Demetrius O’Neal has been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in prison for his role in one of Southwest Florida’s most notorious crimes: the Club Blu shooting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In October, a jury found O’Neal guilty of second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He had been held without bond since.<\/p>\n
Monday morning, the judge handed down two consecutive life sentences for the two second-degree murder charges and 15 concurrent years for conspiracy to commit murder. O’Neal was also ordered to have no contact with the victims’ families.<\/p>\n
Eighteen-year-old Stefan Strawder and 14-year-old Sean Archilles were killed in the 2016 shooting, which also left 14 others injured.<\/p>\n
Before sentencing, the defense requested a new trial, citing multiple “issues” with the case, but the judge denied the request. Two witnesses, O’Neal’s pastor and his aunt, also gave witness testimony on his character before the sentence was read, speaking about his commitment to God and his role as a father.<\/p>\n
O’Neal now has thirty days to file appeal.\u00a0The Florida Department of Corrections will decide where to house O’Neal.<\/p>\n
O’Neal is the second of five people accused in connection with the shooting to go to trial. Kierra Russ was previously convicted in 2022 and sentenced to life in prison for acting as a lookout during the incident.<\/p>\n
Derrick Church is the next to face trial, with his next pre-trial date set for February.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The other two suspects in this case, Don Loggins and Tajze Battle, took plea deals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Loggins\u00a0pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit second-degree murder<\/a>, a first-degree felony, in court on Oct. 1, and is currently serving 15 years in prison and will spend 10 years on probation.\u00a0Battle\u00a0also changed his plea to no contest<\/a> in September and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Demetrius O’Neal has been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in prison for his role in one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54038,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,42696],"class_list":["post-75991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-demetrius-o"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}