Uncertain Terms podcast | Episode 2: Brooks Bellay's sentencing do-over for 1979 Vero Beach murder of a young girl

Legal affairs reporter Melissa E. Holsman has spent more than a year digging into the cases of kids who committed murder — sometimes decades ago — as they return to court for resentencing and could go free. What originally was an investigation into the 23 Treasure and Space Coast cases has become a podcast where Holsman and producer Dacia Johnson explore the murders, the effect on victims' families, new brain science and the law changes that led to the resentencing of more than 600 Florida offenders.

You can listen to the free podcast on most major podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Play Music and Soundcloud.

The transcripts for each episode will be presented here. Below is Episode 2: Brooks Bellay and the worst of the worst.

Listen to more episodes, read transcripts and discover bonus content at TCPalm.com/UncertainTerms.

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Warning: This episode contains graphic details describing the murder of a child and allegations of sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised.

Sandy Gillman: And I remember just, I was not too far from the wall, and I just started backing up and I just slid down the wall and just screamed. I don’t know how long I screamed.

George Halstead: Angel was my first child. She always filled my heart with so much joy and she’s no longer with us. And I think about it, how in the heck could something that, that small pack so much love in that little body, but she did. She packed a lot of love.

Melissa Holsman: Sandy Gillman and George Halstead used to be married and lived in Vero Beach, Florida. And they like talking about their 4-year-old daughter, Angel Ann Halstead. But sometimes it’s really hard.

You can see it in their faces — the pain only a parent who has lost a child can feel, especially to murder. George tears up talking about Angel; her pink cheeks, hazel eyes and round face. The dark-haired girl was left naked and brutally beaten to death by a 14-year-old neighborhood boy four decades ago, on August 20th, 1979.

Dacia Johnson: That boy, Brooks John Bellay, is 53 now, and this is a story of what happened to Angel, and how Brooks faced justice for her murder — and was sentenced not once, but twice.

Melissa: This is Episode 2 of Uncertain Terms, a TCPalm original podcast about Florida minors convicted of murder — sometimes decades ago — who’ve been granted a second chance at freedom from a life prison term. I’m TCPalm legal affairs reporter Melissa Holsman.

Dacia: And I’m TCPalm producer Dacia Johnson. In this podcast, we’ll talk about why the nation’s highest courts have ruled that minors — even the ones who murder — should be punished differently than adults. And we’ll explain how Brooks Bellay, after serving 38 years of a life prison term, became eligible for a sentencing do-over in 2017.

Melissa: That’s right. It’s because Florida’s juvenile sentencing laws were changed in 2014 to comply with Supreme Court rulings that banned life prison terms for minors —except for the rarest of children — whose crimes reflect what’s called 'irreparable corruption.' Basically, an adolescent killer who shows no ability to be rehabilitated.

Dacia: And we’ll talk more about that in this episode. But first, Angel’s mom, Sandy, who now lives in Alabama, remembers being 24 years old and living on a quiet, dead-end road in Vero Beach with her former husband, Jerry, and four kids, when her daughter disappeared from the yard.

Sandy: I was cooking dinner. I can tell you what I was cooking, I was frying pork chops, macaroni and cheese, peas and a dinner roll. Angel had already been in there to set the table, because she’d been to Head Start and they taught them how to set a table. Since then, you had to set the table. I’d bring the plates in, she’d put them around, she’d put the silver, it was all set. And then she went out there to play. And every few minutes I’d look out to count them. OK, the boys are over here, Angel’s right there. The boys came in and Billy was the last one in and I said, ‘Well, where’s Angel?' [Billy said] 'I thought she was already here.’ I said, ‘Well, she’s not here.’ I said, 'Go back down to the Dubose girls and tell her to come home.’

He went down there and she wasn’t there. So then, oh my God, we started looking every ... We went down, we were screaming and yelling. All the other kids had went in, you know, most of them for dinner, or whatever. And, uh, we were even going up on people’s carports and their utility rooms, yelling and looking. And Jerry went down behind the houses on the ditch bank looking, couldn’t find her anywhere, and we screamed and yelled. And there were a couple of older people who lived on the street, and Angel and these girls used to go over there and sing for these old people out in their front yard. They might of, she might be in the house with them or something, you know. Nope, wasn’t over there.

