Background: Fountain Place Apartments in Bartow, Florida (Google Maps). Insets (from left to right): Jeffrey Blevins and David Morris (Polk County Sheriff's Office).
A man in central Florida was smoking a cigarette while on the phone with his mother when he was suddenly shot dead by his upstairs neighbor, authorities say.
David Richard Morris, 48, has been charged with second-degree murder without premeditation and discharging a firearm in a residential area in the death of 56-year-old Jeffrey Blevins, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said in a press release. During Morris' first appearance in court on Sunday, he was ordered to be held without bond.
On Thursday night, Blevins was outside of his first-floor residence at Fountain Place Apartments in Bartow, Florida, where he lived with his sister, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said during a Monday press conference. Blevins was smoking a cigarette and speaking to his mother on the phone.
"The mother heard a sound as if he had fallen down, and she called out to Jeffrey, and he didn't respond," Judd added. The mother hung up the phone and called the sister, telling her to "go outside and find your brother. He's fallen down or something's happened to him. He won't talk to me."
The Bartow Police Department received a call at about 11:20 p.m. "about someone that was down," the sheriff stated. Officers arrived to find Blevins' body outside of the complex's fitness center — next to his apartment — and "it was obvious that he died a violent death."
He had been shot on the top of his forehead and appeared to have died immediately.
Authorities — including the Polk County Sheriff's Office — began investigating and learned that Blevins was known as being "non-confrontational" and "well-liked." Investigators spoke with the victim's neighbors, leading them to Morris' door.
"He has been described to us as a conspiracy theorist," Judd said of Morris, noting the suspect has lived with his mother his whole life. "He's what we call a flat Earther. He still doesn't believe the Earth is round. Well, the floor in the county jail is flat, anyway, and that's where he is."
"So we first interviewed him, and we asked him … 'do you own a firearm?' He says, 'Yes, I own a nine millimeter handgun,'" Judd recounted. "Little did he know … is we had a nine millimeter casing from where our victim had been shot."
Detectives continued to investigate, and they spoke with someone else who reportedly described Morris as a "suspicious guy that, when he was high on meth, would brag about his gun." The sheriff described how investigators found a person possessing meth who told them they had given the drug to Morris in the past.
"Then we found another person who admitted to us, 'well, this guy is, he's kind of an irritating guy. Doesn't cause a lot of problem, but he's just, he's just really strange,'" Judd added. Officers obtained a search warrant for Morris' home and when they searched it, they found a gun with "the same exact casing, brand, and stamp as the murder casing."
"David didn't do a real good job cleaning the gun because we found evidence, blood evidence on the gun," he continued. "And then we were real excited when we found that there was blood evidence on some shoes he had in his house, as well as a towel."
"During the search, Morris refused to remain seated and interfered with detectives by yelling at them," the sheriff's office added, saying they arrested Morris at the time and booked him in the Polk County Jail on a charge of resisting. They also charged him with interfering with a traffic control device because "detectives recovered two street signs that Morris illegally possessed."
Investigators learned that Morris "had been aggressive toward other tenants," with one resident saying Morris had a confrontation with Blevins on the night before he was killed.
Bartow, Florida, is located about 45 miles east of Tampa, Florida.
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