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From video to murder charges
By BILL COATS © St. Petersburg Times, published October 30, 2000 TAMPA -- A mysterious figure seen last March running down an Ybor City street will walk into a Tampa courtroom today, charged with murder. Mike Fuqua, 24, of Lutz, faces trial on charges he fatally stabbed a Charleston, S.C., airman in a bar fight that had spilled into the middle of Seventh Avenue. If convicted, it well may be on the suspicious nature of actions Fuqua is accused of taking after the stabbing. Two witnesses gave detectives vivid statements that a black man appeared to stab Airman Jeremiah Kleiss. Fuqua is white. No blood was found on the football jersey Fuqua wore, and there is no indication in court records the knife has ever been found. Yet just as Kleiss realized he had been stabbed, Fuqua and a buddy from Lutz ran away from the fight. They passed into view of a video camera being used by a college student on spring break from New York. Tampa police released those images to the media at midday March 16. By 10 p.m., they had Fuqua's name and address from an anonymous caller. A witness said Fuqua looked back at Kleiss as he ran, saying, "I got you. I got you." Four days later, a Chevrolet Cavalier belonging to one of Fuqua's friends in the bar fight was found abandoned and engulfed by fire in a tree farm in Lutz. Later that week, an alleged death threat by Fuqua against another friend backfired badly. The friend, Jarrett Brock, contacted detectives to say Fuqua had: told Brock he stabbed Kleiss with a knife he borrowed from Brock. bought a duplicate of his St. Louis Rams-style football jersey to give police, and had hidden the real one in a palmetto patch in Lutz. ridden home from Ybor City in the Cavalier, and later burned it in case any of Kleiss' blood was in it. threatened to kill Brock and his mother if Brock aided police. Instead of silencing Brock, the threat pushed him toward detectives. He led them to the jersey, hidden off Sinclair Hills Road. He urged them to arrest Fuqua immediately. "I'm just scared that if you all don't hurry up and get him, he's going to try and kill me," Brock said in a sworn statement March 30. Within two hours, officers had converged on Fuqua in Nye Park in Lutz, where he was talking to friends. He has been in jail since. In recent months, two of Fuqua's former jailmates there have contacted authorities to say Fuqua admitted to them that he stabbed Kleiss. One asked for a sentence reduction; the other a more desirable jail. Prosecutors apparently lack a murder weapon. Brock told them he loaned Fuqua a 5-inch, pearl-handled folding knife the day he went to Ybor City. He said Fuqua told him he threw it in a gutter several blocks from the fight. City employees brought a vacuum truck to clean out storm drains at Seventh Avenue and 20th Street, and police combed through the contents. They found a box cutter and a black-and-gold pocketknife. Those, along with a steak knife seized from the car of Fuqua's girlfriend, were sent to a local crime lab. Three months later, in a deposition, Brock said, "They brought me down and showed me one picture of a knife, but it wasn't it." Neither Samantha Ward, the assistant public defender representing Fuqua, nor Jim Shoemaker, the prosecutor, returned telephone calls. But public records in the case provide no hint that Brock's knife was found, or that any knife has been linked to the stabbing. Brock, Fuqua and Jamie McCullough, the man who ran from the fight with Fuqua, were considered by north Lutz's community resource deputy, Gordon Brown, to be the last of a group of youths known as the Lutz Boyz. Until this year, the Lutz Boyz were known mostly for graffiti, vandalism and the ransacking of a gay man's home two years ago. But when Fuqua was arrested for murder, he, Brock and McCullough also were charged as co-defendants in an apartment burglary last December. A pre-trial hearing in the burglary case is set for the same time and courtroom today as the murder trial. Fuqua has served prison sentences for crimes in Hillsborough and Hernando counties. He had been free since June 1999 after serving 11/2 years for robbery. Brock has been arrested in two incidents of aggravated battery since he helped get Fuqua jailed. He is accused in May of breaking a man's jaw at a Lutz McDonald's. He was arrested in August on charges he slashed two men at a keg party that turned violent. One required 500 stitches to repair his face and reattach the top of his left ear. Brock has been in jail since. - Bill Coats can be reached at (813) 226-3469 or coats@sptimes.com.
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