Jerry Dickerson 911 call to Vero Beach Police Department

(Phone rings)

Police: Police department.

Jerry: Uh, yes, this is Jerry Dickerson at 1415 24th Avenue and I’m trying to find a little girl that got lost. Uh, she’s been gone about three or four hours now.

Police: About how tall is she?

Jerry: Uh, she’s about three and a half feet tall.

Police: OK, can you give me a description of her?

Jerry: Uh, she’s got short brown hair and she’s got on a pink blouse and pink shorts. 

Melissa: George Halstead lived a few miles away with his wife, Cindy, and their infant baby. Sandy calls him in a panic: 'Angel is gone.'  

George: I end up over, over at my ex-wife’s house, you know, where Angel and the rest of the kids were living. But standing on my side right here was Brooks Bellay. Why was he by my side, other than to help me look and search for Angel? We started looking in areas and some neighbors' houses. Someone says the last time they saw her, she was with a kitten near the end of the road.

Melissa: Soon after the girl went missing, Brooks seemed to cling to the people frantically trying to find her. The boy lived with his divorced mother, Mary, a brother and two sisters in a home cater-cornered from Angel’s house.  

Here’s Brooks talking in 1979 about how he jumped into the search right from the start.

Brooks Bellay: We were walking around, and Jerry — Jerry’s the stepfather — came up to me and said, 'Angel's missing, have you seen her?' And I said, 'I haven't seen her since 4:30,' and he goes, ‘Will you guys help me look for her?’ We went house-to-house and we started looking around and then we got the neighbors and we all started looking in the woods and all that. Then, we finally, um, got enough nerve to call the police.

Melissa: And as Sandy told us during an interview, Brooks showed up at her home way before the cops.

Sandy: The policeman came and it was just getting, the sun had, you know, had gone down it was just getting dusky. And he was writing down Angel’s description and he couldn’t hold his flashlight and everything, so somebody behind me was holding the flashlight. I turned around and I’m like this, and it’s Brooks! His hair’s wet. He done changed his clothes from what he had on earlier in the day. He had on a white shirt, like a Polo. He had on a white-and-red striped shirt with a white collar on it, and he was holding that flashlight for that policeman.

Dacia: In court during Brooks’ resentencing, George’s wife, Cindy, told a judge what she observed happening inside Angel’s home.  

Cindy Halstead: And when my husband and I got to Sandy’s house, he was inside her living room watching 'Star Wars.' Not only did he murder her, he’s inside her house watching TV. He was there while we were talking about, ‘Where is she, where is she, where is she?’ He was there when we called the cops. He sat right there on that chair. He held her 9-week-old brother and was playing with him the same night he murdered her.

Dacia: Sgt. David Carter, a former lead detective for Vero Beach police, testified for the state in 2017. And he said people searching for Angel noticed Brooks was saying some really odd things.

Sgt. David Carter: One of the things that I was told is, ‘Can you take fingerprints from dead bodies?’ I think he had made that statement to one of the, uh, officers. And then a neighbor came and she stated that he said, ‘There’s no need looking for her; she’s dead. She’s been raped; she’s dead.

Melissa: The disturbing news bothered Carter. Why did Brooks keep injecting himself into the investigation? And why would he ask about fingerprints on a dead body? Was he responsible for Angel’s disappearance?

Dacia: So Carter ordered firefighters to put Brooks with a search team and keep an eye on him.  

Carter: Well, I watched Brooks because every time the TV stations would come in from different areas — there was at least 400 people looking for this child — every time I was on TV, I’d look over and Mr. Bellay had a little kitten. Just petting that kitten and it struck me with everything he said, and the last thing that anybody saw with her was a kitten. So I decided to put him in the search party. He wanted to search.

Dacia: That first night when everyone was searching the woods, George really appreciated Brooks’ offer to help him.  

George: He kind of directed me. 'Well, she might be here, she might be there. She plays here in the woods, she plays there in the woods. Here’s some tracks, here’s some, there’s tracks.' Somehow, we ended up with flashlights. But still, Brooks is right by my side. We were out there for approximately 11 hours. I hear other people hollering, ‘Angel, Angel Ann, Angel Ann, Angel Ann, Angel.’ Lots of people. And I start thinking, and it wasn’t until this week that I started thinking: I never heard Brooks ever mention her name. It was always me hollering as we were both walking.

