Riviera Beach man who stabbed teen to death fought to have his life sentence shortened. It worked.
WEST PALM BEACH — The life sentence for a man convicted of murder in 2017 for slashing a 17-year-old girl's throat and stabbing her repeatedly in the chest and abdomen — a crime described by one judge as "one of the most brutal" she had ever seen — has been overturned, replaced with a 50-year prison sentence.
Bryan Augustin was just shy of his 19th birthday when he killed Kayla Storey, the mother of his 1-year-old niece, in a home their families shared in Riviera Beach on Nov. 10, 2014. Circuit Judge Marni Bryson sentenced Augustin to life in prison at the conclusion of his 2017 murder trial — a decision later thrown out by an appellate court because of the trial court's failure to establish whether Augustin was competent to stand trial in the first place.
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Rather than re-try the case, Assistant State Attorney Reid Scott and Assistant Public Defender Ruth Martinez-Estes negotiated a deal for Augustin: Plead guilty to second-degree murder and spend the next 42 years in prison for it.
Augustin, now 27, wrote a letter to Circuit Judge Caroline Shepherd on Nov. 14, pleading with her for leniency.
"My mother is in her mid-50s," he wrote. "If I agree to this plea, she will be in her 90s. She might not even be alive anymore. I already lost my father since I've been incarcerated. I just don't want to lose both my parents."
By Monday, he'd made up his mind. After being declared competent by a court-appointed doctor, Augustin pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and aggravated battery in exchange for the 50-year sentence, with credit for the eight years he's spent incarcerated since the murder.
"Do you have any doubts?" asked Shepherd after she read aloud the conditions of the plea.
Augustin paused, then said, finally: "No ma'am."
Jurors weren't convinced Bryan Augustin planned to kill Kayla Storey
Kayla Storey called her father on Nov. 10, 2014, distressed. She'd found a handgun in the home they shared with Augustin's family, and she moved it, setting off the 18-year-old's temper when he returned to find the firearm missing.
Robert Storey offered to come home early, he testified, but Kayla told him that he didn't need to.
"Everything should be OK," he said she told him.
Kayla Storey and her 12-year-old sister would laugh about Augustin's behavior later as they prepared dinner with Augustin's mother, Myriam Lopez-Williams, in the kitchen. Lopez-Williams told deputies she chided the girls lightly as she washed rice at the sink, reminding them that they were all family — any animosity between them needed to stop.
Augustin walked into the kitchen then and cut Storey's throat, stabbing her roughly 10 times in front of his mother, Storey's sister and infant daughter. The 12-year-old sister took the baby and ran out of the house, screaming, as Lopez-Williams tried to wrestle the blade out of her son's hands.
“I told him, 'Bryan, you cut Mommy,' ” Lopez-Williams testified, the palm of her hands slashed. He shook his head then as though he were leaving a trance, she said, and ran out of the home.
He destroyed all of their lives, prosecutor Scott said in court. Lopez-Williams attended every day of the trial, testifying for the state against her son and sobbing on the stand when she begged the judge not to sentence him to life in prison.
Augustin's original public defender, Nobel Parsons, argued during the trial that prosecutors couldn't prove the slaying was premeditated. He asked jurors to consider his youth and lack of criminal record prior to the stabbing when choosing whether to convict him of first- or second-degree murder.
The difference between the two charges is premeditation: Did Augustin plan to kill Storey? If prosecutors proved that he had, it would earn him an automatic life sentence. Parsons argued instead that the stabbing was an “impulsive act done by a teenager in a heated moment with no real motive.”
The jury voted to convict Augustin of the lesser charge, second-degree murder, for which Parsons asked the judge to sentence him to 23 years in prison.
"His life does still have value, his life has meaning," the public defender said. "He's not just a stone-cold killer; he's an 18-year-old kid who can never make up for what he did, but deserves some sort of reasonable sentence."
Bryson sentenced him to life, triggering the push by the Palm Beach County Public Defender's Office to appeal the decision.
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Parsons submitted Augustin's case to the 4th District Court of Appeal for review in March 2017, a week-and-a-half after his client was sentenced to life in prison. It would take more than a year for the court to issue its opinion, and four more after that for the life sentence to be officially supplanted.
In a three-page ruling, judges Jonathan Gerber, Robert Gross and Burton Conner said it was impossible to tell from the court records whether Augustin had ever been deemed competent to stand trial.
He'd become withdrawn and unresponsive to questions following his arrest, which one expert witness would later blame on a "misfiring brain." Parsons asked Judge Karen Miller, who presided over the case before Bryson, to have him evaluated in 2015. He wrote that he was concerned about the teen's ability to participate in his own defense.
"Once a trial court has reasonable grounds to believe the defendant is incompetent and orders an examination, it must hold a hearing, and it must enter a written order on the issue," Gerber, Gross and Conner wrote. "Failure to do so is a fundamental error and requires reversal."
Though Miller reassigned Augustin's case to the mental health specialty division, where two experts evaluated him, there is no record that a subsequent competency hearing was ever held.
The appellate court ruled that if Augustin's competency at the time of his trial could be determined retroactively, the life sentence would stand; if not, the case should be re-tried.
The ruling prompted years of additional motions and drawn out legal proceedings until prosecutor Scott and public defender Martinez-Estes, who took the case over from Parsons, resolved it with a plea agreement.
"I can tell you that your lawyer and Mr. Scott have been, for a long time, working very hard on your case," judge Shepherd told Augustin before she passed the new sentence Monday. "She did an excellent job for you."
Augustin stayed quiet.
Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Life sentence for Riviera Beach teen's murderer shortened to 50 years
