Apollo Holmes’ suicide a dead end in case of comatose trainer
Assault that left Darius Miller in a vegetative state is a “a sad commentary on urban life,” suspect’s lawyer says.
It’s been a year since celebrity fitness trainer Darius Miller was beaten into a coma while trying to stop a group of men from filming Mayor Shirley Franklin’s daughters outside a Peachtree Street nightclub. Now, a month after the investigation hit an unexpected hurdle, authorities might never discover what really happened that night.
The answer to the mystery might have died Christmas Day with Apollo Holmes.
Holmes, the sole suspect identified in the investigation into the attack, was indicted in October on charges of criminal intent to commit murder, aggravated assault and aggravated battery. Even before his indictment, he’d long refused to divulge the names of the other men allegedly involved in the assault, according to his defense attorney, Bruce Harvey.
In the end, Holmes’ unwillingness to snitch could be viewed as a literal example of an oft-repeated street dictum: death before dishonor.
“Investigators wanted him to testify or cooperate,” Harvey says. “There was a lot of pressure on him to give up the other people, and he didn’t want to do that. He was taking the heat by himself. He was getting all the publicity. He was the one that had to shoulder the burden.”
On Christmas Day — within hours of the one-year anniversary of the attack on Miller — Holmes killed himself in his Cobb County home.
While the timing of Holmes’ suicide suggests personal guilt played a role in his death, Harvey claims otherwise. “I want to dispel that as vigorously as possible,” he says.
The case against Holmes, Harvey says, was far from open-and-shut. What’s more, a review of the court file reveals several discrepancies in the evidence, from the nature of the injury that put Miller into a coma to the varying levels of culpability among the film crew that crossed paths with Miller, the mayor’s daughters and their friends.