- April 26, 2024
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A Palm Coast man is standing trial this week for a 2009 double murder and robbery in Ormond by the Sea, a crime prosecutors say was fueled by drug addiction.
Lonnie Redner, 36, faces the death penalty if he is convicted of killing Michael Floyd and Andrew Kakowski on Nov. 11, 2009. Redner’s trial began Monday with jury selection.
Redner, who shared a home with his girlfriend and two roommates in Palm Coast before he was arrested, is accused of shooting both men and stabbing one of them before stealing a number of bottles of pills and $20 in cash from them.
Redner was broke, jobless and addicted to drugs, told jurors. He was, they said, “dopesick.”
When they died, Kakowski and Redner shared a house in Ormond by the Sea. Their bodies were found two days after they died, when Kakowski’s mother and her husband went to his house, worried because they hadn’t heard from him in days.
They saw Kakowski’s car in the driveway, but when they knocked on the door and, there was no answer, so they circled to the back of the house, finding a cell phone perched on a ledge in the home’s backyard. It seemed odd. Then, they noticed that a lamp inside was turned on, despite the day’s strong sun. That, too, seemed odd.
They walked back to the front of the house and tried the front door. It was unlocked. Inside, they found Kakowski and Floyd, shot and stabbed, their bodies already partially decomposed.
Kakowski’s mother sat in court Tuesday recounting the experience, crying in the stand as her family sat opposite her in the audience, sobbing as well. The entire time, Redner sat still, his head tilted toward the witness stand, watching intently and betraying no emotion. In the moments before the trial began, he had shifted in his seat, peering around the courtroom, but once opening arguments began, he froze.
The home Kakowski and Floyd shared showed no signs of forced entry, so investigators focused their search on the men’s friends, family and acquaintances.
“You have to delve very deeply into a victim’s life,” said Mike Campanella, an investigator with the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, during court on Tuesday. “You make contact with every single person that the victims had contact with from the last time you can identify them as being alive, and you work backwards, one by one.”
Investigators learned that Redner knew the victims, and had gone with his girlfriend and roommates to purchase drugs from them in their home shortly before their death. One of those roommates told investigators that after the sale, Redner remarked that Kakowski and Floyd would be easy to rob.
Prosecutors said on Tuesday that Redner, desperate for drugs, acted on that sentiment less than a month after he made it.
The same former roommate told investigators that, on the day of the double murder, Redner came home with an abundance of pills — it was like Christmas, prosecutors said — which he shared before burning his clothing in his backyard.
Then, Redner’s girlfriend took investigators to the banks of the Intracoastal Waterway near the European Village, in Palm Coast. She said Redner had taken her there and thrown a gun into the water shortly after Nov. 11, 2009. A dive team was summoned, and they retrieved a gun from beneath 11 feet of murky water.
When questioned, Redner told investigators that he stumbled on Kakowski and Floyd’s dead bodies and had stolen from them, but had not killed them, according to court documents.
Redner’s defense chose to refrain from giving opening statements until after the prosecution rests, so it was unclear at press time what arguments will be made in response to the State Attorney’s Office’s allegations.
Redner has been in jail since January 2010 awaiting trial. In addition to the two charges of first-degree murder, Redner faces charges of robbery with a firearm, a first-degree felony, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, a second-degree felony.
