Sarasota Police Seek Clues After Tourists Are Killed

 

Police officials are investigating how the young men, James Cooper, 25, and James T. Kouzaris, 24, got from the bar in downtown Sarasota to the public housing project, where they died on a narrow, one-way street. The police found the men after receiving a 911 call.

The two British tourists did not have a rental car and were staying with Mr. Cooper’s parents in a condominium on nearby Longboat Key on the Gulf Coast.

Shawn Tyson, a 16-year-old dropout, was charged Sunday with two counts of first-degree murder. The shooting took place one day after Mr. Tyson was released from a juvenile facility after his arrest on charges of aggravated assault with a handgun, police officials said. Mr. Tyson was accused of shooting out a car window and spent eight days in detention.

Mr. Tyson, who last year dropped out of the eighth grade in a school for children with special needs, lives two blocks from the murder scene. Prosecutors said they intended to try him as an adult.

“From what I can pull together in the past few days, I don’t think we have ever had a tourist murdered, much less two at the same time,” Kelly Kirschner, the mayor of Sarasota, said Tuesday. “It’s critically tragic.”

The Sarasota police chief, Mikel Hollaway, said at a news conference that he believed Mr. Cooper and Mr. Kouzaris were in the neighborhood voluntarily. No drugs or weapons were found on them. The police are circulating photos of the men in Smokin’ Joe’s bar in downtown Sarasota, where they went for drinks, in the hopes that someone will recognize them and come forward with information.

As the police pieced together details of the killings, Mr. Cooper’s parents flew home to Britain.

Mr. Cooper and Mr. Kouzaris graduated from the University of Sheffield together. A tennis coach, Mr. Cooper, or Coops as he was called, was a leader in Sheffield, his friend Alex Porter said in an e-mail. “He was possibly the funniest and most quick-witted person I have had the pleasure of knowing,” Mr. Porter said, adding that the two had plans to go to Wimbledon this summer.

Mr. Kouzaris, a rugby player and would-be urban planner who was called Jam, was no different. His Facebook page is studded with Web sites for rough road, high-mountain biking. He had studied town planning at the university and had recently moved from Taiwan and joined Mr. Cooper for a three-week vacation. “Amazing” was Mr. Kouzaris’s favorite word and his outlook on life, Mr. Porter said.

Facing a blizzard of harsh British press coverage, Sarasota officials are trying to dispel notions that the city is blighted by crime. These are the first two murders this year in the city of 55,000.

“The British media is portraying this as crime run amok, and that is not true,” Mr. Kirschner said, adding that the city has worked to address the higher crime rate on Sarasota’s north side. “It doesn’t matter where you are in 26 square miles of the city of Sarasota, you should have every expectation you and your family should be safe.”