Brandi Peters Case: Murders, Segura Trial, and Appeal

The Brandi Peters case ended with the November 2019 conviction of Henry Segura, Peters’s ex-boyfriend and the biological father of her youngest child, for the November 2010 murders of Peters and her three children in their Tallahassee, Florida, home. Segura is serving four consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole after a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder on all four counts. An earlier trial in 2017 ended in a mistrial when jurors deadlocked, and a Florida appeals court unanimously upheld the 2019 convictions in November 2021.

What Happened on Saddle Creek Drive

On the morning of November 20, 2010, relatives could not reach 27-year-old Brandi Peters by phone. A neighbor walked to her house on Saddle Creek Drive, found the doors locked, and noticed blood on the vinyl siding near the front entrance. Officers who forced their way in found Peters and all three of her children dead inside. There was no sign of forced entry; the only broken glass came from the officers’ own entry.¹

Medical examiner Dr. Lisa Flannagan later testified that Peters had been shot as many as seven or eight times, with bullets recovered from her skull, jaw, chest, abdomen, and arm, and that she had also been beaten with a heavy object, suffering a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage. Injuries to her hands and a broken artificial nail at the scene indicated she fought her attacker.² Six-year-old Tamiyah Peters died of a gunshot wound to the back of her head. Her twin sister Taniyah and three-year-old JaVonte Segura were drowned. All three children’s bodies were found together in a bathtub filled with bloody water.³

Why Investigators Focused on Henry Segura

Segura acknowledged an ongoing sexual relationship with Peters, and DNA testing confirmed he was JaVonte’s father. Prosecutors argued he had a financial motive: Peters had been pressing him over more than $20,000 in unpaid child support, and that debt was also blocking him from securing a visa for an overseas job that would have paid a six-figure salary.⁴

Segura first told police he had not been at Peters’s home and that he owned only one cell phone. Investigators discovered a second phone in his possession that belonged to a man named Silas Thornton, who had left it with Segura for a repair. Records showed calls and texts between that phone and Peters, and cell site data placed the phone near her home around the time of the killings.⁵ His DNA was recovered from the grab bar of the bathtub where the children’s bodies were placed, and he admitted owning a firearm of the same .32 caliber as the bullets recovered at the scene.⁶

At trial, Assistant State Attorney Jon Fuchs pressed the pattern of deception, telling jurors Segura “lied 23 times alone” and that “no one else had a motive.”⁷ On the locked house, Fuchs told the jury: “Nobody forced their way in… He was let in.”⁴ A former cellmate, Kelsey Kinard, testified that Segura had confessed in jail, saying he “killed four people, shooting two of them and drowning the other two.”³

The Cartel-Hit Defense

Defense attorneys Nate Prince and Tiffany Baker built their case around an alternative suspect theory: that the killings were a drug-cartel hit. James Carlos Santos, an incarcerated Vice Lords member and convicted drug trafficker, testified that he had recruited Peters as a courier, that she had stolen roughly $90,000 in drugs and cash from him, and that he assembled a seven-person crew — including a Colombian cocaine trafficker named Angel Avila-Quinones — to kill her and search her home for the missing goods.⁸

The defense pointed to a partial DNA match to Avila-Quinones on a severed phone cord in Peters’s bedroom, and to several additional unidentified DNA samples at the scene. It also stressed that Segura’s DNA appeared only on the bathtub, and that none of the more than 200 items tested elsewhere in the bloody scene matched him.⁹ A cartel expert called by the defense testified that the scene was consistent with a cartel-style killing.⁶

Prosecutors worked hard to discredit Santos. His account had shifted over time, he could name only two of the alleged seven-person crew (both names already public through news coverage), he had previously told Tallahassee police he knew nothing about the murders, and he acknowledged confessing at one point to a separate killing he did not commit. He also had a schizophrenia diagnosis.⁶ Avila-Quinones, interviewed by the FBI and both legal teams in Italy, said he had not been in the United States since his 2009 deportation and had no fear of DNA testing because the sample was not his. The state’s own DNA expert eventually concluded the sample did not belong to him.¹⁰

Segura testified in his own defense. He said he deleted text messages to hide his infidelity from his wife rather than to conceal a crime, that scratches on his forearm came from pulling arrows out of bushes with a friend, and that he routinely blocked his caller ID when calling Peters so she would not identify the second phone number.¹¹

The 2017 Mistrial

Segura’s first trial began July 31, 2017, in Leon County Circuit Court before Judge James C. Hankinson. It was the first death penalty case tried in Tallahassee under a Florida law requiring a unanimous jury recommendation for a death sentence.¹² The jury of eight women and four men deliberated for 19 hours across two days before reporting it was hopelessly deadlocked. Judge Hankinson declared a mistrial on August 16, 2017.¹³

During deliberations, jurors asked to re-hear Kinard’s cellmate testimony and testimony from a Tallahassee police sergeant about the investigation of other suspects’ alibis. The prosecution had acknowledged at trial that there was “no smoking gun or DNA” directly tying Segura to the killings, while the defense emphasized the unidentified DNA at the scene.⁹ Both sides said they would retry the case rather than negotiate a plea.

The 2019 Conviction and Sentence

The retrial was held in November 2019 before a six-person jury. On November 19, 2019, the ninth anniversary of the killings, jurors convicted Segura on all four counts of first-degree murder after roughly four hours of deliberation. He had already been jailed for nine years awaiting trial.¹⁴

Judge Hankinson sentenced Segura to life in prison without the possibility of parole on each count. According to reporting on the sentencing, Segura told the judge he believed he should be sentenced to death.¹⁵

The Appeal and Where Segura Is Now

Segura appealed to Florida’s First District Court of Appeal. His attorneys argued that the trial court had improperly excluded Santos’s out-of-court confession and that the weight of the evidence did not support the verdict.¹¹ On November 3, 2021, a three-judge panel of Robert Long Jr., Harvey Jay, and M. Kemmerly Thomas unanimously affirmed the convictions and sentences in a four-page opinion, writing that “[t]here was significant evidence of Segura’s guilt” and that his “real request is for us, as appellate judges, to substitute our verdict for the jury’s.”¹⁶

Segura, inmate number N80669, is serving his four life sentences at Hardee Correctional Institution in Hardee County, Florida.¹⁶

1
ABC News. Mother, Kids Killed in Tallahassee Home
2
WTXL. Graphic Autopsy Photos Shown at Henry Segura Trial
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WCTV. A Daily Recap of the Henry Segura Trial
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WCTV. Opening Statements Begin in Henry Segura Quadruple Murder Trial
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WTXL. Henry Segura Trial to Continue Tuesday With Witness Testimony
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FindLaw. Segura v. State
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Court TV. Henry Segura
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WCTV. Henry Segura Quadruple Murder Trial – Day 5
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Tallahassee Democrat. Jury Finds Segura on Quadruple Murder Charges
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WTXL. Day 6 – Henry Segura
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Florida First District Court of Appeal. Segura v. State, Initial Brief on Merits
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WTXL. Segura Quadruple Murder Case Continued to Next Week
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WCTV. Judge Declares Mistrial in Henry Segura Quadruple Murder Trial
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WFSU. Segura Found Guilty in Quadruple Murder of Ex-Girlfriend, Kids
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WTXL. Convicted Quadruple Murderer Henry Segura Gets Life in Prison
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Tallahassee Democrat. Henry Segura to Remain Behind Bars, Murders Appeal Rejected