FORT MYERS, Fla. (Court TV) — Emotions ran high in a Florida courtroom on Thursday morning as two teenagers testified to witnessing a deadly shooting that killed their friend.
Thomas Stein appears in court during his trial on April 29, 2026. (Court TV)
Thomas Stein, 18, is standing trial on a charge of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted robbery in the death of 15-year-old Kayla Rincon-Miller on March 17, 2024. Two teenage girls who were with Rincon-Miller the night she died took the stand on Thursday to talk about the terrifying events that led up to the shooting.
Louann Dejaie, 18, and Emma Wright, 19, had gone to the movies that night with Rincon-Miller, and they saw “Bob Marley: One Love” at a local theater. When the film ended, the trio went outside the building, where they smoked marijuana before deciding to walk to McDonald’s for food.
“We were just talking, dancing,” Wright described. “We had taken Kayla’s phone and started taking photos of her, telling her to make the sidewalk her red carpet…just being girls.”
Emma Wright testifies in April 30, 2026. (Court TV)
As they walked, the teens all noticed an SUV slow down to approximately 5 mph and roll past them. “We were just thinking that they were weird,” Wright said. “We kind of made fun of them while they were driving past us, just saying like, ‘What are you doing?'”
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After the SUV passed, Wright and Dejaie described the vehicle making a U-turn and then driving straight back towards them. The SUV stopped right in front of them, and then people got out of the car. “I thought it was a prank, a joke that maybe one of Kayla’s or Louanne’s friends were pulling on us,” said Wright.
Both Wright and Dejaie described three to four people getting out of the car and attacking them. “This happened quicker than I could process,” Dejaie testified. “I was scared and I just wanted to say anything to deflect the situation, so I automatically started screaming, ‘We don’t have anything!'” Wright and Dejaie both described the masked men, who were Black, as telling them to hand over “everything.”
Louann Dejaie testified on April 30, 2026. (Court TV)
While the passengers in the vehicle were all described as Black men, both Wright and Dejaie said that the car’s driver was white, with a bowl cut and blue eyes. “I saw the driver go straight for Kayla,” Wright said.
Dejaie said she heard three gunshots before the assailants all got back into the car and fled from the scene. She immediately ran to Kayla. “She was like, ‘I just got shot,’ and I remember telling her, ‘It’s gonna be OK. It’s gonna be OK,’ and I just didn’t want to believe.”
Stein’s defense questioned the accuracy of the victims’ recollections: both girls said they believed there were three or four people who attacked them, but only two people have been arrested and charged in the case. “We just knew we had been ambushed,” Dejaie said.
After both eyewitnesses left the courtroom, Stein’s defense team moved for a mistrial. His attorneys claimed that Wright changed her story on the stand and identified Stein as the shooter for the first time, despite previously saying she could not remember who shot Rincon-Miller. Prosecutors countered that the jury had already been made aware that Wright’s story had changed multiple times because of the trauma and stress from the event. Judge Nicholas Thompson denied the motion, saying he found no violations.
The only other person charged in the case, Christopher Horne Jr., previously pleaded no contest to the same charges Stein faces as part of a plea agreement under which he will testify at the trial. He is expected to be sentenced to 25 years in prison next month.
