May 9th, 2019. Around 3:00 in the afternoon, in a quiet neighborhood in Kenosha, 15-year-old Kay Jueg had just gotten home from school with her mother. Music was playing through the house. They were joking around, dancing, and just going about their normal day, but someone had already been watching the house.
Later, security cameras would capture a figure in a hoodie dressed completely in black. The person left a bicycle near the park, walked along the neighboring houses, and entered through the open garage door. Just over a minute passed, then the gunshots started. First one, a few seconds later, another, then another, and another. Seven shots in total.
Kay’s mother hid inside the bathroom and called 911 convinced the shooter was still inside the house, but before that she managed to see the person clearly, and she recognized him immediately. Her daughter’s ex-boyfriend. She begged him to stop. He gave only one response. “No, I have to.
” And then he pulled the trigger again. Hey guys, let me grab you for just a second. I’m really curious where my audience is watching from, so I’d love for you to drop a comment and tell me what city you’re in and what time it is for you right now. Thanks for taking a moment. Go ahead and share that in the comments, and now let’s keep going.
A doorbell camera across the street captured the sound of the gunshots. Seven shots echoed through what was usually a quiet, peaceful neighborhood. Moments later, the hooded figure ran from the scene. Inside the house, mother and daughter were left fighting for their lives. Around 2:00 that Thursday afternoon on May 9th, 2019, Stephanie Jueg left her home in Kenosha to pick up her 15-year-old daughter Kay from school.
Stephanie ran a photography business out of their home, which meant she was usually able to drive her daughter to and from school herself. She and her husband, Nick, had three children. Their oldest son, Tyler, had already moved out. Their youngest, 11-year-old Mason, was attending a local elementary school.
At around 2:20 in the afternoon, Stephanie and Kay pulled into the driveway, opened the garage, and went inside. Once they got home, they turned on music. It was their time together. That part of the day when the house belonged only to the two of them. They danced, laughed, and joked around.
A few minutes after getting home, Kay went to her room to get ready for her shift at her part-time job. Stephanie went into the master bathroom to finish drying her hair. Then, exactly at 3:00, the sound of gunshots broke through the noise of the hair dryer, followed immediately by screams. At 3:02 p.m., Stephanie called 911.
Locked inside the master bedroom, Stephanie had no idea how badly Kay had been injured. She was too afraid to leave the room, believing the shooter could still be somewhere inside the house. But, one thing she felt certain about was who had pulled the trigger, her daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Okay, how old are you? I’m 14.
39 39 39. Oh my god. Oh my god. I need help. Please. Please. Please. I can’t get you help. You don’t know where he is? No. No, I locked the door. Okay, I’m sorry. Okay, you think he took off running? I think pretty well. Stephanie couldn’t know for sure, although investigators would later determine that the shooter had already fled the house before the 911 call was made. The attack was already over.
Not knowing that, Stephanie finally left the safety of the bathroom and ran back to Kay’s room. There, she found her daughter lying on the floor. Okay, is she in her bedroom? She’s in the bedroom. Okay, what is his name again? Marty There’s a lot of people coming, a lot. They’re going to come help you, okay? Oh my god.
How old is this Marty? 15 15? Yes. Deputies from the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department arrived at the house within minutes, along with EMTs. They found Stephanie Jagga inside the bedroom next to Kay. Um, Stephanie had been shot in the left arm just above the wrist. Another bullet had struck her in the right side of her body.
Even with those injuries, she was desperately trying to save her daughter’s life by performing CPR. Kay was carried out onto the front lawn so emergency crews could begin treatment. While Stephanie was rushed to a nearby hospital just a few blocks away. But, despite how quickly paramedics responded and how close the hospital was, Kay’s injuries were far too severe.
She was pronounced dead at the scene. Um, the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office later found that she had suffered four gunshot wounds to the chest and a fifth to the head. Medical staff would later say that even if a full surgical team had been standing inside Kay’s room the exact moment the shooting started, there still would have been no way to save her.
Stephanie Jiga survived the attack after undergoing multiple surgeries to her arm, chest, and abdomen. As soon as she was physically able to speak with detectives, she described what happened in the final seconds before she was shot. She said she first heard a horrifying scream followed by a loud gunshot coming from her daughter’s room.