Melissa: The search grew to involve hundreds of volunteers covering acres of woods and lakes and fields, using dogs and divers and helicopters. To get a feel for the scope of it, I talked to Assistant State Attorney Ryan Butler, who represented the state during Brooks’ resentencing last year. 

Butler grew up in Vero Beach, he was 10 years old when this happened.

Ryan Butler: Right, you have to understand, Vero Beach was a very small community in 1979. There weren’t a lot of people there. This was in the city limits of Vero Beach. And there was one newspaper in town and this was a big deal. It captured everyone’s attention. And the search involved not only law enforcement and the fire department but the people. People came out to help search for her.

Dacia: But the ordeal reached a tragic end the morning of August 22nd, 1979.

Vero Beach Firefighter Charles Corbin led the team that found Angel’s battered body hidden in palmetto bushes, not far from an old well. Brooks was with that team that found her. Corbin described what he saw during a taped interview shortly after the search ended.

And just a reminder, this is going to get graphic.

Charles Corbin: I noticed some clothing laying ahead of me and to the right. As I moved to the right, I saw it was pink shorts and blouse. I moved into the area and I became acquainted with a smell, which when I leaned down and looked to my left, I saw the back of the body covered with pond fronds.

Dacia: George and Sandy were devastated. During Brooks’ resentencing in 2017, Sandy recalled how she found out her daughter was dead.

Sandy: We heard the police sirens going off. We looked out the window and I said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ And we saw them taping the street off. And Walt Mills — was an older detective — he came to my front door. And when he came in the door, the first thing I seen was tears running down his face.

Melissa: Sandy was taken to bed and medicated. Reporters gathered as authorities retrieved the little girl’s remains. At Brooks’ resentencing, when state prosecutor Nikki Robinson showed Sgt. Carter a crime scene photo of Angel, it was clearly a haunting memory for the retired lawman.

Carter: That there was her halter, and her top and her panties. This is after I moved the palm fronds. I had to move them; the medical examiner wanted me to move them. She was on her right side just like you see here. Her clothing wasn’t that far from the body, the clothing itself. But it was on the palm fronds. Her, her top, her halter top, I think it was pink, and the bottom was pink and her panties.

Nikki Robinson: And they were hanging in the trees?

Carter: Hanging in the tree.

Robinson: Not far from the body?

Carter: Not far from the body.

Melissa: Robinson asked him: 'What did you think after finding a young, naked female murder victim, and with her clothing displayed like that?'

Carter: I looked at her and I knew that she’d been raped. I didn’t have a doubt in my mind.

Robinson: Or that it was somehow sexually motivated?

Carter: No doubt. I’m just basing that on what I’ve seen before.

Dacia: Now, whether Angel was sexually assaulted became a huge and controversial issue in prosecuting this case. But there was another bizarre clue Carter recalled in court.

Carter: Later, we found a tree that was filled with women’s panties.

Robinson: Was that close to the body?

Carter: It’s not far. It wasn’t far at all. But there was a tree that had women’s underwear hanging in the tree.

Robinson: More than one?

Carter: Oh, yes.

Robinson: Approximately how many, can you venture?

Carter: 15, 20.

Melissa: Brooks never confessed to being the one who hung those panties up in that tree. And cops never proved it was him. But to this day it remains one of the weirder aspects of this case. Medical examiners eventually performed two autopsies on Angel’s body. The second one required her remains to be exhumed months after she was buried. And as Medical Examiner Roger Mittleman testified, her death resulted from a powerful punch, or repeated blows, to her tummy.

Roger Mittleman: Both autopsies showed a laceration of the liver. In addition, there was a fracture of the front of left ribs five and six. And then, there was staining of blood — in other words, contusion — in the lower sternal area, the lower breastplate area, in each case. 

Melissa: But the two autopsies differed on whether Angel had been raped. The first ME stated she had been sexually assaulted, but he later backed off that conclusion. So I asked Butler what was going on here.

Butler: The initial autopsy performed by the 19th Circuit medical examiner, Dr. Scofield, determined that there was some damage to her body, which indicated a sexual assault had taken place. When the second autopsy was performed by Dr. Davis, in Miami — he was the Dade County medical examiner — he was unable to corroborate those findings due to the condition of the body at that point because of decomposition.

