The knock on the door came just before 6pm last Saturday. Tom and Jane Hollinghurst and their younger daughter Hannah, 11, were sitting beside the swimming pool behind their home.
It was the kind of balmy Florida evening that the British couple had grown used to in the six years since they emigrated from Derbyshire. The sprinkler system was spreading waves of mist over the lawn. Nothing could have prepared them for what they were about to learn.
Jane Hollinghurst answered the door. When the two uniformed officers asked her to confirm her name, she summoned her husband.
“I have to inform you of some terrible news,” said Deputy Jason Platt. “Your daughter Alexandria was involved in a shooting incident in the early hours of this morning. I’m sorry to tell you that she, Brandon Goode and a police officer were found deceased.”
Alex, as she was known, was 17 and had been counting the days to her 18th birthday and adulthood. A petite blonde with blue-green eyes and an academic record that guaranteed her a good university place, she was popular at the local high school in Davenport, near Disney World, where she had worked part-time.
The boys who tried to go out with her had soon realised that she was interested only in her boyfriend, Brandon, an intense youth with slicked-back hair who had just turned 18. To the dismay of Alex’s parents, the couple had become almost inseparable over the previous three years.
“He was a super smart kid,” said Dominic Russo, who had known Brandon since they were both 10. “He’d come in with a new dress shirt and tie on every day. I guess he wanted to be GQ. High-end clothes. Different.”
Last month, Brandon and Alex were stopped by police in his silver Isuzu Rodeo and arrested after glass pipes and cannabis were found. Brandon was held in jail overnight and Alex taken to a juvenile assessment centre. They were due to appear in court last week. After yet another ugly row with her mother — there had been so many about sex or alcohol or drugs — Alex was forced to hand her mobile phone to her parents.
Unbeknown to the Hollinghursts, it was not Brandon’s first arrest. Less than two years earlier, his mother Connie had walked into the living room to find Brandon, his head shaven, sitting on the couch. Blankets had been used to cover some of the windows.
As she approached him, Brandon turned around. His face was covered in black paint and he had an axe. Brandon jumped up and pinned her to the wall, demanding that she accept a divorce settlement from his father.
But Sheriff Grady Judd, trying to make sense of events last weekend declined to portray Brandon as anything like the character played by Woody Harrelson in the film Natural Born Killers, where a psychopathic couple embark on a spree of mayhem and murder.
“He wasn’t a thug,” the sheriff said. “I consider him a child in search of direction in life. The incident with the axe was a divorce thing. He violated the law by being in possession of marijuana but he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the criminal type that we see so often. This just does not fit the mould.”
THE Hollinghurst family emigrated to the US when Alex was 11. Andrew Cartledge, her primary school headmaster in Hadfield, Derbyshire, remembered “a great child” with an infectious smile.
"I Would Have Painted the Walls With My Blood"
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