Stephanie ran to see what had happened, and standing in the doorway, she saw her daughter’s ex-boyfriend, 15-year-old Martis Fuller. Then she begged him, “You don’t have to do this.” He answered, “No, I have to.” After that, he raised the gun toward her chest and fired. Stephanie managed to retreat behind the bedroom door, but the shooter followed her and kicked the door open. Then he fired again.
Backing farther into the master bedroom, she was finally able to lock herself inside the bathroom. From there, Stephanie made two phone calls. The first was to her husband. The second was to 911. Inside the house, investigators initially recovered six shell casings. Later, they determined there had actually been seven shots fired, and the final casing was eventually found beneath a console table near the bottom of the stairs.
There were drops of blood on the staircase along with a single bullet. At the upstairs landing near the bedrooms, shattered furniture became part of the crime scene after officers forced open one of the locked bedroom doors to make sure the shooter was not hiding inside. He wasn’t there. Martis Fuller, if he was in fact the gunman, had already fled before police arrived.
Inside Kay’s bedroom, a cluster of shell casings near the mirror, partially buried in the carpet, showed investigators where the shooting had started. The downward angle of the gunfire led detectives to pull back a section of carpet near where Kay had collapsed. Underneath it, they found a bullet lodged deep in the wooden floor. Investigators believed the final shot had been fired at close range while the shooter was standing directly over her.
On the sidewalk between the Juga home and Horizon Park, detectives found a single bullet matching the type used in the shooting. They believed it had accidentally been dropped on the way to the house before the attack. 15-year-old Kay Juga was a member of her school’s cheerleading team. She also played softball and was an honor student at Bradford High School.
Kay excelled at everything she did. She loved life and she was passionate about music and dancing. In the middle of their grief, friends and family kept coming back to one thing, Kay’s unforgettable laugh. She would start telling a joke, then completely lose it halfway through and burst into uncontrollable laughter so hard that everyone around her would end up crying from laughing before she even finished the story.
It was impossible not to get pulled into Kay’s joy and laughter. She would just make a room light up with her smile anytime or her laugh. Her laugh is You can always remember her laugh. I I can hear it all the time, you know, it’s just it’s very memorable. She was such a loving person. Kaylie loved cheer. She loved being with her friends.
She was just a bubbly person. She made everything a great time. The cheerleaders who had performed alongside Kay wanted to honor their friend with a special routine followed by a moment of silence. At first, the local school board blocked the memorial saying they could not allow it for legal reasons. The situation was complicated because two students from the same school were connected to the case, Kay and Martice, and school officials did not want it to appear as though they were taking sides.
My wife was shot trying to get CPR to my daughter who was murdered. And they can’t do a moment of silence or a 5-minute cheer? Ridiculous. After a wave of backlash over the decision, the school changed its position and the memorial was ultimately allowed to take place. I’m glad this was able to happen and I’m glad to see that everyone came out for Kaylee.
And that I love her and that I’ll always miss her. Right after the murder, the shooter, believed to be Martice Fuller, fled the scene. Even though everything happened fast and in complete chaos, Stephanie Jugga had every reason to be confident in her identification. Martice had become part of the Jugga family’s life about a year before the tragedy.
Um when Kay first brought her new boyfriend home, he was generally welcomed by the family. Stephanie later said he seemed like a good kid at the time, an athlete with plans for college, and what looked like a stable future ahead of him. Martice played basketball and was the quarterback for his school’s football team, while Kay had joined the cheerleading squad.
To everyone around them, they looked like the perfect young couple. Over the next 10 months, Martice ate dinner at the Jugga house two or three times a week. He stayed over to watch movies with the family, attended football games for Kay’s younger brother, Mason, and even spent major holidays, including Christmas, with the Jugga family.
But over time, the relationship between the teenagers started becoming unhealthy. Martice seemed to want constant control over his contact with Kay. Even when she was home, she would keep him on video calls while doing homework, watching TV, or texting friends. If she went anywhere without him, he would repeatedly call and message her non-stop, even after Stephanie sat him down and explained that his behavior was disrupting the peace inside their family.
He brushed her concerns aside, laughed it off, and kept calling anyway. At the same time, typical teenage rumors were spreading all over social media. Kay heard accusations that Martice was spending time with another girl and from there it seemed like Martise started accusing K of doing the exact same thing.
