Evicted tenant allegedly shot realtor dead outside Florida property in case of mistaken identity, police say

A Florida real estate agent was fatally gunned down in her vehicle at a property she was scheduled to show a potential buyer.

Around 12:30 p.m. Dec. 23, Sara Michelle Trost, 40, was sitting in the driver’s seat of her Jeep outside a Coral Springs home when Raymond Reese, 51, allegedly drove up in a dark sedan and hit her vehicle’s front right tire, the Sun Sentinel reported, citing an arrest warrant.

Witnesses claimed that when Trost opened her door the sedan’s driver aimed a gun at her through a window and fired, the warrant states.

“All of a sudden, we heard two gunshots,” neighborhood resident Roben Cipriani told WPLG. “I turn to my wife and I said, ‘I think that was gunshots.’ I got a little closer to the Jeep and I saw some blood.”

According to the arrest warrant, Reese phoned 911, gave the dispatcher his name, birth date and address, and allegedly asked for an officer to be sent because he shot his former landlord.

Trost, the mother of a young toddler girl, was hit in the left arm and chest and pronounced dead at the scene.

Police wrote in the warrant that Reese had lived at the home where Trost was killed and “he was upset at his former landlord over an email she sent him the previous day, which he had read that morning.”

The woman who was Reese’s landlord said she believed the murder suspect intended to target her, not Trost, because of the eviction, according to the warrant.

Police later recovered the alleged murder weapon from Reese’s Ford Fusion, and he was taken into custody and booked into the Broward County Jail on a first-degree murder charge. He is being held without bond.

“To all of us who knew Sara, she was larger-than-life. There was always a smile on her face and a good word to share,” Rabbi Shuey Biston wrote on a fundraising site about the victim, who was a member of Chabad of Parkland. “Sara was the most giving and caring person to both those she personally knew and those whose paths happened to cross hers.”