Jordan emphasized that he had not seen the shooting himself. He could only report what Tyler had said while lying badly wounded on the floor. Brittany was right there when Tyler made the statement, and patrol officers arrived roughly one or two minutes later.
The detective also returned to Jordan's estimate of the timeline because his earliest answers had sounded inconsistent. Jordan explained that the confusion came from waking suddenly into an emergency and immediately calling 911. He believed only a few minutes passed between Brittany waking him and the emergency call, not the half hour he had first mentioned while disoriented.
He remembered Tyler's physical condition much more clearly than the clock. Tyler could move only slightly, and when he tried to lift his head it would fall back. Jordan watched him struggle to open his eyes and realized he could not have stood under his own power. Brittany remained directly behind him, cradling him and trying to keep him upright.
That was why Tyler's brief words mattered so much to investigators. Jordan did not claim to know the context of the shooting, and he did not claim to have seen Brittany fire. He simply repeated the two things he remembered Tyler managing to say before responders arrived: first, that Jordan should call 911, and then a statement identifying Brittany as the person who had shot him in the back.
Jordan agreed to give detectives a written statement. He also submitted to a gunshot-residue swab. Afterward, officers opened a police vehicle and gave him somewhere to sit out of the Florida sun while investigators turned their attention to Brittany.
Investigators also considered the scene itself when evaluating the changing story. The house did not show an obvious forced entry or a stranger fleeing before police arrived. Tyler was found close to the people he lived with, and a handgun was already in the area Jordan described. Those circumstances did not identify the shooter by themselves, but they sharply limited the number of plausible explanations detectives had to test.
The amount of alcohol consumed that evening was another issue. Jordan openly acknowledged drinking and did not pretend his own memory was perfect. That made detectives cautious about treating every minute estimate as exact. But his central account remained stable from the 911 call through the later interview: Brittany woke him, Tyler was already wounded, and Tyler managed only a few words before his condition deteriorated.
The time apart appeared to change Brittany’s account. Instead of saying only that she had gone to sleep and awakened to find Tyler injured, she now described waking during a violent encounter with him. According to Brittany, Tyler became aggressive, pinned her near a bedroom wall, grabbed her by the throat, and repeatedly tried to strangle her.
The detective encouraged her to describe the scene carefully. Brittany said she had been near a back window and was trying to get away. She was unsure exactly where she stood in relation to the bed and nightstand but described Tyler repeatedly squeezing her neck or grabbing her again after she tried to break free.
“You were fighting to survive at this point,” the detective said, trying to keep her talking.
Brittany seemed unable to reconcile the story she was telling with the man she knew. “I don’t have to get away from him is the thing,” she said. “He’s the most kind person.”
The detective reminded her that regardless of Tyler’s normal personality, if someone was strangling her in that moment she would have been in fight-or-flight mode. Brittany agreed that the encounter had been frightening, but she still expressed disbelief that Tyler would behave that way.
The possibility of self-defense was now directly on the table. The detective asked whether she had reached toward the nightstand and grabbed a gun to scare Tyler or force him away from her.
“I don’t know,” Brittany said repeatedly. “I would never want to hurt him ever. I don’t know if I did. I don’t remember.”
She remembered holding and kissing Tyler after he was injured while he bled. The detective continued exploring whether, during an alleged fight for her life, she might have grabbed the gun without necessarily intending to fire it.
“I would never shoot a person,” Brittany said.
The detective replied that even displaying a gun could cause an attacker to back away. Brittany still said she did not know what had happened.
Investigators asked whether Tyler had ever been violent with her before. At first the relationship had been presented as nonviolent, but Brittany now said there had been another incident roughly four or five months earlier. She claimed Tyler had attacked her while extremely intoxicated and that she escaped by pushing him off and possibly scratching his neck.
She did not call police after that earlier incident. Brittany described Tyler as having been blacked out and said he had largely stopped drinking after it. She repeatedly insisted that outside those episodes he was a wonderful person who would never hurt anyone unless he was protecting his family.
Brittany's reference to the earlier incident became particularly important because it was the first concrete history she offered to support the idea that Tyler could become physically dangerous when drunk. She said that months earlier she had been able to push him away and return to bed. There had been no police report from that night, so detectives had to evaluate the claim through whatever other evidence and witnesses they could find.
She also struggled when asked whether Tyler was as intoxicated on June 17 as he had allegedly been during that earlier episode. Brittany said she assumed he was because he had been drinking again after a period of largely avoiding alcohol. Yet Jordan's description of the evening was that Tyler had consumed several beers and the mood remained normal when Jordan went upstairs. That difference did not resolve the case, but it gave detectives another point to compare against later witness testimony and forensic evidence.
This new version could, on its surface, support a self-defense theory. Tyler had allegedly become violent after drinking, and Brittany claimed he strangled her during another drunken episode. Jordan’s statement that Tyler identified Brittany as the shooter could also fit a scenario in which she fired while trying to escape.