During the summer before the murder, one of Martise’s friends messaged him saying, “Weren’t you hanging out with another girl just yesterday? K deserves better.” On X, which was still called Twitter at the time, K posted, “I didn’t even do anything. You never believe me. I swear to God, I’m so sick of this already.” The alleged third party later replied, “Me or K?” And then she added, “Wait, seriously? You were cheating on both of us.
And the crazy part is he was with me at school yesterday.” Martise’s controlling behavior kept getting more aggressive. One incident inside the halls of Bradford High School took a disturbing turn when Martise blocked K’s path and demanded that she hand over her phone. School security had to step in to calm the situation and physically restrain him. Afterward K was left in tears.
Following that incident, the school ordered Martise to stay away from her. Their class schedules were changed and an official agreement was put in place, one more outburst like that and he would be expelled. No sports teams, no chance at a scholarship. He was forbidden from having any contact with K Jugga. In February he violated that agreement.
Martise cornered K again and this time teachers witnessed the incident themselves. Everything was captured on surveillance cameras, but Martise still denied it happened. He was expelled from school and according to witnesses he was furious. By spring K had completely ended the relationship.
At first she downplayed what had happened at school because she did not want to drag him deeper into trouble. But after the expulsion, she finally reached her breaking point. She posted online about someone believed to be Martise writing that he was taking advantage of her. “Start respecting yourself and stop letting people treat you like this, she wrote.
In response, her ex-boyfriend began obsessively following almost every move she made. On X, Kay posted, “Keep watching, baby.” People saw him pacing back and forth outside the Juga house after school. Sometimes he would quietly stand outside late at night staring through Kay’s bedroom window while the family slept inside, and the phone calls never stopped.
Eventually, Kay blocked his number. Martice started calling her from his friends’ phones instead. Sometimes the friends would briefly talk to her first, then hand the phone over to him. Kay started blocking those numbers, too. Whenever she went out with friends, they agreed not to post selfies online or reveal where they were.
They stopped sharing plans on social media because they were afraid Martice would see it and show up uninvited. At just 15 years old, Kay ended up quitting her first job at a local laundromat because she no longer felt being there alone. The business owner tried to help however he could. Martice’s number was blocked on the work phone, and Kay was allowed to keep the doors locked whenever she worked by herself, only opening them when customers knocked.
But even with all those precautions, she lived in constant fear. In April, she sent a message to her first employer saying, “Brian, thank you for giving me the opportunity to work here. I really appreciate you hiring me for my first job. Unfortunately, because of a a situation happening in my personal life, I need to find work somewhere with more people around and somewhere he won’t know where I work for my own safety.
” Kay eventually found a new job and hoped her ex-boyfriend would never figure out where it was. Immediately after the shooting, police in Kenosha launched a large-scale search for the 15-year-old suspect. Investigators learned that he had not been living at his mother’s house for several weeks.
Instead, he had been moving from one friend’s home to another, staying wherever he could. When detectives spoke with his mother, Alisa Fuller, she insisted her son could not have been the shooter because he had supposedly been at her house from noon until 3:00 that afternoon, the exact time the murder took place. But, Martice’s girlfriend, Alexis, gave police a completely different version of events.
She told investigators that Martice had spent the night at her house. Around 1:00 in the afternoon, she dropped him off near another friend’s home, only about 10 blocks from the Jugga residence. Later, Martice asked her to pick him up from roughly the same area around 3:30. When she did, he was wearing the same clothes, but his white sneakers were now extremely dirty, and he looked visibly shaken.
The following morning, Kenosha Police Department received a call from Martice’s cousin, Anice Andrews, who lived in Racine. She said that, to her surprise, her younger cousin had suddenly shown up outside her home late the night before, around 9:00. She let him stay for a few hours so he could see family members, but when he still refused to leave, she finally turned him into police.
You got to do. You can’t keep waiting. You can’t keep standing around here. I know you want to see your family and everything, but the time is almost up. Anything could happen to you at this point. He really didn’t want to speak on the situation. I was just trying to calm him down and just trying to figure out what was going on in your mind that you did something like that cuz I know my cousin, he’s 15 years old.
He is not that type of person. I wouldn’t wish this on nobody, and I feel like I feel like how I am with both sides of the family. I wouldn’t want my 16-year-old daughter getting shot and killed in her own home, and my 15-year-old cousin might get sentenced for life. So, right now it’s just my head is everywhere. At first, Ananias told police only that she knew authorities were searching for her cousin, which was why she turned him in.
