Charlott Morris doesn’t believe the man accused of killing her brother when he says that he is sorry and that he didn’t mean to do it.
Morris said she and her brother, Travis Henshaw, were very close and did everything together.
We went to the mall and movies together, even played together as kids and had the same friends. I made sure he was with me at all times,” said the 27-year-old married mother, who has a son and is eight months pregnant.
She said Henshaw was “the baby of the family,” the youngest of three siblings.
Henshaw, 23, died early Thursday morning, the day after he was punched in the face by Mathew Q. Gunter, who suspected him of sleeping with his girlfriend.
Morris said her brother never regained consciousness. He was on life support when his heart stopped, she said. Neither she nor their mother, who live together in South Carolina, got a chance to see him before he died.
Gunter, 19, who is at the Marion County Jail without bond, now faces a charge of manslaughter. His next court appearance is scheduled for Sept. 18. County Judge Jim McCune has appointed the Public Defender’s Office to represent him.
On Friday morning, after appearing before the judge via video conference from the jail, Gunter had little to say to a Star-Banner reporter. Looking straight ahead, Gunter just said, “I’m sorry,” and “I didn’t mean to do it.”
On Thursday morning, before Gunter knew of Henshaw’s death, he gave an interview. Gunter said a friend had told him Henshaw had slept with his 21-year-old girlfriend. So he went to a southeast Ocala home. There, Gunter said, “I confronted him” and Henshaw “shrugged his shoulder.” Gunter punched him, he said, the back of Henshaw’s head hit the side of a door, his body slid down the side and his head hit the concrete floor.
It was bad instinct on my part,” Gunter said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen this way. If I could take it back, I would.” He said Henshaw had been a friend of his for years.
Morris said that, while she doesn’t know Gunter, she doesn’t believe he’s sorry.
“I think he went over there to hurt my brother,” she said. “He had every intention to hurt my brother. He knew what he was doing.”
Morris said Henshaw once had work doing concrete curbing but, after his girlfriend broke up with him, he turned to meth. The addiction was so powerful, she said, that he went from being 6-foot-1 and 230 pounds to roughly 100 pounds.
“My brother was very weak,” she said.
Morris said he was homeless.
As for their being good friends, Morris said that Gunter and Henshaw were never friends, just associates. She asked how Gunter could “consider him a friend and did that to him.”
She pointed out Gunter’s 2011 conviction for domestic violence against his girlfriend.
On Wednesday, after punching Henshaw, Gunter fled. But deputies soon found him and drove him to the Sheriff’s Office. According to a Sheriff’s Office report, Gunter admitted committing the crime in an interview with Detective Ryan Robbins.
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