British tourists killed in savage execution

The three young men should never have been there. One, a man in build but not in age, had just been involved in a shooting. A judge said he posed a danger to the public but he was released by police. The two friends he confronted in the dark, on a crime ridden housing estate just hours later, were trying to make their way home.

They were on holiday and they were drunk. A minute later they were dead.

The shooter, Shawn Tyson, has just been found guilty of their murders in Sarasota, Florida a year ago. He was sixteen when he shot them, multiple times.

James Cooper and James Kouzaris, both British and in their mid twenties, had taken photographs of themselves having fun earlier that evening. Ninety minutes before they died they were pictured on a bar's CCTV camera, drinking with some girls. What on earth they were doing in a run down neighbourhood a mile and a half away will remain a mystery but police say they were not carrying drugs and were not drug users.

Their killing was a savage execution by a man who has 'savage' tattooed across his chest. He asked the two friends for money and when they said they had none, he pulled out a gun saying "well since you ain't got no money, I've got something for your ass." They were found without their shirts and with their trousers down.

Tyson, who is now 17, was tried as an adult but he will not be executed for his crime, even though it carries the death penalty in Florida. Instead he will spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. What a brutal end to three lives. James Cooper had been a tennis coach; he'd even played Andy Murray in a tournament. One wrong turning, late at night, in a city they didn't know and the two friends from Sheffield University found themselves facing a young thug with a gun in his belt and savagery near his heart. For the men's parents and friends it's heartbreaking. But even for Shawn Tyson it's a desperate end to a life that might have been different. He'd been a promising footballer but got in with the wrong crowd of older men, dropped out of school and the rest is written in blood on a Florida street.

Any murder is brutal. These murders seem especially so. So needless, so random,such a waste.