The unwinding of Brandon Labiner, Part 2
As legal jeopardy mounts, one man is murdered. One is found hung.
The second of two parts. Read Part 1 here.
A little before 4 in the afternoon on July 1, a man stepped outside a Boca Raton office building to vape.
He heard hysterical screaming, and then, four shots coming from the building’s underground parking garage.
He rushed over. A woman was on the phone. “He did it,” she said over and over.
In the garage breezeway, Paul Labiner’s body was sprawled, face down, still holding his car keys.
He was shot four times: twice in his lower body, once in the chest and once in the head.
Five spent 9mm bullet casings were scattered nearby. Three live rounds were dropped near the walkway entrance. Another bullet was found in a trash can.
Paul, 68, a respected attorney with a decades-long practice, was pronounced dead 15 minutes after police arrived.
Hours later, police officers were at his son’s law office, urging him to speak with them. Brandon Labiner refused. He gave them the phone number of his lawyer, Val Rodriguez.
Rodriguez persuaded him to cooperate.
Police arrested Brandon on an outstanding misdemeanor warrant. The next day, they charged him with the premeditated murder of his father.
He has pleaded not guilty.
For more than a year, the father and son had engaged in a bitter feud tied to the theft of $451,000 from the trust account of Paul’s wife, as Stet reported Sunday.
But it wasn’t only the embezzlement that led to Brandon’s unraveling.
It was also everything that came after: harsh and public judgments, a failing law practice, an unexpected death and a family torn apart by lies.
‘A predator of the worst type’
Whatever differences Paul and Brandon Labiner might have had before 2022, whatever words might have been said in anger between father and son, Paul Labiner still seemed the least likely person to push his son out of the legal profession.
A wealth-management lawyer, Paul said he had bought a 20-person law practice so that his son would have a turnkey business when he passed the Bar exam. Brandon would be lead attorney.
One day before Brandon’s 34th birthday, Paul began taking it all away.
He filed a formal complaint with The Florida Bar, asking them to revoke his son’s law license.
Brandon responded that the Bar had no reason to investigate his father’s complaint, or his license, or the hundreds of thousands of dollars missing from his stepmother’s trust.
It was a family matter.
“It pains me that I am even forced to write a response,” wrote Brandon in his defense. “This is a man who once loved and supported me.”
The most important issue for the Bar, he said, “is the fact that this is a personal dispute amongst family members, both of which happen to be attorneys.”
It was nothing of the sort, wrote Paul.
“This is not merely a father-son dispute,” Paul said.
“He is a predator of the worst type, as he has stolen from his family and will do so again if he is not removed from positions of trust that attorneys occupy."
Warring realities
Hundreds of pages of Bar investigation and court documents don’t only detail accusations and counter-accusations between father and son.
They paint alternate realities: Paul said Brandon had injured him in a scuffle when he found his son trying to access his bank accounts; Brandon said his father battered him.
Paul said Brandon looted his stepmother’s trust. Brandon said he took money to replace Paul’s theft.
Brandon said he never verbally assaulted his father with an expletive-filled tirade as Paul contended. It was his father’s temper that led Brandon and his pregnant wife to fear Paul would harm them, he said.
And although paramedics had ruled out blood-sugar levels as a reason for Brandon’s 2022 misdemeanor DUI, that arrest wasn’t relevant, he reassured the Bar: The judge and prosecutor already knew it wasn’t alcohol, he said, but a blood-sugar problem brought on by diabetes.
The real problem, wrote Brandon, was his father’s 33 years of sobriety.
Having conquered addiction, Brandon said his father had “sadly” refocused to another obsession: persecuting his son.
Mounting legal jeopardy
Even for lawyer plaintiffs and defendants, civil suits can be painful. Accused and accuser are frequently subject to embarrassment or humiliation as private details surface in public forums, the author of a 1999 study found.
“I should dread a lawsuit beyond almost anything short of sickness and death,” said famed federal appeals court Justice Learned Hand.
In just six months between June and December of 2022, Brandon was facing that legal jeopardy, and more, on multiple fronts
In one probate court case, Paul sued to remove Brandon as a trustee for his stepmother’s trust. A separate probate case modifying a family trust named Brandon.
And in civil court, Paul and his wife sued Brandon for damages.
His father filed the Bar complaint during the same six months.
Further, Brandon was not yet off the hook for the February 2022 misdemeanor DUI. He needed to meet court-imposed terms before the charge could be dismissed.
An unexpected death
Two months into 2023, with the Bar investigation pending and the litigation pressure growing, Brandon’s wife gave birth to their stillborn son, Jordan Graham.
“I am at a loss writing this, trying to figure out how we can move forward,” Brandon said on Facebook. “Give your little ones an extra kiss tonight.”
