BARTOW, Fla. (Court TV) — Prosecutors pointed to a letter allegedly written by a defendant ordering his brother to “stop snitching” as they urged a jury to find the man guilty of killing three friends heading out fishing.
Tony Wiggins listens to closing arguments on Sept. 28, 2026. (Court TV)
Tony Lee “TJ” Wiggins, 32, faces a potential death sentence if he’s convicted of three counts of murder in the deaths of Damion Tillman, Brandon Rollins and Keven Springfield. Wiggins has pleaded not guilty and claimed he was nowhere near the scene when the victims were gunned down after leaving a Dollar General in 2020.
Prosecutor Ralph Guerra summarized the evidence against Wiggins in his closing argument to the jury on Monday: He emphasized that blood found on the seat belt in a vehicle where Wiggins was sitting the night of the killings matched Tillman’s DNA, and pointed to surveillance video from Dollar General, which showed the defendant speaking to Tillman in the store.
Guerra said that after leaving the store, both men got into separate vehicles — but Wiggins’ vehicle followed the victims a short way before someone shot the men. Investigators found that Tillman, Rollins and Springfield had each been shot multiple times; Tillman and Rollins also had injuries consistent with being beaten with the butt of a gun.
After the shooting, Wiggins told police that he was in a car with his girlfriend and his brother and that they had gone directly from the Dollar General to McDonald’s. But Guerra showed the jury surveillance video from both locations, along with the route between the two, which left 12 minutes unaccounted for. “That missing 12 minutes of time, I submit to you, is the window in which Damion, Brandon and Keven were all murdered,” Guerra said.
Debra Tuomey, Wiggins’ defense attorney, questioned the reliability of the prosecution’s forensic evidence, telling the jury that the witnesses they heard from were “DNA analysts — not scientists. Analysts.”
“‘Forensic science’ is really an oxymoron,” Tuomey said. “It’s like saying, ‘jumbo shrimp,’ ‘awfully good,’ ‘deafening silence.’ Either it’s science — either it’s scientific, or it’s not.”
Guerra told the jury that the defendant incriminated himself in letters found in his cell addressed to his brother. “I told my lawyers not to even waste their time. The story Daddy told my lawyers is crazy as f—,” the letter says. “I don’t know where they came up with that dumb s—, but it won’t help us at all, bro.”
The letter, Guerra said, urges Wiggins’ brother to recant his previous statements to police and write down a new version of what happened. “What I need you to do to help us is I need you to write out a statement stating that you lied because you were scared they were going to pin the murders on you, so you said I did it to get the attention off of you,” Guerra read from the letter. “Put in there you’ve never seen me with a gun or seen me shoot no one and that I didn’t own or have any guns in my possession; that all the guns and ammo in the safe was yours and I had no access to it or knowledge of where the key was.”
Wiggins’ brother, William Wiggins, pleaded guilty to three counts of accessory after the fact and tampering with evidence as part of a plea agreement that required him to testify against his brother. But at a proffer session outside the presence of the jury, William Wiggins reneged on the plea deal and said that he and his brother were never at the scene with the victims.
While the jury never heard from William Wiggins, Guerra told the panel that the defendant had threatened his brother in another letter filled with images that TJ Wiggins later had tattooed onto his body. Those images include a stop sign that says “stop snitching” and a rat hanging from a noose. Another tattoo, which Guerra said referenced the scene of the triple homicide, featured a “number 27 on a sign that’s the U.S. highway sign” with crime scene tape around it. “Someone might think, and I would submit to you, talking about a rat on a noose and ‘stop snitching’ and the skull with three tally marks and the guns and all that imagery, I would submit to you, that that was a bit of a warning to his brother: Now you better change your story. Better change that story, buddy.”
If the jury convicts TJ Wiggins on the top charges of murder, it will then be tasked with recommending whether he receives the death penalty or serves life in prison without parole.