Dacia: Carter ordered two detectives to bring Brooks in for questioning shortly after Angel’s body was found.

Now, let’s talk about Brooks, and how he became the lead suspect.

Melissa: Now remember, Brooks was 14 years old, living with his divorced mom. He’s adopted at birth in New Jersey and he and an old brother. His dad, Jack, was an architect and his mom, Mary, was a teacher. But from all accounts, it was a tumultuous marriage, lots of fighting, dad was a heavy drinker, so Brooks was in this really chaotic atmosphere.

Then he goes out and finds he’s adopted, when his dad remarries a woman who has a bunch of boys that he knows from school and they outed him. So apparently, this was a major turning point for Brooks. He became angry and was kind of ungovernable at that point.

Dacia: Yeah, and he was a big kid, too. Already over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, and he kind of became the neighborhood bully. He had some behavior problems. A doctor wrote in '79 that his mom tried to get him some counseling. He had a few run-ins with the cops, set fires, including trying to torch a concession stand at a school football game. He had average grades though, a normal IQ and was never diagnosed with a mental disorder. He just had a bad temper.

Melissa: Yeah, in fact, Ryan Butler, when I spoke to him, he made a point to say even Brooks’ own family called the cops on him from time to time.

Dacia: And when we sat down with Sandy, Angel’s mom, she told us she repeatedly chased him off from her yard, warned him not to play with her girls, just because he was a big kid and was too rough.

Melissa: She told us some really creepy stories, you know. She said that Brooks even told her one day that when he was living across the street, that when their house was being put in on the foundation, he learned how to actually break into her house. You remember her saying that?

Dacia: And one other thing we also learned is that Brooks’ mom had scheduled Brooks to attend Shilo Boys Ranch, which is a place in Sebastian for ungovernable minors, and he was set to start school there shorty after this happened.

To learn more about this project, go to TCPalm.com/UncertainTerms. Subscribe to episodes on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play Music.

Melissa: While investigators were making a murder case against Brooks, Angel’s family planned her funeral. At Brooks’ resentencing, Sandy talked about their struggle to lay to rest her daughter’s badly decomposed body.

Sandy: The man that owned the funeral home, he came in and says, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ She said, ‘We’re picking out clothes for her.’ He said, ‘All we can do is wrap her in white linen and put her in a casket.’ They had to go all the way to Coral Gables to find a casket. And they brought the casket back and I looked at it and it was white. And I said, 'No, I want it pink.' So they painted it pink for me, with a gold railing.

Dacia: A lot of people attended Angel’s viewing — it had to be a closed casket: girls from her Head Start class, teachers and people who knew Sandy’s father, a widely respected man who ran the Vero Beach community center.

Melissa: Yeah, it was a really sad affair. And Angel’s burial was even broadcast on television.

Sandy: That is the second time in my life I ever saw my daddy cry. There were so many people at that cemetery. There were firemen that helped look for her, deputy sheriffs, Sgt. Carter, so many people there. And the way I was, I lived in that house. We moved about a week after we buried Angel, we moved.

Melissa: The wooded area off 25th Avenue in Vero Beach where Angel was murdered is now a city park.

Dacia: Two police sergeants questioned Brooks for hours once he was at the station. But because he was a minor, they needed Brooks’ mother there too.

(Phone rings)

Dispatcher: Police

Mary Bellay: Yes, this is Mary Bellay and I just got back to junior high school and, uh, one of the teachers here told me that you’re looking for me? Do you know anything about it?

Dispatcher: Hold on just a minute please.

Jim Attkisson: Hello, Sgt. Attkisson.

Mary: Right.

Attkisson: Ms. Bellay?

Mary: Yes.

Attkisson: Uh, we came over to the school. The reason we came over a few minutes ago is that we have your son down, and we need to talk with him. But he’s a juvenile and we can’t talk with a juvenile unless a parent is present.

Mary: Right.

Attkisson: So can you come down?

Mary: Yes, I’ll be right there.

Attkisson: Alright, thank you.

Mary: Right, bye.

Dacia: Mary found her son in a small cubicle. She described the scene while testifying at a pretrial hearing in 1979.