Even then, she said she did not believe he was capable of what he was being accused of. As detectives walked her out of the station, they spoke to her not just as a witness, but as a mother. They asked how she would feel if it had been one of her own children, if her 6-year-old son or her 4-year-old daughter had been inside their own home.
Those words stayed with Ananias. After thinking about it, she told detectives she had more to say. They went back inside the station and sat down for another interview. That was when she revealed that her cousin had essentially confessed the entire crime to her the night before. Surveillance cameras around the neighborhood captured a timeline on the day of the murder that closely matched the information Ananias had already given police.
Shortly before 2:00, Alexis dropped Martise off near his friend’s house in a neighborhood not far from the Jugga home. An indoor security camera captured him standing near the front door wearing dark jeans, a gray hoodie, white sneakers, and a black backpack. Not long afterward, he was seen leaving the house on a bicycle.
Between his friend’s house and the Jugga residence was another home equipped with a doorbell camera. That camera recorded someone riding a bike westbound toward Kay’s house wearing a gray hoodie, dark pants, white sneakers, and a backpack. Across from the Jugga home sat Horizon Park, a large open park with playgrounds, walking paths, and sports fields. Trees lined the road nearby.
Hidden among those trees, someone would have a clear view of the front of the Jugga house. According to Ananias, Martise left the bike among the trees, changed clothes, and began watching the house. She said he later admitted that his original plan had only been to go inside and shoot Kay once, maybe twice.
He told his cousin that he watched Stephanie and Kay arrive home and enter through the garage. He knew their routine. He knew Nick would still be at work and that Mason would still be at school. Another security camera across the street later captured a figure now dressed entirely in black and no longer carrying the backpack, although the white sneakers remained the same.
The person moved along the sides of neighboring houses and walked directly beneath the camera mounted near the corner of the Jugga garage before entering through the open garage door. Even if the Jugga family’s home security system had been working that day, which it was not, investigators believe the route chosen by the attacker would likely have kept him out of view of their cameras anyway.
Just over a minute passed after the person entered the house, nearly 90 seconds before the gunshots began. First came a single shot. 16 seconds later, another. Then the remaining shots came rapidly one after another, seven shots total. The attacker spent about 3 minutes and 40 seconds inside the house all together.
Cameras then captured the figure running out through the garage and speeding back down the street toward Horizon Park. The same Nest camera that had recorded the hooded rider calmly passing the house earlier that afternoon, taking about 8 seconds to move through frame, captured the cyclist again. This time, the rider flew past in the opposite direction in only 2 seconds.
The returning figure was once again wearing the gray hoodie, leading investigators to believe Martis had changed back into his original clothes before escaping. Just as Ananias described, the return trip was captured at 3:04 p.m., only 2 minutes after Stephanie managed to call 911. Martise Fuller was charged with first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide.
His trial was scheduled to begin in February of 2020. Um but even before the case reached court, Martise found himself facing new trouble. Prosecutors claimed that with help from certain family members, he had attempted to interfere with potential jurors. We were monitoring some jail phone calls from the defendant.
The allegation is that the defendant got the names off of a chart of the potential jurors that the defendant then memorized those names and made some assumptions about who was related to those individuals and then began to try to contact people to get in touch with them. The supreme seriousness of something like that is that it really deals with the whole integrity of a jury trial.
Around that same time, during one of the pre-trial hearings, Martise’s mother, Aleese Fuller, was arrested after an emotional outburst inside the courtroom. Following a heated confrontation, authorities planned to charge her with obstructing an officer. Exactly what she yelled during the incident was never publicly released.
The murder trial eventually began in May. On May 9th of 2019, the unimaginable happened to the Juca family. A person that they shared Christmas Day with, that they opened their home and their hearts to, and let them share let him share time with their precious daughter took her life. And he looked at Stephanie Juca in the face after all their time together and tried to take her life, too.
And when she tried to reason with him, he told her, “Yes, I do.” and shot her twice. Between March and May of 2019, Martice Fuller’s life was in chaos. He had been expelled from Bradford High School, unable to play football, and ultimately, due to a fight with his family, he found himself homeless. He was transient.
He didn’t have a cell phone that had a cellular connection. He was forced to rely on using Wi-Fi when he could have internet at various locations. He found himself begging, relying on friends for rides because he was 15. He couldn’t drive. He didn’t have a car. [snorts] During this time period, Martice was frequently frantic.
