It was Michael Keetley that shot six men one early morning in 2010 on the front porch of a Ruskin home, a jury decided Monday.
After 12 years, two trials, and a second go at deliberations, which lasted 13 hours over three days, a panel of two women and 10 men convicted Keetley of two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Juan and Sergio Guitron and four counts of attempted murder.
Keetley stood quietly beside his attorneys and shook his head slightly as a clerk read the word “guilty” six times. In the gallery behind him, the mother of the two murder victims wept.
The jury’s decision bookended Hillsborough County’s longest-running case, which has dogged the local legal system for more than a decade.
Keetley has been jailed 4,499 days since his arrest. The guilty verdict ensures he will remain incarcerated until the day he dies.
He was 39 when he was arrested. He is 52 now. Although a judge in 2018 granted him bail, Keetley remained incarcerated, unable to pay the $900,000 required to secure his release.
His arrest came in December 2010 after surviving victims fingered his image as that of the man they said pulled up in a minivan early Thanksgiving morning outside a home on a narrow street in Ruskin called Ocean Mist Court. The man got out what the men variously described as a pump action shotgun or a rifle and wearing a shirt that read “sheriff.” He asked for someone named “Creeper,” a neighbor some of them knew, but who lived a few houses away. He demanded their identification, made the men kneel down, then, one-by-one, began shooting them.
The Guitron brothers, known as “Magic” and “Spider,” were killed. Severely wounded were Richard Cantu, Daniel Beltran, Ramon Galan, and Gonzalo Guevara.
Although the surviving victims were not immediately able to identify their attacker, word soon spread in the Ruskin community that it was the ice cream man.
Keetley was well-known in the area, having worked the neighborhoods selling frozen treats from his purple ice cream truck. It was also widely known that he’d been robbed several months earlier, and shot several times. He endured several surgeries and months of physical therapy. People in the Ruskin community collected donations to help him recover.
People who knew Keetley said he became frustrated with law enforcement’s investigation of his shooting. So, according to court testimony, he undertook his own investigation, eventually coming to believe that a man named “Creeper” might be involved.
Evidence assembled against him included projectiles and a bullet shell casing that investigators found at his family’s property, which an analyst opined were consistent with shell casings and projectiles at the murder scene. Records from a computer investigators seized from Keetley’s home showed internet searches for terms like “ocean mist” and “creeper” and numerous terms related to firearms. Witnesses also testified that Keetley painted his family’s minivan a day after the shootings.
But the state’s case was less than airtight. Defense attorneys picked apart problems with the way the lead detective conducted a photo lineup with witnesses. They also questioned the accuracy of eyewitness memories of what the shooter looked like, noting their inconsistent descriptions, how quickly the shooting occurred, how dark it was outside that early morning.
His case lingered through the tenure of three state attorneys. Complicated in its early years by the state’s pursuit of a death sentence — which prosecutors later abandoned — and complex legal questions over who should handle Keetley’s defense, the case finally reached trial in February 2020.
But a jury then was unable to render a verdict. It was later reported in court records that the first jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of finding Keetley not guilty.