Mary: Brooks was sitting in a chair. His back was to me, and they said they were going to read him his rights, if he wanted a lawyer present. And Brooks said no, he didn’t, uh, want a lawyer. And my thought was, well, you know, they had told me it was routine questioning and if Brooks thought he didn’t need a lawyer, uh, I went along with Brooks.

Dacia: But his questioning wasn’t exactly routine. Sgt. Carter, who also testified at that '79 hearing, remembered Brooks being willing to talk to police, but his mother was a different story.

Carter: Brooks’ mother was there and I went over to her and asked if she would like to talk to him. She said, ‘Yes, I would.’ So we went into the interview room where Brooks was and Brooks did not want to talk to his mother.

Melissa: Let’s talk about that interrogation for just a minute. So he’s sitting in a cubicle and mom’s outside in the hallway and she wanted to be in there, but Brooks was like, ‘No way, I don’t want my mother in here for questioning.’ And for quite a long time, you know, they really hammered him. He’s denying everything. He denied seeing Angel, he denied having anything to do with anything with it. But he was willing to describe for detectives how he got involved in the search.

Attkisson: Did you see her this morning?

Brooks: No.

Attkisson: You haven’t seen her at all?

Brooks: No.

Detective Ronald Blanton: Did you see her clothes or anything?

Brooks: No, I ain’t seen nothing. He asked us, we walked around the other way, he said not to go anywhere near there because you guys had to check it out real good. We walked around, we walked, I walked by her and saw her covered up with the palm fronds. That’s all we saw.

Dacia: The detectives really didn’t buy his story. So they decided to appeal to his sense of guilt, his belief in Christ, not being able to live with the burden of what he did. You know, they, um, spoke really softly, there wasn’t really any yelling or screaming. It just seemed very psychological. And at one point, they even told him it was OK to cry.

Melissa: Yeah, and he did too, you know. And then, with his mom out in the hallway, Brooks changes his story. He admitted being with Angel. And it all started with a story about a kitten.

Brooks: She said she was looking for a little white kitty cat. I said, ‘I’ll help you,’ and she walked over and took her clothes off and I punched her.

Attkisson: Why?

Brooks: Because she took her clothes off.

Attkisson: Tell me this Brooks, she was assaulted sexually. Did you?

Brooks: No.

Attkisson: Where did you hit her?

Brooks: In the face, I think.

Attkisson: How many times?

Brooks: Once, twice. She was crazy.

Attkisson: Huh?

Brooks: That she was crazy.

Attkisson: She was crazy? You thought she was?

Brooks: For taking her clothes off.

Blanton: You know, that doctor is going to be able to tell if somebody had sexual intercourse, and he can tell if you did it or not.

Brooks: I might have. I don’t remember.

Attkisson: Look at me, you remember something, look. You said yes?

Brooks: Uh-huh.

Attkisson: That’s why you hit her?

Brooks: Uh-huh.

Blanton: Did it hurt her, when you were having intercourse with her?

Brooks: No. I don’t know. She wasn’t, wasn’t crying.

Attkisson: She was crying?

Brooks: She wasn’t.

Melissa: Now, authorities did believe that Angel had been raped and beaten to death. During that same 1979 hearing, Mary recalled the shock of being told her son confessed.

Mary: I still find it hard to believe.

Attorney: What happened then?

Mary: Well, uh, I asked him if I could see Brooks, uh. I wanted Brooks to tell me this, since I hadn’t been present when he confessed. Uh, all kinds of things were going through my mind. Was he forced to say something? You know, I wanted him to tell me what had happened. And they told me they didn’t think Brooks would talk to me. And I said I wouldn’t leave until I saw him. So they let me go down there in the room. And I tried to talk to Brooks, but he wouldn’t answer me. I asked him things like, uh, ‘Brooks, tell me it’s not true.’ Uh, I think I said, uh, that we had all been looking for the little girl. I was out there the two nights myself. I wanted him to tell me that it wasn’t true.

Dacia: But that didn’t happen. Brooks was told to write down his confession and read it out loud.

Brooks: The girl was going down the trail and I saw her going. So I went after her and said, ‘Stop, where are you going?’ She said, ‘After a white kitty cat,’ or in other words kitten. She asked me to go along with her, so I did. We walked a long ways and stopped. She looked off. She took off her clothes and came toward me and grabbed at my privates. And also asked me to do a four-letter word to her. So I did and when I was done, I hit her and, and etc. And about one to five minutes later, I dragged her up to the bushes. And for that I’m sorry. And then one to five minutes later after that, I left through the woods, through the round track, through the water and I walked home.