On impulse, he got a tattoo of an infant’s foot and Jordan’s name on his arm. His wife, Brandon wrote on his Facebook page, “was there holding my hand in support the entire time.”
That week, the Bar formally petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to issue an emergency suspension of Brandon’s license.
The Bar’s lead forensic accountant didn’t weigh in on Brandon’s personal attacks on his father. He did make clear why he recommended an emergency suspension.
There was “clear and convincing” evidence Brandon wrongly took more than $451,000 from his stepmother’s trust, then presented the Bar with forged documents incriminating his father for missing money.
Legal blows
On April 14, two days after the Bar petition cited deceptions made by Brandon in a civil court case, his attorney withdrew from the suit for damages Paul had filed.
On April 18, Brandon’s license to practice law was suspended.
On May 3, his wife filed for divorce.
On May 6, a settlement agreement was filed with the court, closing out his father’s suit for damages.
The judge ordered the case closed.
But the settlement was as fraudulent as it was mysterious, according to Paul.
He and the two other plaintiffs had not agreed to settle with Brandon. The agreement was filed under a variation of his name he no longer used.
Paul suspected his son filed the fake documents.
The judge scheduled a hearing.
Brandon did not show up.
In June, Brandon did not show up for a scheduled hearing on the DUI.
A warrant was issued for his arrest.
It’s not clear when Brandon told his sister and brother-in-law he had bought a gun. According to police records, they said Brandon told them things would be better if a person were dead.
Brandon could have been talking about himself. But that’s not known: The name was redacted by police.
The bicyclist
Paul had once claimed security footage caught Brandon illegally taking items from their shared office.
Now, office security footage recorded the person police believed was Paul’s likely assailant, according to a police report.
The camera recorded a helmeted man on a maroon bike pedaling into the underground garage. He gets off the bike. He takes a box out of a backpack and what appears to be a gun out of the box.
He sets it on the ground and pulls a black jacket over his white T-shirt.
He paces for more than half an hour before picking up the item from the ground. He moves behind a column.
Security footage records the bicyclist struggling with another man in the garage breezeway. The two pass out of camera range.
When the bicyclist is back in the frame, he is alone and standing, right arm and hand extended downward toward where Paul’s body was later found.
He runs away.
A calm call, and a cat
Brandon’s sister and brother-in-law talked to Brandon twice the day of the murder, they told police.
He told them he had nothing to do with the murder. He did not own a gun.
“He seemed very calm on the phone, which was odd because he usually sounds like he is under the influence” of unknown substances, they said.
He sent a text shortly after: What time did they want to come over and meet his new cat?
Police showed the couple and one other unidentified person the surveillance camera footage.
Each said it was Brandon.
Police tracked him to his law office.
After Rodriguez helped persuade Brandon to surrender to police, an officer escorted Brandon’s estranged wife to retrieve two dogs and a cat still in the office.
He saw a bike in an open closet. It matched the bike seen on surveillance. What looked like fresh soot was on office surfaces.
In Brandon’s car, police found boxes of 9mm ammunition, a gun box, a gas can, a lighter, a trash can with what appeared to be a burnt interior, gloves and a face mask.
In the second-floor office restroom, they found a gun cleaning kit and a piece of paper with Rodriguez’s name on it.
Explaining the inexplicable
If, as police believe, Brandon Labiner murdered his father, he would fall into a rare subset of killings in the United States: parricide, the murder of a parent or close family member.
Scholars have spent decades trying to understand them.
Adolescents desperate to escape abuse and adults enraged by their abuse history are one category.
Severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, is another.
A third category is the antisocial child. They can kill for greed.
But even explained, some cases of parricide remain inexplicable.
Ben Simpson is a pseudonym for an 18-year-old who shot his mother and father in an alcohol-fueled rage.
University of South Florida Professor Kathleen Heide’s internationally recognized work is the basis for parricide categories. Simpson fit none of those three, she said.
Rather, he never truly grew up. He did not learn to solve his problems, as his parents “over-indulged their son and tried to right his wrongs.”
They made their choices, she said, out of love.
On July 25, Brandon Labiner pled not guilty to murdering his father.
“The evidence is complex and it will take us quite some time to figure it all out,” said his attorney, Val Rodriguez.
“We simply have no comment other than to say that Mr. Labiner denies all of these charges.”
On September 28, the Florida Bar revoked his law license.
On October 5, while he remained jailed without bond, a grand jury formally indicted him for first degree murder with a firearm and added a second charge, evidence tampering.
On November 15, Brandon Labiner was discovered hanging in his Palm Beach County jail cell.
It has been tentatively ruled a suicide.
You’re reading a story from Stet Media Group. Support Palm Beach County journalism in the public interest with a free or paid subscription.
Already a subscriber? Take our survey to help us make Stet better.