Thomas Stein was a sixteen year old living in Florida when he would murder Kayla Rincon-Miller
According to court documents Kayla Rincon-Miller and two friends were walking to a McDonalds after watching a Bob Marley movie. Thomas Stein would be in a SUV that stopped suddenly in front of the group of girls. Armed individuals, identified later as Stein and Christopher Horne Jr, would jump out of the van and demanded the possessions of the girls when Stein would shoot Kayla Rincon-Miller who would pass away from her injuries the next day
Thomas Stein would be arrested. At trial Stein would say that he thought the robbery was a joke and the gun had gone off by accident
However the jury would not believe the teen killers story and he would be convicted of second degree murder and armed robbery
Thomas Stein will be sentenced at a later date
Christopher Horne Jr would plead guilty to second degree murder and will be sentenced at a later date
Thomas Stein Case
A Florida jury has convicted 18-year-old Thomas Roy Stein of first-degree murder with a firearm and three counts of attempted robbery in the shooting death of Kayla Rincon-Miller, a 15-year-old girl killed while walking to McDonald’s after a movie night with friends in Cape Coral on 17 March 2024.
Thomas Stein, who was 16 at the time of the shooting, faces sentencing on 10 July. He was charged as an adult shortly after his arrest on 19 March 2024 and was later indicted by a Lee County grand jury on 4 September 2024.
Filming a ‘Red Carpet’ Walk Before the Attack
The trial’s most striking testimony came from Rincon-Miller’s two surviving friends. Louann Dejaie, 18, and Emma Wright, 19, told the court they had watched a Bob Marley film at a local theatre that evening before the group decided to walk to a nearby McDonald’s for food.
Minutes before the shooting, the three teenagers were filming each other on Rincon-Miller’s phone. ‘We had taken Kayla’s phone and started taking photos of her, telling her to make the sidewalk her red carpet,’ Wright testified. They were laughing and dancing along the pavement.
When a silver SUV slowed to roughly 5 mph and rolled past the group, the girls didn’t panic. ‘I thought it was a prank, a joke that maybe one of Kayla’s or Louanne’s friends were pulling on us,’ Wright told the jury. The SUV then made a U-turn, flashed its high beams, and stopped directly in front of them.
Armed men jumped from the vehicle and demanded the teenagers’ bags. Within seconds, Dejaie heard three gunshots. The attackers fled back to the car. She ran to Rincon-Miller, who was lying on the ground.
‘She was like, “I just got shot,” and I remember telling her it’s gonna be OK,’ Dejaie testified. ‘I just didn’t want to believe.’
Rincon-Miller died the following morning from a gunshot wound to the torso. The associate medical examiner found the firearm’s muzzle had been just 2 to 3 centimetres from her chest.
Cape Coral police traced the Hertz rental SUV to Stein’s home through GPS data and mobile phone records. The vehicle had been rented in his mother’s name for a beach trip earlier that day.
Thomas Stein’s defence hinged on a story prosecutors called fiction. He told the jury that two additional passengers he knew only as ‘JD’ and ‘Trey’ were in the vehicle, and that ‘JD’ had struggled with Rincon-Miller and fired the weapon. He claimed he was trying to break up the fight when the gun went off.
No other suspects have been arrested or charged. Co-defendant Christopher Horne Jr., who pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and three counts of attempted robbery, testified there were only two people in the car and identified Stein as the gunman. Horne told the court that Stein pointed the girls out, said ‘Let’s rob them,’ and pressured him into going along. After the shooting, Horne said he screamed at Stein and asked why he fired the weapon.
Horne faces 25 years in prison, with sentencing set for 19 May.
‘Thomas Stein was not trying to provide assistance to Kayla. He fled the scene and only worked on getting rid of evidence,’ assistant state attorney Sara Miller told the jury during closing arguments.
Rincon-Miller’s death fits a broader national crisis. Firearms have been the leading cause of death for Americans aged 1 to 19 since 2020, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Pediatrics found that in 2021 alone, 4,752 children and teenagers died from gun-related injuries across the country.
Thomas Stein was 16 when prosecutors say he drove the getaway car, supplied the weapons, and planned the robbery that ended a teenager’s life. He will be sentenced as an adult on 10 July.
