14-Year-Old Guilty of Killing Teacher

A jury convicted a 14-year-old Wednesday of walking into his school with a pistol and murdering his English teacher by shooting him between the eyes, a verdict that could send the boy to prison for the rest of his life.

The nine-woman, three-man Palm Beach County jury, however, balked at the finding of first-degree murder sought by prosecutors, which would have meant mandatory life imprisonment with no chance of parole. Instead, jurors agreed on murder in the second degree, which allows the judge to set the sentence.

“Not too bad,” was the reaction of the youthful defendant, Nathaniel Brazill, according to his lawyers, after the verdict was read. The boy then cried, they said.

The case was the latest in Florida in which a young teen was ordered to stand trial as an adult, facing the prospect of a lifetime prison term. Brazill was 13 when he shot his teacher.

On Wednesday, at a bill-signing ceremony at a Tampa elementary school, Gov. Jeb Bush said Brazill should never have been tried as an adult. “There is a different standard for children,” Bush, a Republican, said. “There should be a sensitivity to the fact that a 14-year-old is not a little adult.”

On May 26, on the final day of the school year, Brazill, 13 and a seventh-grader at the time, shot Barry Grunow, 35, once in the head as the respected and beloved teacher stood in the doorway of his classroom at Lake Worth Middle School. Grunow had refused to let Brazill see two girls in his class to say goodbye for the summer.

The youngster, who had been sent home from school earlier in the day for throwing water balloons, returned with a .25-caliber semiautomatic he had stolen days before from his grandfather. Defense attorneys conceded that he aimed the pistol at Grunow but claimed that he fired it by mistake. Brazill testified that he got mad when the teacher didn’t take his request to talk with the girls seriously.

The slaying was captured on a school surveillance camera’s videotape, which shows Brazill pointing the gun at Grunow for 11 seconds before the teacher falls to the floor.

The second-degree murder verdict meant jurors concluded that the killing was not premeditated but committed on the spur of the moment. In an interview after the trial, Toni Sellier, 51, said she and other jurors tried to take Brazill’s youth into account as they wrestled with their decision.

“Did a 13-year-old kid have enough mental capacity to reflect on what he was doing?” became the crucial question, said Sellier, a housewife from Delray Beach. “We know he is a smart kid and all that, but in the heat of the moment, did he have true premeditation?”

Over 14 hours of deliberations, she said, the panel was split between verdicts of first- and second-degree murder, and jurors never accepted the defense’s contention that the killing was an accident appropriately punished by a finding of manslaughter. By noon Wednesday, she said, all jurors had come to agree that Brazill was “caught up in the moment.”

“He came back to school with a pistol, and Mr. Grunow happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Sellier said.

While the verdict was read to a hushed courtroom, Brazill seemed to frown or furrow his brows in puzzlement. Lead defense attorney Robert Udell said Palm Beach Circuit Judge Richard I. Wennet, who set sentencing for June 29, is free to impose anything from “zero to life.” His client, Udell said, may not comprehend that.

“I don’t think Nathaniel can think past the next 10 minutes,” Udell said. “He doesn’t know 10 years, 20 years, 30 years in jail. It’s a lifetime to him. He doesn’t understand those numbers.”

Last week, Brazill testified for five hours in a flat, emotionless voice, betraying his feelings only once, when he shed tears after describing what had happened to Grunow after he shot him.

Bob Hatcher, the principal of Lake Worth Middle School, praised the verdict, saying “the justice system worked.”

Grunow’s relatives left the Palm Beach County Courthouse without talking to reporters. Polly Powell, Brazill’s mother, also left without commenting, holding hands with friends and relatives.

The trial, which attracted enormous media attention in Florida and the rest of the country, was troubling because it was yet another incident of gun violence in schools and because the defendant was a well-liked student with good grades and no prior history of trouble with the law.

After the verdict was announced, even prosecutor Marc Shiner indicated that there were two victims in the case: Grunow, who was married with two children, and the popular jokester who had just been convicted of murdering him.

“We’ve lost a great teacher,” Shiner said. “The community lost a young man who may have had a promising future. The Grunows lost. The Brazill family lost. This community lost. Based on all the attention this case has gotten, our country has lost.”

The case also was the second in recent months that focused national attention on how Florida deals with children accused of serious crimes, and it sparked public debate over whether the law should be changed to take their age more into account. In March, a 14-year-old Fort Lauderdale boy, who said he was imitating his TV wrestling heroes when he killed a young playmate, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

That defendant, Lionel Tate, was 12 when the death occurred, and the judgment was so harsh that some jurors and even the prosecutor objected. It even became an issue in Florida politics.

“A lot of people in juvenile justice would say, ‘Yes, there are juveniles who belong in criminal court,’ ” said state Sen. Steve Geller, a Democrat, who sought unsuccessfully this spring to amend current laws on sentencing. “I just have a problem saying that a 12- or 13-year-old who’s committed one act of senseless violence, well, we should throw him away.”

Florida’s crusade against youth crime began in 1978, when prosecutors were given the power to try 16- and 17-year-olds in adult court. But it was a highly publicized ambush of two napping tourists at a highway rest stop in 1993 that gave the state crackdown its most powerful impetus. In that attack, one tourist was slain and his companion was wounded. Four teens were arrested, including one with 30 prior arrests and another with 26.

In its next session, the Florida Legislature broadened prosecutors’ powers to allow them to charge children as young as 14 in adult court for serious crimes, bypassing the juvenile court system and its goal of rehabilitation.

Brazill also was found guilty of aggravated assault with a firearm for pointing the gun at another teacher as he fled from the school.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue and Associated Press contributed to this story.