors don’t particularly like to try the cases because the law blurrs the line of personal responsibility in a drug user’s death, while the charge of first-degree murder, which carries the weight (but not the wording) of premeditation, almost never squares with the facts of such cases, however convincing the prosecution’s arguments.

The law–the product of political expediency more than judicial  wisdom–also diminishes to the point of irrelevance the user’s (the victim’s) own agency, which runs counter to the principles of mens rea, the latin phrase that refers to the defendant’s mental state and “guilty mind.” So juries can be reluctant to equate a dealer’s or a peddler’s actions with an outright murderer’s–juries of 12 especially: doubling the usual jury pool, as required in capital cases (even though the death penalty is not a possibility in this case) lowers the chances of a conviction on the highest charge. Juries must be unanimous in their verdicts.

Pirraglia’s is the third trial on such a charge since 2018. In the very first such trial, in 2022, a jury found Jevante Hamilton guilty on a lesser, manslaughter charge in the overdose death of Timothy Davidson in August 2019. Circuit Judge Chris France sentenced him to 40 years in prison, the additional 10 resulting from a separate, unrelated conviction that France, who can be an unforgiving judge, imposed concurrently.




Last year, a Flagler County jury acquitted Nysean Giddens of a first-degree murder charge in the overdose drug death of Shaun James Callahan, 37, at his Palm Coast home in September 2020. (The Sheriff’s Office had originally charged him with manslaughter. A grand jury upped the charge.) Giddens still ended up in prison on a five-year sentence for selling drugs.

So the Pirraglia jury may have been wise to sleep on it: deliberations are not usually quick.

Pirraglia, a slight man with a deceptively cherubic face, is already a convicted felon with a stint in state prison that ended in July 2023. An arrest for aggravated battery in 2015 ended with a misdemeanor conviction for assault. Felony convictions for tampering with evidence, harboring an escaped prisoner and for drug possession led to the prison sentence.

None of that was spoken to the jury. But Dunton did tell the jury of Pirraglia’s pattern of shooting up people to rob them–people he knows, and in O’Shea’s case, people he calls his best friend.