McKinsie Lyons is one of two men who stormed into a Ruskin mobile home in 2018 and shot and killed a man and a pregnant woman, a jury decided Thursday.
After a weeklong trial almost eight years after Alexis Martinez and Juanita Solorzano were killed, a Tampa jury deliberated about 4½ hours before finding Lyons guilty of two counts of first-degree murder.
Lyons, 46, showed no reaction as a clerk read the verdict aloud.
He was also convicted of killing an unborn child by injury to the mother — Solorzano was six months pregnant when she was killed — along with robbery and burglary charges.
The trial now moves into a penalty phase, where prosecutors will try to convince the same jury to recommend the death penalty.
Family members of the victims wept as they listened to the decision. They had sat through the entirety of the weeklong trial, struggling as they listened to their loved ones’ anguished cries in surveillance footage of the crime, which prosecutors repeatedly played before the jury.
Speaking to a reporter afterward, they thanked the jury and the court system.
“We waited eight years for justice,” said Feve Coronado, Martinez’s sister. “We had faith that we were going to get justice. This was a senseless act that shouldn’t have happened to three people — because the baby was a person, too. … We pray for his family. Because it’s not their fault.”
“Even though justice is served, I don’t get my mom back,” said Angela Reyes, Solorzano’s daughter. “But I’m glad he’s going to be locked away. I feel it’s what he deserves.”
In closing statements, Assistant State Attorney Michelle Doherty appeared to prepare the state’s case in favor of capital punishment by emphasizing the brutality of the crime.
“There can be no other words to describe what happened to those two victims other than an execution,” she said.
Martinez and Solorzano were found dead one morning in January 2018 inside the mobile home they shared on Southeast 14th Avenue in Ruskin. Both lay in pools of blood in the bathroom, having been shot multiple times.
The home was equipped with security cameras and a recording system. Hillsborough sheriff’s detectives recovered footage that showed a violent robbery the night before.
The recordings showed a woman emerging from the dark front yard, stepping up to the front porch and knocking on the door.
She spoke briefly with Martinez, asking for a ride. After he went back inside, two men approached the home, hiding near a corner. Both carried guns.
Martinez reemerged and walked toward a parked car. The men snuck up from behind, one of them leveling a gun at his head. He screamed as they began to beat him.
They chased him back onto the porch, where the beating continued. They emptied his pockets and forced him back inside.
The audio recording picked up the victims’ desperate cries.
“I promise you, there’s nothing,” Martinez could be heard saying.
“Please,” Solorzano said as she cried.
The robbers could be heard demanding valuables and menacing the victims: “I’ll smoke his ass … I’m not playing … You wanna die?”
They took guns. They took a wallet and an iPad and a watch. At some point before the murders, the robbers became aware of the video cameras and disconnected them.
In the yard, the woman who’d knocked on the door scoured the ground with a cellphone light, looking for drugs that had been dropped when Martinez was accosted.
The state’s case rested greatly on the testimony of Lyons’ former girlfriend, Samona Ramey. She identified herself as the woman in the video.
She pleaded guilty in 2021 to her role in the crime in exchange for a 35-year prison sentence.
In court, she admitted to the jury that she orchestrated the robbery with Lyons and a man she said was his nephew.
The other robber was identified in court at Jaquan Sharp, who was never charged and has since died.
Ramey said she was a drug user in 2018. She had bought methamphetamine from Martinez before, she said.
She described her actions in the video. She remembered hearing the gunshots. When she later learned cops wanted to question her, she checked into a room at the Sun City Center Inn.
Lyons later joined her there. They talked about the robbery. She was asked what he’d told her.
“That he had killed both of them,” she testified.
Lyons’ defense tried to attack Ramey’s credibility. They noted her criminal history, which includes nine prior felony convictions. They also emphasized her drug addictions and her struggles with mental illnesses.
Defense attorney Nick Sinardi emphasized the many lies she told about the robbery when first questioned by police. She first told a story about getting kicked out of a truck and walking to the home to ask for a ride. She claimed not to know the names of the two robbers, then later gave names of other people.
At one point in her interview, Sinardi noted, she told a detective, “I swear to God, everything I love, I’m telling the truth.”
“And she was lying through her teeth,” Sinardi said. “And she was lying completely.”
Ramey acknowledged that she’d lied previously. She said she was in love with Lyons, whom she’d known since she was 15.
The prosecutor argued that the jury didn’t just have to rely on Ramey’s words.
Lyons carried a revolver, Doherty said. Investigators determined the fatal gunshots were fired from such a weapon.
Several people investigators spoke to also identified Lyons as one of the gunmen in the surveillance video.
After Ramey was arrested, Lyons became a fugitive. Detectives later tracked him to Kentucky, where he was working for a steel manufacturing company under a false name. His flight, Doherty said, showed a “consciousness of guilt.”
A surveillance video recorded a few days after the crime showed Lyons lingering outside the Sun City Center Inn, smoking a cigarette and gulping a drink. In the footage, he wore a cap with a dark jacket and shirt, similar to what one of the robbers was seen wearing.
“There is evidence after evidence telling you who did it,” Doherty said.