In Sequence Devastating to Defense, Prosecution Shows Jury 26 Minutes That Led Up to Noah Smith’s Murder

The next-to-last clip in a sequence of 10 brief surveillance videos the prosecution showed the jury in Stephen Monroe’s trial on a first-degree murder charge this afternoon showed a white Cadillac driving on a dark Bunnell street, toward Palm Coast. It was the father of 16-year-old Noah Smith driving his dead or dying son to the hospital on Jan. 12, 2022. Monroe had fired one of the two guns that killed him.

Whether it was the single bullet Monroe fired or one the many bullets his friend Tyrese Patterson fired that pierced Noah’s hip and ended his life isn’t known. To the prosecution–and in the eyes of the law–it’s not relevant. All four young men involved in that shootout on South Anderson Street, over an idiotic feud–Monroe, Patterson and Devandre Williams in a black car on one side, Terrell Sampson on the other–were charged with first-degree murder. All but Monroe pled out. Two are serving prison terms, one has yet to be sentenced.




Monroe alone faces the risk of life in prison if convicted. If today’s sequence of 10 videos have the impact the prosecution want them to have on the jury, Monroe’s chances of beating the charge, already hard to see, dwindled to a grainy speck in one of those videos.

Assistant State Attorney Mark Johnson, who is prosecuting the case with Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis, had methodically played each of the 10 surveillance clips to the jury in chronological order, building them up like 10 mini-chapters in an adolescent’s ridiculous and tragic end: Noah was not involved in the feud. He was a bystander.

Flagler County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Augustin Rodriguez, the on-call supervisor of detectives that night, had stepped down from the stand, pointer in hand, and stood next to an oversized screen by the end of the jury box, walking the 14 jurors (including two alternates) through the sequence as Johnson played each clip: a 26-minute span from the time the black Kia SUV is seen driving down Rose Petal Lane in Palm Coast’s R Section, with Monroe, Patterson, Williams, two guns and full magazine clips on board, to the time the white Cadillac is seen taking Noah out of his home neighborhood for the last time.

There was the SUV driving toward Rolling Sands Drive at 9:54 p.m. Williams was at the wheel, though none of the video clips are detailed enough to show who was sitting where. It doesn’t take them long to get to Bunnell. From 10:01 p.m. to 10:09 p.m., in clip after clip, the SUV is seen circling some of the same blocks with some variations in directions. The same three men–boys mistakenly pretending to act like men, really–had five hours earlier made the same trip from the R-Section to Bunnell to taunt and humiliate Terrell Sampson’s brother Ed, daring him to come out and fight. Monroe had written a rap song to humiliate him further. When they all returned five hours later, it was Terrell they ran into, not Ed, and it was Terrell who “took the bait,” as Johnson described it, going a distance from South Anderson Street and firing in the direction of the SUV.




Terence Lenamon, Monroe’s attorney, argued to the jury on Monday that Monroe acted in self-defense when he fired his gun. But Monroe didn’t fire his gun just then. Nor did Patterson. They could have left the scene. They were in the SUV, engine running, Sampson was hiding somewhere, on foot. They could have driven back to Palm Coast and left it at that. It wouldn’t have been the first errant shooting in the neighborhood (nor was it the last: Williams five months later shot and killed 16-year-old Keymarion Hall, another bystander in another sordid shootout.

Instead, the did some of that circling around South Bunnell the jury watched this afternoon, blowing through stop signs and driving :”somewhat recklessly” in some of the clips, Johnson said. Most of the clips were from just stationary two cameras, one of them from a church. The clip that starts at 10:06 and 55 seconds shows the SUV turn right on East Booe Street. It shows it turn its lights off for an instant, turn them back on, then off again as it turns down South Anderson, toward the scene of the shooting.

It must’ve been about then that, as a young woman testified this morning, the SUV drove by a cluster of people near Noah’s house, its occupants yelling out the window to them for the second time to “take cover.” The young woman was among those standing by the street. Noah had just come up to her to ask if she had napkins. He’d been at Wendy’s after a basketball game at Flagler Palm Coast High School. Wendy’s hadn’t given him napkins. He went in the house to get some. Right about then Terrell Sampson fired his volley, hitting no one. Noah heard the shots. And for whatever reason, came back outside.




At 10:09 and 10 seconds, the church camera again shows the SUV drive by and turn left on South Anderson this time, and as it does, in the far upper left corner of the screen, the jurors could see what Rodriguez was describing: “multiple flashes.” The muzzle flashes from Monroe’s and Patterson’s guns. The flashes were barely discernible. Johnson, directing the sequence with a deliberately slow pace that seemed to echo the sequence’s actual time, then showed a clip from a new camera angle, this one from a ratty old City of Bunnell surveillance camera. It shows the SUV approaching it below, then, very clearly, the rapid-fire muzzle flashes out of the two windows.

The next clip, 11 minutes later, was that of the Cadillac carrying Noah. And the one after that–out of sequence, without a time stamp–showed the SUV returning to the house on Rose Petal.

About a dozen witnesses testified for the state today, most of them filling in forensic details–the tedious but required part of every murder trial when the prosecution must establish the evidence of the most basic elements: the guns used, the bullets and shell casings recovered, the car used, the moments when Bunnell police first responded, then sheriff’s deputies and detectives, and so on. The prosecution also established that two days before the shooting, Ed Sampson had run off the road the same SUV, driven at the time by Patterson, with his girlfriend aboard, in what apparently ignited the idiotic feud.




But it was the sequence of video clips the jury would remember, and the way Johnson played them. The brief seconds of the Cadillac crossing the camera’s eye–a hearse in the Bunnell night–were entirely unnecessary. The clip had no evidentiary value. Noah’s death is not in question. Defense attorneys are usually sensitive to that sort of thing, objecting to their use as prejudicial. Monroe’s attorney did not object (and Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols probably would not have excluded it as Johnson would have simply argued that it was part of the timeline).

So it may have been the most impactful two or three seconds of the trial so far–more so than the muzzle flashes. The jury was riveted, the courtroom silent and still. For Monroe, it was the single most indelible image his attorney will have to overcome if he is to sway the jury his client’s way. Reading the bible, as Monroe did before the jury’s arrival this morning, wasn’t going to help.