Melissa: We can see in the records that by about 8 o’clock that evening, they actually held a hearing so they could hold him over for the charge of murder, and he was put in a detention center for juveniles. And within 10 days of Angel’s murder on August 20th, a grand jury came back with a first-degree premeditated murder charge. And, you know, actually, at that time, he could have faced the death penalty because they didn’t outlaw the death penalty for minors until way after this happened.

There was massive publicity about this case and it forced the trial to be moved from Indian River County, where Vero Beach is located, to Stuart in Martin County, which is where Brooks’ resentencing also happened. And you know, interesting, the indictment itself of premeditated first-degree murder, it didn’t say anything about sexual assault. But because the M.E. had said there was proof of sexual assault, that’s exactly what the prosecutors planned on telling a jury to bolster their case of how this happened. But then, the M.E. recants and the state’s case kind of falls apart.  

Dacia: So to salvage the case, State Attorney Bob Stone ordered a second autopsy months after Angel was buried.

Bob Stone: You had one pathologist who said an injury was caused by an indication of some sexual battery. You had another medical examiner who said that’s not true. Then, you’ve got to sit there and weigh it and you don’t know what a jury will do when they hear certain evidence. My concern was a jury would hear that evidence and just find him not guilty, period.

Dacia: Brooks was offered a plea deal for second-degree murder and he took it. The plea deal required Brooks to give up the right to be sentenced as a minor, which would have capped his prison term to a max of six years. So now, he faced up to life with a chance at parole after 25 years — the punishment he received July 17th, 1980.

Melissa: But in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court released an opinion called Miller v Alabama that changed the future for Brooks and thousands of juvenile offenders like him nationwide. That’s because the Miller opinion banned automatic mandatory life prison terms for minors. And it set in motion a series of rulings that opened the door for kid killers like Brooks to ask a new judge if a life sentence was still appropriate.

Now, the Supreme Court found that science shows a child’s character is not as well developed as an adult. Their traits are less fixed, and they have a greater capacity for change.

Dacia: So in order to impose a life prison term, a judge must consider factors such as age, family life and the nature of the crime.

In Brooks’ case, Martin County Circuit Judge Lawrence Mirman had two sentencing options. He can reduce Brooks’ prison term to 40 years, meaning he would be freed in two years. Or send him back for a number of years up to life. Juvenile killers who’ve been locked up for at least 40 years can go free. And we have an example of that in one of this season’s episodes.

At Brooks’ resentencing, he spoke directly to Angel's family for the first time.

Brooks: First off, I wanna tell you how I am sorry. I know it doesn’t change anything. I know what I did to Angel was terrible and what I’ve done to you over the years is terrible. I’ve created 38 years of hate and anger that you didn’t do to yourself, I did it to you. Uh, I’ve, uh, tried to become a better person. I’ve tried to realize what I did and I’m sorry for what I did to you. I’ve hurt you, I’ve hurt the community, I’ve hurt my family. Um, when I first got to prison, yeah, I got in trouble. I, uh, rebelled and did stupid things that was mostly child’s things: food fights, uh, disobeying verbal orders, refusing to work. But at the same time, I’m being told that I’m this evil, violent person and I don’t think I am. Uh, because I’ve looked inside myself and I realized that one of my issues was anger, and I have changed that person. They say, ‘Well, you don’t show your emotions, you don’t show your sorrow.’ Uh, I am. I am sorry. I’m so sorry.

Melissa: Brooks and his attorney, Assistant Public Defender Usha Maharajh, tried for a couple of days to convince the court he was rehabilitated and should go free.  

Maharajh recently talked to me about Brooks. She insisted that Angel’s murder has always been misconstrued. She says there was no planning, no rape, and she’s convinced Brooks gave police a false confession about that sexual assault.

Usha Maharajh: What we had in this case, unfortunately, most unfortunately, there was a very young victim, the age of 4. and there’s an innocence about a 4-year-old and a vulnerability. And I think that overrode a lot of the considerations in this case. Brooks is a very gentle person. Because of what happened, so long ago, he’s felt such incredible remorse. And he’s learned how to control his behavior and control his anger.

