Keith Moses is scheduled to appear in an Orlando-area courtroom Tuesday at 9 a.m. for a hearing in the case stemming from the February 2023 Pine Hills mass shooting that left three people dead and two others injured. It marks his first court appearance since his defense team requested a trial delay last month, and the proceeding now looks unlikely to reach trial before early 2027.
Moses is accused of killing a 9-year-old girl, her mother, and a television news reporter over the course of several hours, according to WFTV. The victims included 9-year-old T'yonna Major, her mother Nathacha Augustin, and Spectrum News 13 reporter Dylan Lyons, who was covering the earlier shooting when he was killed. Prosecutors have accused Moses of carrying out the string of shootings across Orlando's Pine Hills neighborhood.
The case has moved through several distinct legal tracks since Moses was first taken into custody. An Orange County grand jury indicted him in March 2023 on 16 charges, including three counts of capital first-degree murder, two counts of attempted first-degree murder and armed burglary, as reported by WKMG ClickOrlando. Moses had initially entered written pleas of not guilty to preliminary holding charges before that indictment came down.
Death Penalty Sought, Then a Competing Legal Question
Then-State Attorney Monique Worrell filed notice in May 2023 that her office would seek the death penalty against Moses, following a recommendation from a capital case review panel, according to FOX 35 Orlando. Worrell said at the time that while she personally opposed capital punishment, she was obligated by law and the panel's findings to pursue it. That decision now sits alongside a separate legal question the defense is raising: whether Moses can be executed at all.
Moses's defense team is pursuing an intellectual disability claim, arguing that establishing such a disability could make him ineligible for the death penalty if he is convicted. Under Florida Statute § 921.137, a defendant convicted of a capital felony cannot be sentenced to death if they prove an intellectual disability based on subaverage intellectual functioning, concurrent adaptive behavior deficits, and onset before age 18, per the Florida Senate's statutory text. Florida law requires the court to appoint two independent experts to evaluate a defendant once such a motion is filed.
That statutory defense is legally distinct from mental competency, which measures a defendant's ability to understand court proceedings. Circuit Judge Leticia Marques already ruled in January 2024 that Moses was mentally competent to stand trial, following evaluations by two medical experts, a decision that had been delayed from December 2023 after Moses refused to leave jail for court. The intellectual disability question, by contrast, traces back to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2014 ruling in Hall v. Florida, which struck down the state's rigid IQ threshold of 70 for capital cases and required courts to weigh standard measurement error and adaptive behavior under Eighth Amendment protections, according to the Legal Information Institute. That decision built on the Court's 2002 Atkins v. Virginia ruling barring execution of cognitively disabled defendants.
Suspension of a Prosecutor and a Reconstituted Task Force
The case has also carried political weight in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis suspended Worrell from office in August 2023, citing her office's past handling of juvenile cases, including a 2021 drug charge involving Moses that predated the shootings, per WUSF. Worrell challenged the suspension and went on to win back her office in the November 2024 election.
Locally, officials responded to the shootings by reconstituting Orange County's Citizens Safety Task Force to partner with youth mentorship programs, and the county allocated $2 million toward community task force initiatives and youth intervention programs in the following fiscal year, according to Police1.
Civil Lawsuits Target Sheriff's Office and Charter Communications
Beyond the criminal case, the shootings spawned civil litigation on two fronts. In January 2025, the estate of Dylan Lyons filed a federal wrongful-death lawsuit against Charter Communications, Spectrum News 13's parent company, alleging it failed to provide adequate safety training, risk assessment or protective gear when assigning him to an active crime scene, according to NeJame Law. Charter Communications has moved to dismiss the suit, arguing the claim belongs exclusively under workers' compensation law, a fight Hoodline detailed in April.
Separately, families of victims T'yonna Major and Dylan Lyons filed a lawsuit in February 2025 against the Orange County Sheriff's Office, alleging deputies failed to alert nearby residents or secure the area between the initial morning murder and the afternoon shootings. The sheriff's office has denied liability and requested that the case be dismissed, as Hoodline previously reported.
Spectrum News 13 photojournalist Jesse Walden survived a gunshot wound alongside Lyons that day. Deputies arresting Moses shortly after the spree recovered an empty .40-caliber Glock handgun inside his pants that was still hot to the touch, according to CBS News. Body camera footage showed deputies taking Moses into custody about 20 minutes after the final shooting scene.
Tuesday's hearing comes as the trial itself has been postponed until at least early 2027, following the defense's request last month for additional time. No new trial date has been set.
