Brittany was visibly overwhelmed. When deputies moved her away so paramedics could work, she repeatedly said that she did not know what had happened. Asked whether she had heard a gunshot, she said no. She said she had gone to sleep and then awakened to Tyler already injured.
“What happened?” an officer asked.
“I don’t know,” Brittany answered. “I went to sleep. I don’t know.”
The officers separated Jordan and Brittany almost immediately. At that point, neither person had been cleared, and investigators did not want them discussing the incident or unconsciously changing their accounts to match one another. Jordan had made the 911 call, but the deputies still had to consider everyone who had been inside the house.
Jordan gave the officers a more detailed account of the moment Brittany woke him. She had yelled for him to help, and he found Tyler on the floor with Brittany holding him from behind and trying to support him. Tyler had no shirt on, and Jordan could tell the blood was coming from the back side of his body, although Brittany’s position prevented him from seeing the wound clearly.
Jordan said he saw no knife or other weapon next to Tyler. He again mentioned the pistol he had noticed on the floor. He also told police that he had known both Tyler and Brittany for years and had lived with them for about a year, and he had never personally witnessed serious physical violence between them.
When officers asked Jordan how he had found Tyler, he tried to reconstruct the position of everyone in the room. Brittany had Tyler partly upright, supporting him from behind and placing pressure near the wound. Jordan said Tyler's shirt was off and he could not see the exact injury because Brittany's body and hands covered much of his back. He remembered blood around Tyler but nothing on the front of his torso that explained the amount he was losing.
The handgun Jordan noticed also became a repeated point of questioning. He said he had seen it on the floor in the open living area when he came out after Brittany yelled for him. It was not in Tyler's hands. Jordan knew firearms were kept in the home, but he had not heard a shot and therefore did not immediately understand that the pistol might explain the wound.
Deputies asked whether Tyler or Brittany had a history of violence. Jordan said he had never seen anything that made him believe either one routinely attacked the other. He had known both of them for several years, and although he had heard arguments, he had never witnessed an incident remotely like what was unfolding that morning.
The surroundings raised additional questions. Officers saw a large number of alcohol bottles around the downstairs patio and could smell alcohol in the air. Jordan admitted that the three of them had been drinking that evening. The question investigators could not answer yet was whether Jordan and Brittany could really have slept through the discharge of a firearm inside their own home.
Upstairs, officers tried again to obtain a clear statement from Brittany. She said she had gone to sleep and woke to Tyler lying on the floor bleeding. She repeatedly asked whether he was going to be okay, but responders could not give her an answer.
“Who is he to you?” an officer asked.
“That’s my boyfriend,” Brittany said.
She said they had been living together for about nine months and had known each other for roughly two years. Her answers about the actual incident, however, remained vague. She said she did not know what woke her, did not know whether anyone else had been in the house, and initially said she had no idea whether Tyler had a gun.
The relationships among the three residents mattered. Jordan and Tyler had met a couple of years earlier. Jordan owned a fishing boat, while Tyler worked for a local boat maker. At the time they first became friends, Tyler had been living with Brittany and the man who was then her boyfriend.
After Brittany’s earlier relationship deteriorated, she left with Tyler and the two became a couple. Brittany managed a beachside operation where people rented paddleboards and kayaks. Later, Tyler and Brittany rented the Florida Keys home and invited Jordan to take the second bedroom, dividing the approximately $3,600 monthly rent among the three of them.
The arrangement suited Jordan because his fishing work kept him away for weeks at a time. When he was on land, the house gave him a place to stay, and Tyler and Brittany had the property mostly to themselves while he was at sea. By the early morning of June 17, that arrangement had turned into a crime scene.
Deputies continued questioning Jordan before moving Brittany downstairs. Investigators wanted their statements preserved independently because even small differences could become important. There was no obvious sign of an intruder, and the injury was in a location that made an accidental self-inflicted shooting difficult to explain.
Jordan said the television in his room had been playing quietly and he had been half asleep. Even so, he believed he would have noticed an unusual noise. What he remembered clearly was Brittany’s voice waking him, not a gunshot or argument.
Officers kept Jordan under close observation while they worked. One deputy asked him to keep his hands visible, and another confirmed where Jordan had seen the firearm. At that early stage, Jordan was still one of the people who had been inside the residence, so investigators treated him cautiously while they tried to determine what had happened.
Brittany, meanwhile, appeared devastated and confused. She kept asking about Tyler while saying that she had awakened to find him bleeding. The deputies repeatedly asked whether anything had happened before she went to sleep, whether she heard anything, and whether she remembered a weapon. Her responses remained some variation of “I don’t know.”
Eventually paramedics prepared Tyler for transport. His condition was extremely serious. They moved him down the stairs and toward the ambulance while officers began shifting from emergency response to crime-scene preservation.