Brant Dustin Kelling has been convicted of second degree murder in the death of a man in St. James City, the State Attorney\u2019s office announced Monday. The jury returned a guilty verdict Friday evening following a five-day trial in Lee County. <\/p>\n
Assistant State Attorneys Brenda Wade and Leena Marcos of the State Attorney\u2019s Office Homicide Unit prosecuted the case.<\/p>\n
The crime was discovered on Aug. 10, 2023, when the Lee County Sheriff\u2019s Office responded to a 911 call from a home in St. James City. A woman there had found her friend, bloody and unresponsive, laying on the lanai of the home. He died at the scene.<\/p>\n
LCSO\u2019s report indicated there was a large amount of blood in the driveway of the home and visual injuries of trauma on the <\/p>\n
victim, who was not clothed. According to the medical examiner, the cause of the victim\u2019s death was found to be blunt force trauma to the head. <\/p>\n
Kelling, 34, then a resident of Curlew Drive in St. James City, was identified as a suspect through a DNA profile match, according to an August 2023 report from the Lee County Sheriff\u2019s Office. The suspect had been arrested on outstanding warrant charges in Ohio.<\/p>\n
Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 20, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brant Dustin Kelling has been convicted of second degree murder in the death of a man in St.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-76112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76112","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=76112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}