A jury found Brian Canarelli guilty of second-degree murder with a firearm five years after James “Cole” Berger was shot outside his home.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — One witness heard the first shot and rushed to help James “Cole” Berger. Another told investigators she saw Brian Canarelli draw a handgun and continue firing after Berger fell. Nearby, deputies found six spent casings and a pistol in Canarelli’s vehicle, evidence in a case that ultimately ended with a second-degree murder conviction.
A Palm Beach County jury returned the guilty verdict against Canarelli on Sept. 25, more than five years after the June 2021 killing at a Jupiter Farms property. Prosecutors had charged Canarelli with first-degree murder with a firearm, but jurors selected second-degree murder with a firearm instead. The State Attorney’s Office said the verdict followed a five-day trial in which evidence showed Canarelli fired multiple shots at Berger outside the 37-year-old’s residence.
The physical scene was documented within hours of the shooting. Contemporary reporting based on the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office arrest report said Canarelli’s white Porsche Cayenne was parked outside the property on 98th Trail North. Investigators reported seeing a handgun on the driver’s-side floorboard. Six spent 9 mm cartridge casings were recovered near the front entrance. Berger had suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead. Canarelli was arrested and booked into jail early the following morning.
Those objects, however, did not explain by themselves how the confrontation began. Witness accounts supplied the sequence. Canarelli’s estranged wife told investigators that she and Berger had been arguing earlier at the home and that the adults decided three children there should leave. One was her 9-year-old son with Canarelli. The boy wanted to go to his father’s home, so his mother called Canarelli at about 8 p.m. and asked him to come get the child. She told investigators Canarelli was calm during the call and agreed to the pickup.
When Canarelli arrived, Berger approached the gate and the two men argued, according to the arrest report. Canarelli remained outside the property while the exchange continued. Berger eventually went over the gate as his fiancée was preparing to open it. She told deputies that she heard a shot. Her statement, as described in news reports, did not claim she saw Canarelli fire it. Instead, she ran to the front and found Berger down, began performing CPR and heard Canarelli say that he had shot him.
The account from Berger’s mother was more direct. She told investigators she had come to the property to pick up children and saw the confrontation. According to the arrest report, she said Canarelli reached behind his back, produced a shiny handgun and shot Berger. She said Berger held a pebble but never raised it toward Canarelli. After Berger fell, she said, Canarelli moved toward him and fired four more times. Her account became one of the clearest eyewitness descriptions of the shooting in public reporting about the case.
Investigators’ recovery of six shell casings provided another piece of the scene, though the publicly available reports reviewed for this article do not set out a shot-by-shot forensic reconstruction of every round. They also do not provide the full trial transcript, all exhibits or the jury’s deliberations. What is confirmed is that the prosecution presented a homicide case over five days, the State Attorney’s Office said Canarelli fired multiple rounds, and jurors found him guilty of second-degree murder with a firearm.
The distinction between what witnesses reported and what the jury ultimately decided is important. In 2021, the statements in the arrest report were allegations used by investigators to establish probable cause and support the first-degree murder charge. They were not, by themselves, a conviction. Canarelli remained presumed innocent as the case moved through the court system. That changed with the Sept. 25 verdict, when jurors concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed second-degree murder with a firearm.
The jury did not accept the prosecution’s first-degree murder charge, which meant the final verdict differed from the offense authorities had pursued since Canarelli’s arrest. The publicly available verdict reporting does not disclose the jury’s internal reasoning, and jurors generally do not issue a narrative explaining how they evaluated each witness. The result itself shows that they rejected first-degree murder while finding the evidence sufficient for second-degree murder and the firearm finding.
The trial also put physical evidence before the jury in open court. Palm Beach Post photographs showed a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office crime-scene investigator testifying while a crime-scene sketch appeared on a monitor. Other photographs showed evidence bags and a projectile displayed during the proceeding. Assistant State Attorneys Bethany Johnson and Courtney Behar handled the prosecution, while Circuit Judge John Parnofiello presided at the Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley Courthouse in West Palm Beach.
For investigators, the shooting scene had begun as a late-night response to a home in Jupiter Farms. Reports differ slightly in how they date the event because the confrontation unfolded overnight. The State Attorney’s Office described the killing as occurring June 22, 2021, while later news coverage also referred to the early hours of June 23. Contemporary reporting said Canarelli was called to the property around 8 p.m., with deputies dealing with the aftermath later that night and Canarelli booked at about 4 a.m. June 23.
The personal relationships around the shooting were complicated but well documented. Berger was engaged to Canarelli’s estranged wife. Brian and Victoria Canarelli had married in 2012, and a petition to dissolve the marriage was filed in August 2020. By the time of the shooting, the marriage was still being dissolved. The fatal confrontation did not begin with Canarelli going to the property for Berger, according to the arrest report; it began after his estranged wife asked him to pick up their son.
That context also explains why several people were positioned to see or hear parts of what happened. Children were being moved away from the property. Berger’s mother had come to collect children. Canarelli arrived to pick up his son. Berger was at the home with his fiancée. The resulting witness accounts overlapped on major facts but were not identical because the witnesses stood in different places and perceived different portions of the confrontation.
The sheriff’s office initially charged Canarelli with first-degree murder with a firearm, and a judge denied him bond at an early court hearing. The case then remained pending for years before reaching trial in September 2026. During that period, separate family-law litigation involving Brian and Victoria Canarelli continued. Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed a ruling in their family case in March 2026, several months before the murder trial began.
The September trial converted the accumulated evidence into a final jury finding at the trial-court level. The State Attorney’s Office said the case was prosecuted by its homicide unit and credited the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office with the investigation. Its post-verdict announcement described Berger as the 37-year-old fiancé of Canarelli’s estranged wife and confirmed that the killing occurred outside Berger’s Jupiter Farms residence.
Canarelli now faces sentencing rather than another determination of guilt by the trial jury. Parnofiello postponed sentencing after the verdict and ordered a presentencing investigation at the request of Canarelli’s lawyers. A date was not immediately set. Florida law provides substantial mandatory punishment when a person convicted of a qualifying felony discharges a firearm and causes death or great bodily harm, including a minimum term of at least 25 years under the relevant firearm provision.
The statute does not mean a 25-year sentence is automatic as the final sentence in every such case; it establishes the applicable mandatory minimum framework while allowing longer punishment where authorized. The judge must determine Canarelli’s sentence based on the conviction, Florida law and the sentencing record developed before the hearing. The State Attorney’s Office had not announced a sentencing date in the material reviewed for this report.
For Berger’s family, the verdict followed a delay measured in years rather than months. He was remembered in an obituary cited by later reports as warm and welcoming, a man who made people feel comfortable and asked little from life. The criminal proceeding could not resolve that personal loss. It did, however, answer the central legal question that had remained open since deputies collected the casings, documented the handgun and interviewed the witnesses in June 2021: a jury found Canarelli guilty of Berger’s murder.
Author note: Last updated November 9, 2026.