Melissa: Judge Mirman listened to the state and he listened to the defense. And on November 17th 2017, he ruled Brooks was the rare juvenile offender the Supreme Court wrote about in Miller, who showed little or no ability to change. During a 25-minute speech, Mirman spells out exactly why Brooks needs to spend the rest of his life locked up.

Judge Lawrence Mirman: Life without parole should only be imposed on juvenile offenders whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility and irreparable corruption. Facts of particular crimes are particularly important because a person’s ability to commit specific acts very often reflects a deep-seeded character.

However, sometimes a crime is an aberration of a person’s character, never to be repeated. To say this crime is horrific is an understatement. It is one of the most heinous crimes that has ever occurred in the history of this jurisdiction, the 19th Judicial Circuit.

Melissa: He also shocked the courtroom by pointing out that records showed Brooks had hatched some sort of crazy kidnapping plot. He’d planned to hold Angel for ransom.

Mirman: The defendant’s statement seems to have been a form of deranged bravado reflecting a deep-seeded desire by the defendant to commit the murder of the little girl.

Dacia: Mirman also addressed whether Angel had been sexually assaulted.

Mirman: The court is not sentencing the defendant as a rapist and a murderer. The court is considering him just as a murderer of a little girl found naked and beaten to death. Put simply, the crime is shockingly evil and reflective of a wicked character. The significance of the evil nature of the crime dwarfs the consideration of age in the way that few crimes do. That the defendant was the sole actor further evidences his corrupt character.

More:Brooks Bellay ordered back to prison after sentencing do-over 

Dacia: We were in court that day and Angel’s relatives were there. Sandy; George; George’s wife, Cindy; Angel’s sisters, Shelly and Stacy, also listened and cried as Mirman was talking.

Melissa: That day, you could have heard a pin drop. They were hanging onto Mirman’s every word. It was really, just, you could feel the emotion coming out of these people. Because none of them felt that Brooks had said or done anything to show that he should go free.

Dacia: And Brooks was led away in handcuffs. And it seemed like it was a huge sense of relief for Angel’s family.

Sandy: I’m glad that he’s going back to prison, but I’ll never be happy, you know. Because we still don’t have Angel here with us. Yeah, I’m happy he’s going back, he deserves to be there.

George: I didn’t feel that he had any chance — Brooks Bellay I’m talking about — of ever getting out of prison. I just think he, he, he’s gonna to die with this evil with him.

Melissa: So given everything that Judge Mirman said and Brooks is now off to prison, there’s still a good chance that this case is not over. His attorney, Usha Maharajh, has filed an appeal. And that appeal says Judge Mirman made a mistake. That they did show that he had proof of rehabilitation and he deserved this shot at freedom, or for anything less than a life prison term.

Maharajh: Given you have this person with that track record, that evidence, you cannot ignore. Or turn a blind eye and call that person evil for something that was done as a child.

Melissa: And Usha’s convinced that they’re going to win this appeal. And if they do, it could take a year or longer to find out how the appeals court will rule. There’s a chance that this case could come back for resentencing all over again.

Dacia: Join us for the next episode of Uncertain Terms. I’m TCPalm producer Dacia Johnson.

Melissa: And I’m legal affairs reporter Melissa Holsman.

Dacia: Our next story features a 17-year-old girl who shot and killed a convenience store owner 23 years ago. This is a pretty interesting story because not only is it our only female this season, but we really dig into her life leading up to the day that she killed, including having to testify against her own father when she was only 8 years old.

Melissa: Here’s Ozzie Hussain, remembering the murder of his 25-year-old brother, Tariq Hussain, on December 5th, 1995.

Ozzie Hussain: It doesn’t matter the age, but those were the ones who took the life of my brother, who, who disturbed my life, who disturbed my whole family’s emotions. The very young son of my parents, a 25-year-old, very dear to our family, very good to his friends, his customers loved him. And, uh, it was just all of a sudden, our world was changed.

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"Uncertain Terms" is written by Melissa Holsman and produced by Dacia Johnson. It’s brought to you by TCPalm, a part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, with editors Cheryl Smith and Tim Thorsen.

You can find more online at TCPalm.com/UncertainTerms. Email us at UncertainTerms@tcpalm.com. And follow us on Twitter @UncertainTerms.