A 28-year-old Florida man sentenced Wednesday to two life sentences in connection with a triple shooting that left two men dead in West Palm Beach in 2017.
Palm Beach Circuit Court Judge Scott Suskauer sentenced Kenneth Gessesse Hawthorne in the two first-degree murder and one attempted murder convictions by a jury on April 27. The attempted murder count carries a 25-year minimum sentence to be served concurrently with the life sentences.
Hawthorne was a resident of an apartment at Caribbean Villas off Haverhill Road where the shooting occurred on March 29, 2017. Killed were 21-year-old Isaiah Hyndman and 21-year-old Cortney Lowery Jr.
The Palm Beach County jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder with a firearm and one count of attempted murder with a firearm.
Another victim, 23-year-old Abiade Granger, was in stable condition at St. Mary’s Medical Center after surgery. Walter Granger, his father, is a pastor and said his son knew everyone involved.
The young men were close, Assistant State Attorney Francine Edwards said. Hawthorne and Hyndman were roommates at the Caribbean Villas apartment complex in West Palm Beach. Hawthorne often played video games in his bedroom with Lowery and Granger.
They played 16 rounds of Call of Duty while Hyndman laid in bed in the room next door on March 29, 2017. Hawthorne swapped the game out for another one, Granger said, then left the room without a word. He closed the bedroom door behind him.
Granger and Lowery continued to play until rapid, unrelenting gunfire sounded from the room next door. Granger said Hawthorne reappeared in the doorway of his bedroom and continued to pull the trigger, a pair of noise-canceling headphones over his ears.
Edwards described the path of the gunfire: one bullet in Hyndman’s head, one in his chest and another in his thigh; five in Lowery’s back; two in Granger’s head, two in his chest, two in his stomach.
Hawthorne continued to pull the trigger, Granger said, not yet realizing he’d run out of bullets.
Assistant Public Defender Courtney Wilson kept her voice even throughout the trial, modeling the dispassionate way jurors are supposed to consider evidence.
“What appears obvious is not always the truth,” she said.
Granger had only seconds to look at the gunman in the doorway before he turned away to shield his face from the bullets. His mind grappled for an explanation, Wilson said, and it could have landed on Hawthorne in error.
There was nothing to suggest that Hawthorne schemed or planned to kill them either, she said. Investigators didn’t find texts or posts or handwritten notes hinting at any conflict in their relationship — only a business plan the young men wrote with dreams of making music together.
Even the pace of the gunfire — rapid and without pause, the gunman continuing to pull the trigger after the bullets stopped — points to a state of unconsciousness, she said; no time for reflection, which is required to prove that a killing was premeditated.
Public Defender Carey Haughwout rebutted the testimony of a firearms expert who said the bullets in the victims’ bodies came from Hawthorne’s gun. She called it an “opinion,” tainted by investigators’ belief even before they analyzed the gun that Hawthorne pulled the trigger. His was the only weapon they tested against the bullets.
Hawthorne’s attorneys made no reference during their closing argument to the mental illness that had for years made Hawthorne unfit to stand trial. He was involuntarily hospitalized after his arrest in 2017 and treated for schizophrenia until court-appointed psychologists deemed him competent in 2019.
His mental illness was so severe that it rendered him “incapable of controlling his actions,” an assistant public defender told the judge in 2019, arguing that prosecutors shouldn’t be allowed to seek the death penalty if jurors found him guilty. The State Attorney’s Office maintained its threat of execution until August, then reversed course.
The six years Hawthorne spent hospitalized and jailed “have been a slow torture for a man who wants to know what lies ahead in his future,” Haughwout wrote in a last-bid attempt to have the case dismissed in April. She argued unsuccessfully that Hawthorne’s constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated.
Haughwout also asked Circuit Judge Scott Suskauer to divide Hawthorne’s trial into two parts: the first to determine whether he shot Lowery, Hyndman and Granger, and the second to decide whether he was legally insane when he did it. Attorneys for a man accused of stabbing to death a Palm Beach Gardens teen asked Circuit Judge Daliah Weiss for the same thing in January.
Neither judge granted the request. Suskauer sentenced Hawthorne to prison May 10 after hearing testimony from defense experts and the victims’ families. He got a glimpse of their grief and gratitude Thursday.
“I can close my eyes and sleep tonight and know that justice was done,” said Hyndman’s father, Kyle.
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