He was overwhelmed. He was a 15-year-old child trying to survive. Prosecutors built their case around two stories unfolding at the same time. The first was Kay’s reality, her attempts to escape a toxic relationship and protect herself. The second was the story of Martice, who was becoming increasingly angry over losing control, first over Kay and then over his own life.
According to the prosecution, that anger led to a series of decisions during the week leading up to the murder. First, Martice began talking to several friends about where he could get a gun and ammunition. Eventually, he managed to obtain both. 7 days before the shooting, someone photographed him holding the newly acquired handgun.
He showed the weapon off to friends and bragged about it. 3 days before the murder, he told one of his friends that Kay had ruined his life and that he wanted to kill her. 2 days before the crime, he was searching through her Facebook page trying to figure out where she was. Around the same time, he borrowed a bicycle from one friend and then hid it at another friend’s house near the Jugga residence.
He also started watching the neighborhood during the day and at night staring through the window of Kay’s bedroom. On May 9th, the day of the murder, Martice messaged his friend Desiree and asked her to do this job with him. She understood exactly what he meant. Earlier that same week, he had already brought it up twice before he wanted Kay dead.
Make any suggestions about what he wanted to do to his ex-girlfriend? Yes. What did he say? That he wanted to kill her. What did you say to that? I listened. And do you remember um what his message to you was? Uh to do the hit with him. What did you understand that to mean? The obvious um to kill her.
To kill the ex-girlfriend like he had talked about the day before? Yes. It says, “I’m so mad. You need to do that to her.” Say that again. I’m so mad. You need to do that to her. And [snorts] what is the day and time that that message was sent to you? Um Thursday at 11:52 a.m. Thank you.
Desiree refused to take part in the plan, but she did not tell anyone about the conversation with Martice until after Kay’s death. By the time she testified in court, Desiree was already serving time in a juvenile facility for several unrelated crimes. Investigators were eventually able to recover the murder weapon with help from another one of Martice’s cousins, a man named Dantrell Seemore.
Dantrell led police to a storm drain in Racine, where 15-year-old Martice had wrapped the handgun in a baby diaper taken from a relative’s house and thrown it inside. Detectives later admitted they likely never would have found the weapon without that information. The same was true for the clothes Martice allegedly changed into before the attack, the black hoodie and white sneakers believed to have been worn inside the Jugg home.
Police never recovered them. After learning how he disposed of the gun, investigators believed the clothing had probably also been dumped somewhere in a sewer system between Kenosha and Racine. There were simply too many locations to search. However, detectives did recover other clothing belonging to Martice along with the black backpack seen in surveillance footage.
Those items were still with him when Annelise turned him over to police the following day. To explain Martice’s mental state and possible motive, prosecutors called an assistant principal from Bradford High School to testify about the behavior that eventually led to his expulsion. Jill Swenson worked in student discipline and regularly dealt with troubled teenagers.
But according to her testimony, Martice Fuller stood out from the rest. Even after years of working as a social worker with difficult and sometimes aggressive teens, she said Martice genuinely frightened her. She described his anger over being separated from K at school. Then, after he violated the no-contact agreement and learned he was going to be expelled, he began repeatedly calling every office in the school desperately trying to reach the assistant principal and convince her to reverse the decision. He refused to
accept her answer. Eventually, she stopped engaging with him altogether and simply hung up the phone. He was very angry with me. Um he called me a liar. He told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about or what I had seen. Um he put his finger in my face. Um we had to take a break for him to take a walk.
Ultimately, we had to call dad to convince him to sign it. Did his father come or did he just talk to him over the phone? He spoke to him over the phone. I had told both students that I was going to split them up. They had several classes together and um Martise did not want that to happen. [gasps] And there was a day during his suspension that he was calling every office in the school building trying to get to me so he could convince me not to change their schedules.
Students are usually not very happy with me when they meet with me because my job to do discipline. However, this was an extreme case for me. I was scared. You were scared of Martise? Yes. I explained to him that this is what was going to happen. He kept trying to tell me that that’s not what Kaylee wanted, that that’s not what he wanted, that it wasn’t as bad as what I thought.
I ultimately had to hang up the phone on him because he would not stop talking. Martise’s defense attorneys tried wherever they could to find weaknesses in what appeared to be an almost airtight case. One argument raised by the defense was that in the middle of the chaos and trauma of the attack, Stephanie Juggins may have mistakenly identified her daughter’s ex-boyfriend as the killer.
