Witness

Shoddrick Nobles

Tallahassee man who testified for the State in the 2019 joint trial, describing a cocaine sale to Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera and the motel room he rented in his own name the night before Dan Markel was shot.

Appeared Garcia–Magbanua

Mentioned Magbanua Retrial

212 lines · 4 appearances · 9 mentions · 2 trials

About

Nobles was a local witness who placed Garcia and Rivera in Tallahassee on both the June and July 2014 trips, and the room he registered in his own name produced a dated documentary record for the night before the shooting. That made his testimony usable by both sides: the State cited him alongside cell-site and rental-car evidence to fix the two men's movements, while Garcia's defense used his admitted drug sale, uncharged conduct, and the coincidence of a second roadside meeting to challenge his account. His day-four testimony also preserves several limits in the record, including a lost license-plate photograph, an unverified rental history, and an opening portion of the direct missing from the audio record.

Across Trials

The difference between the two proceedings is one of participation rather than credibility. In the Garcia–Magbanua 2019 Joint Trial, Nobles was a live State witness whose direct, two separate cross-examinations, and redirect occupied a substantial part of day four, and whose account was revisited through Rivera's testimony, investigative testimony about the lineup exhibits, an FBI agent's cross, and both sides' closing arguments. In the 2022 Magbanua retrial he did not take the stand at all and was named a single time, in a question putting to a witness a prior account about a man identified as "Rick" Nobles having been shot — a reference framed around a drug source, a Prius, and a hotel-room confrontation, with no testimony given by or about him and no evident connection drawn to the 2014 encounters he had described three years earlier. Nothing in the later proceeding revisited, corroborated, or challenged his 2019 account; the shift is simply from a central placement witness in the joint trial against both defendants to a passing third-party mention in the retrial of Magbanua alone.

Trial Record (13)

GM Garcia–Magbanua Sep 26, 2019 – Oct 11, 2019

Trial Summary

Testified on day four as the Tallahassee man who sold cocaine to Sigfredo Garcia and Luis Rivera and later rented them a motel room the night before Dan Markel was shot, drawing cross-examination from both defense teams about coincidence, cooperation, and his own criminal exposure.