Families endure second trial in Cobra Bar murders: 'It's just been one giant nightmare'

Bartley Teal’s right hand shakes.

It’s a tremor he developed after his son died, he said outside a courtroom Tuesday morning. He was there for the trial of Demontrey Logsdon, one of two men charged with murder in the robbery and shooting of Jaime Sarrantonio and his son Brandon Teal outside an East Nashville bar in August 2018.

The trial began Monday and is expected to last into early next week.

The other defendant, Horace Williamson, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole after his trial in July 2023.

Prosecutors say that Logsdon was the one who twice pulled the trigger on a long gun to kill both 33-year-old Brandon Teal and 30-year-old Sarrantonio. Williamson, armed with a handgun, participated in the robbery and sexual assault of Sarrantonio and the surviving female victim, and drove the getaway car, according to prosecutors.

The four victims — including a male and female who survived — had met at the Cobra Bar in the early morning of Aug. 17, 2018. It was Brandon Teal’s birthday. They were getting in his car just before 3:30 a.m. to go to a friend’s pool when two men wearing bandannas stopped them in the bar’s parking lot, robbing them and shooting two of them.

Bartley Teal could not wish his son a happy birthday. He and his wife, Teresa Teal, arrived after Brandon Teal died. He was pronounced dead at 5:45 a.m.

“As a parent we want to protect our children as much as we can,” Bartley Teal, 61, said. “And I feel guilty that I wasn’t able to be there to protect him.”

The Sarrantonio family, from Connecticut, did not see Jaime before she died. The last time they saw her was in the Connecticut beach town Westbrook, Jaime’s “slice of paradise,” where her mother remembers her running around the neighborhood, swimming in the ocean and singing Jimmy Buffett.

“Her last words to me when she left was, ‘Mom, I wish I never had to leave,” her mother Robin Fisher, 72, said.

Over the years, some family members of both victims have developed anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Bartley Teal said the video of the crime has replayed in his mind for years. He has lost more than five jobs due to his inability to focus.

“I’ve been having night terrors, fighting in my sleep at nighttime (but) I don’t know who I’m fighting,” Teal said. “It's just been one giant nightmare.

"That night they shot my son in the heart, they also shot me in the heart, too."

In the security footage shown in the courtroom, the man armed with the long gun shoots Sarrantonio as she lies on the ground stilly and silently, seconds after the men groped her.

The senselessness of her death is the hardest part, her younger sister Jolie Sarrantonio, 35, said Tuesday.

“It's just scary being out and being around people, and you really don't know who you're around,” she said. “You’re very ‘eyes wide open’ now.”

While they have turned to ways to find some peace — relying on the support of family and friends, therapy, moving closer to home —they said things are not easier five-and-a-half years later.

“They say time heals,” Jolie Sarrantonio said. “It doesn’t.”

And going through another trial makes it harder.

“It's like pulling Band-Aids off,” Fisher said.

But they hope that concluding the legal process will bring a sort of closure.

As video of his son’s death played on a computer screen for what he hoped was one of the last times Tuesday morning, Bartley Teal sat in the gallery and hoped for a guilty verdict, his hand shaking in his wife’s.

Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @EvanMealins.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Teal, Sarrantonio families endure 2nd trial in 2018 Cobra Bar murders