A 19-year-old who police say broke into a home last year and shot one of the residents in the face with a sawed-off shotgun confessed to the shooting in a recorded interview.
In Hamilton County Criminal Court on Wednesday, jurors listened to the police recording during the trial of Quinzell Grasty, who is charged with first-degree murder, aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery. During the interview, he told police that he had been involved in the burglary but had not been the one who shot Matt Coyle in a home on Standifer Gap Road.
For nearly an hour, Grasty stuck to that story, but changed it in the last minutes of the interview.
“I didn’t mean to kill a man, but it happened,” he said on the recording. “I try to get along with people. I just wish … I wish I could just talk to that family and tell them I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to hurt that man.”
Grasty’s mother, Quita Johnson, who was hearing the tape in court for the first time, left the courtroom crying after the jury was dismissed for the day.
Outside court, she said her son had been changing his story and hadn’t admitted to her that he had been responsible for Coyle’s death.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think,” Johnson said. “I didn’t raise him like this. I know saying sorry to [Coyle’s family] isn’t going to make it any better. There is nothing I can say to bring their son back.”
On Tuesday, the first day of the trial, Coyle’s girlfriend Sarah Gill testified that she and Coyle were in bed on the morning of April 16, 2009, when Coyle heard a loud noise in the house.
She testified that Coyle got out of the bed, retrieved a pocketknife and cracked the bedroom door to see if someone was in the house. A gunshot blew him back into the room, she said.
Before she saw Coyle’s face and the blood, she said she thought he had been shot by a paintball gun and that the whole thing was a joke.
“He killed the man I love,” she testified Tuesday.
On the tape, Grasty said he and his friend, Michael Adams – both of whom were 18 at the time of the robbery and killing – made plans to rob the home because one of Coyle’s roommate sold “pounds and pounds” of marijuana and they thought he would have cash or drugs.
The spot of the robbery, which Grasty called “a lick” in testimony, would have a lot of “stuff” to steal, he told his friends.
“I told them where to hit a lick,” he said during the police interview before confessing to firing the shotgun. “They were supposed to rob them. They weren’t suppose to murder the man. I am not trying to kill nobody. I don’t hit licks. Nine times out of 10, I don’t hit licks.”
A second taped interview with Grasty will be played today when the trial continues.