Jurors will consider the death penalty for the man who killed two people outside a bar.
By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published June 28, 2003
TAMPA - For four wild gunshots outside the Apollo South Lounge, 34-year-old Jeffrey Viverette was convicted Friday of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder.
Nursing a grudge against Darren Nelson, a man who had once dated his live-in girlfriend, Viverette waited with a gun outside the 40th Street club at closing time on Feb. 10, 2002.
While one of his gunshots struck Nelson in the calf, Viverette also hit three uninvolved bystanders. Two of them died. Slain were James Stewart, a 56-year-old Tampa tree trimmer, and Claudia Rivers, a 29-year-old Tampa mother of four. Another bullet struck Tarsha Williams, a Riverview woman, in the breast, but she survived.
"It means my sister can finally rest in peace," Rivers' sister, Pamela Maxwell, 34, said of the verdict.
Nelson, a 40-year-old city sanitation worker, testified this week that Viverette challenged him to a fight at the bar hours before the shooting. Bouncers kicked Viverette out of the club, but he returned to ambush Nelson just before 3 a.m.
"He wanted to settle that score," prosecutor Jay Pruner told jurors in his closing argument Friday. "He'd been disrespected."
Nelson survived, the prosecutor said, because he reacted quickly and ran when he saw Viverette approaching with a gun. The prosecutor argued the killings amounted to first-degree murder, saying that just because Viverette was "a bad aim" and hit unintended targets "doesn't mean it wasn't premeditated."
Nelson, like other eyewitnesses, identified Viverette as the shooter. While Nelson said Friday that he was pleased with the guilty verdict, he decried the senselessness of the violence.
"It was about a female that I dated five, six years ago," Nelson said. "It could have been avoided. (Viverette) should have talked to me, and gotten to know me, before jumping to conclusions."
Now, Nelson said, "his life is taken away on something that's real stupid."
The defense argued that with the free flow of alcohol at the club and the confusion surrounding the shooting, eyewitnesses who picked out Viverette as the shooter couldn't be believed.
"Does (Nelson) believe now that it was Jeff?" Assistant Public Defender Samantha Ward asked jurors Friday. "Probably. But probably isn't enough." At the time of the shooting, she said, Viverette "was at home with his girlfriend and his two kids."
The jury, which deliberated about four hours Friday afternoon, will return Aug. 7 to decide whether Viverette should spend the rest of his life in Florida prison or go to the death chamber. The state is asking for the death penalty.