According to the attorneys, because of the long-running conflict between Martise and the family, it would have been natural for her to immediately assume the person standing outside Kay’s room was him even if it had actually been a complete stranger. They also argued that once investigators focused on Martise, they stopped seriously considering other possible suspects.
But, Stephanie Juggins’ testimony came across as powerful and confident, leaving very little room for doubt. And I went running out of my bathroom, through my bedroom, and stopped in the doorway of my bedroom. Facing me was Martise with a gun. Did you say anything to him when you saw him? I did.
I stopped in my doorway and I looked at him and I said, “Oh my god, Martise.” I said, “Please, you don’t have to do this.” And he looked at me and he said, “Yes, I do.” [snorts] Stephanie described how she tried to help Kay, but by then it was already too late. So, then I tried to start doing CPR as fast as I could. And with that, were you able to do that hav- having been shot in your own wrist? At that moment, it was very painful.
But, I didn’t care. Trying to save her was more important. Did your daughter die as a result of those shots? She did. Yes. Ananice told the jury about the confession her cousin made to her the night after the murder. According to her, the fact that he showed up at her house at all already felt unusual.
They were family, but they had never been especially close. When he started explaining what had happened, she simply listened. Then early the next morning, she called the police. The detectives was telling me to put my daughter in their shoes and to see how it would feel about, you know, something happening to happening like that to my daughter.
[snorts] Do you remember what additional things you told the officer at that time? So, what did you say that the defendant, Martise Fuller, had told you about what happened at the Juega house that day? Well, he told me that he was watching her house for quite a while. And that he knew what you know when when she would be alone at at her house and then he said that when he walked in, they were listening to music and her Kylie was in her room and um with the door cracked or something like that. And he said that he shot at her
once and he freaked out and he snapped and shot at the mom twice. The defense did not call a single witness. Throughout the trial, Martise’s attorneys chose not to present anyone who could testify in his favor or seriously challenge the prosecution’s version of events. Martise himself also chose not to testify, remaining silent during some of the most important moments of the case.
For the jury, that meant the closing arguments carried enormous weight because those final statements were meant to pull every piece of the story together into one complete picture. In closing, prosecutors carefully walked the jury through what they described as a series of absurd coincidences that all would have needed to happen at the exact same time for Martise to actually be innocent.
They spoke slowly and methodically, step by step, reminding jurors of every major detail in the case while arguing that the defense’s theory simply did not make sense. Prosecutors said that under the defense’s version of events, Stephanie would have had to somehow mistakenly identify the person she saw that day.
According to the state, this would not have been a simple misidentification, but a mistake that unbelievably lined up with countless other pieces of evidence. Prosecutors also focused heavily on the fact that Martise’s own cousin seemed to know far too many details about the crime before investigators had even obtained the surveillance footage or completed their analysis of the scene.
To the prosecution, that was one of the most disturbing parts of the entire case because the information she described had not yet been publicly known at the time. And as prosecutors pointed out, the confession she recounted was later backed up by an overwhelming number of facts, pieces of evidence, and matching timelines.
In the prosecution’s view, all of those details fit together into one clear and consistent story. One that could no longer be explained away as coincidence. What a horrible coincidence if you’re an innocent person. And then, here’s a horrible coincidence. IT’S A COUSIN OF YOURS WHO TAKES THE POLICE, who otherwise ARE NEVER GOING TO FIND this gun, to a sewer in Racine where they find the very gun that is the murder weapon.
Okay, so you didn’t kill her, but your cousin is able to lead police to the murder weapon, WHICH LOOKS IDENTICAL to a picture we have of you with the same gun, and to what your friend says is the gun you showed him. Just days before the murder. The defense’s final major argument centered on timing.
Attorneys claimed the shooter simply would not have had enough time to carry out every action within such a short window. According to the defense, it was impossible for someone to leave the Jugaku house around 3:00, run back to the park, change clothes, and then be captured riding a bicycle in the opposite direction only 4 minutes later.
That became one of the key pillars of their case as they tried to challenge the entire sequence of events presented by prosecutors. They argued that the timeline was physically impossible and that the timing just did not add up. According to the defense, prosecutors were trying to cram far too many actions into far too little time in order to make their theory appear believable to the jury.
