Anthony Colarossi
orlandosentinel.com
James Madison Bedsole was a motorcycle club probate member on trial for the shooting death of Chad Brickey.
James Madison Bedsole, a Warlocks motorcycle gang member, listens during his first-degree murder trial, Tuesday, February 8, 2011. (JOE BURBANK/ORLANDO SENTINEL)
Chad Brickey's family members sat in court all week to hear what they heard late Friday: James Madison Bedsole, guilty of first-degree murder.
After deliberating for several hours, a 12-member Orange County jury found Bedsole responsible for Brickey's September 2009 shooting death in Apopka. Judge Roger McDonald promptly sentenced Bedsole to the mandatory penalty of life in prison.
The convicted man sat stone-faced, as he did for much of the trial.
The case gained attention because Bedsole, 40, was a probate member of the Warlocks motorcycle club at the time of Brickey's death. The prosecution attributed his role in Brickey's shooting to Bedsole's job as a probate member assigned to protect other Warlocks' motorcycles.
On Friday, Bedsole was forced to listen to another constituency — the victim's mother, his grandmother and the mother of Brickey's daughter.
"I just hope she can fight the devil later on in life, the same devil that you allowed to control you," said Nicole La Rosa, who had a child with Brickey, 29. "You are the reason my once happy child can be so angry. No one can fix her sadness. All [she] has is Chad looking down from heaven, and she can't look back."
Asked later if she saw any response when she looked across the courtroom at Bedsole, La Rosa said, "He just looked at me. He really didn't have any type of emotion."
The verdict came hours after defense attorney Jeff Dowdy tried to raise doubts about the state's case against Bedsole. He focused on the inability of the state's key witness, Holguy Louissaint, to identify Bedsole in court as the man who jumped into the back of his truck during an early-morning chase in September 2009.
That chase from Sharky's Bar in Lockhart to a Mobil station in Apopka ended with Bedsole firing a shot from a 9-mm handgun and striking Brickey in the back of his head as he tried to elude Louissaint's truck.
Dowdy said that even when the prosecutor in the case pointed at Bedsole and asked Louissaint if he was the man in his truck that night, Louissaint couldn't identify him.
"I don't see him in the courtroom," Dowdy said, quoting Louissaint. "You are being asked to make so many leaps of faith here, it's incredible. There's a verdict here. It's not guilty."
Dowdy also pointed out that 11 video cameras at the Mobil station captured the two trucks, but none showed Bedsole.
Dowdy then called Louissaint the "luckiest man in the world" because he was initially charged in the case and is thought to be withholding some details about that night's events.http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2011-02-08/news/os-warlocks-murder-trial-20110207_1_warlocks-james-madison-bedsole-holguy-louissaint Now he faces no prosecution.
But Assistant State Attorney Les Hess, in his rebuttal closing, said Louissaint "is lucky that the cameras prove he is not the shooter."
"I suggest the luckiest man in the world is the shooter, if you let him go," Hess told the jurors.
He noted that cell-phone records place Bedsole at the scene, and he asked jurors to consider whether the defense was that someone else used his phone that night.
He said Bedsole also was untruthful with police and had motive to harm Brickey because Brickey had run over a bike outside Sharky's, although it turned out not to belong to a Warlock.
"This is not an innocent man," Hess said of Bedsole. "This man is guilty."
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