Prosecutors pushed back hard against that claim arguing that the timeline actually lined up almost perfectly. They broke down the route and movements minute by minute insisting that every action fit comfortably within the established time frame. That portion of the trial became one of the most intense moments in court because both sides were essentially arguing not just over evidence, but over seconds.
The distance from Horizon Park to the Dzhokhar house was roughly 320 m. Prosecutors pointed out that a high school athlete could cover that distance in well under a minute especially while running on adrenaline and panic. In their view, that part of the timeline was completely realistic. Riding a bike from the park to the house with the doorbell camera, a distance of about 0.
17 mi, could be done in roughly 30 to 40 seconds at the speed seen on the surveillance footage. Prosecutors argued that the camera recordings actually supported their timeline rather than contradicting it. By their calculations, that still left another 2 to 3 minutes available for the clothing change. And according to the prosecution, the outfit believed to have been worn by Marda’s could be removed quickly and easily, a black tracksuit designed to be worn over other clothing and stripped off fast afterward.
For prosecutors, that became yet another piece of evidence supporting the realism of their timeline. The jury returned with a verdict only a few hours later. After all the arguments about timing, routes, and evidence, their decision would finally determine which version of events they believed was more convincing.
The verdict read as follows. We the jury find the defendant guilty of first-degree intentional homicide as charged in count one of the information. We the jury find the defendant guilty of attempted first-degree intentional homicide as charged in count two of the information, dated today and signed by the foreperson.
After the verdict was read, Martis slowly turned his head toward his family sitting inside the courtroom. A heavy silence filled the room, broken only by quiet movement and the restrained emotions of the people witnessing the end of a deeply tragic case. His relatives kept their eyes fixed on him as the court officially decided his future.
The realization that at 16 years old he would likely spend the rest of his life in prison seemed to hit him gradually, almost in waves. At first, Martis tried to remain composed, keeping his emotions under control, but the tension inside the courtroom became impossible to ignore. A minute or two passed after the verdict, and eventually the emotional pressure became too much.
He suddenly pulled off his face mask, broke down in tears, and began crying openly in the courtroom. During the sentencing hearing, Martis asked his attorney to read a prepared statement on his behalf. The atmosphere inside the courtroom remained tense and heavy. Family members sitting in attendance listened closely to every word, hoping to hear some kind of explanation or at least an acknowledgement of responsibility for the tragedy that had permanently changed their lives.
In the statement, Martice wrote that he was sorry for what happened to Kay and described her death as tragic. At the same time, however, he continued to maintain his innocence in the murder. His words were calm and restrained, but for many people in the courtroom, they became yet another painful moment in a case that had already left behind far too much grief, too many unanswered questions, and memories that would never fully fade.
Truthfully, I am sorry about the pain you’ve all suffered through that this but through this, but more importantly, the loss of my ex-girlfriend Kaylee that I loved, too. So, I am sorry. Despite the hatred that is against me, I still am sorry. But, I have to continue to stand innocent because I am. And I know that I’ve barely showed emotion throughout my time, but in all honesty, it is because it’s hard to have tears left to cry knowing my mom lost a son, one of her children, too.
You sat emotionless until the verdict was returned. You seem to have no ethos, no regret, no sorrow, no empathy. You are for you and no one else. You are a very dangerous and damaged human being. Martice Fuller was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The decision brought a final legal ending to a case that had shocked many people because of its brutality and heartbreaking circumstances. The trial left a lasting impact on everyone who followed the story, and for Kay’s family, that day became another painful reminder that nothing could ever undo the loss they suffered. Today, Martens is serving his sentence at Green Bay Correctional Institution, where he is reportedly visited often by family members.
Behind the prison’s high walls, life continues under a strict daily routine. But for the people who loved Kay, none of it brings real closure. Even after the sentence was handed down, the pain left behind by the tragedy never truly disappeared. A little more than 5 years after Kay’s death, on what would have been her 20th birthday, Stephanie spoke publicly about her loss and the emotional weight the family still carries every single day.
She talked about how deeply Kay is still missed by everyone who knew her, how often her name still comes up in conversations, and how painful it is to think about all the moments in life she never got the chance to experience. For her family, that date became more than just a memorial. It became another reminder of the future Kay was permanently robbed of.
Today we celebrate Kaylee. Even though it’s not the same, and this is our fifth birthday without her. I mean, how can it be? Five birthdays without her. And it just seems like everything happened yesterday.
