Kissimmee man pleads guilty to killing ex-girlfriend

Home

Osceola News

Police News

Other Sun Publications

FREE DELIVERY!
Get Free Delivery! Request your Osceola News Gazette Today.

Login Form

2013 Osceola Health

2013 Sexual Predator Sexual Offender List sexualpredatorcover13

Windows on the Classroom March 2013

School Calendar
2012-2013

View our other Special Sections

Kissimmee man pleads guilty to killing ex-girlfriend

County News

Thursday, 29 November 2012 08:31

By Fallan Patterson
Staff Writer
A Kissimmee man will learn his fate in January after pleading guilty last week to stabbing to death the mother of his daughter in the Polk County side of Poinciana in November 2011.
Steven Louis, 29, pled guilty Nov. 20 in a Polk County courtroom to killing his ex-girlfriend, Nicole Fields, after a heated argument about Louis’ failure to pay child support.
Circuit Judge Michael E. Raiden will sentence Louis on Jan. 3. He faces life in prison, as the plea was not associated with any deal made with the Orange Osceola State Attorney’s Office.
Fields, 26, had dropped her two daughters off at a Kissimmee babysitter’s house Nov. 3, 2011 before her scheduled child support hearing involving the couple’s daughter, according to police records.
During the hearing, Fields filed a motion to give Louis $11,700 credit because he had been giving her money toward day care and she “had a change of heart” and wanted to give him a “fresh start” because he had recently been released from prison, court records stated. Her motion was denied.
Fields was visible on the courthouse security cameras walking to and from the hearing alone, according to court records.
Louis was scheduled to also appear at the hearing but told detectives he lacked transportation from his Poinciana home on Gateshead Court.
It was after the hearing that Fields drove to Louis’ home where the pair got into a heated argument about child support while driving around the neighborhoods in Fields’ teal 1994 Oldsmobile Cutlass.
Louis told detectives the couple stopped by an abandoned home, 612 Robin Lane in Haines City, that has an empty lot and a wooded area in the backyard so Fields could urinate. It was in that wooded lot that the argument between the 5 foot, 3 inches and 155-pound Fields and the 5 foot, 11 inches and 195 pounds Louis escalated, according to the detectives’ interviews with Louis.
Fields allegedly told Louis he wouldn’t be allowed to visit their daughter except in the presence of the Department of Children and Families unless he supplied her with more money to care for the child. It was then the pair allegedly began hitting each other and a knife fell out of Louis’ pocket.
When Louis bend down to retrieve the knife, Fields allegedly hit him. Louis told detectives he was a “different man” when he stood back up and allegedly stabbed Fields multiple times in the shoulder and torso.
Louis told detectives that Fields was bleeding heavily and said she told him she felt like she was going to “pass out.” Fields then fell to the ground and Louis said he kissed her and took his polo shirt off and laid it over her face, according to court records.
He then fled the scene with Fields’ cell phone in her car because he “believed Nicole was dying so he got out of there as fast as he could,” the court records stated.
Louis then allegedly texted Fields’ babysitter because she was already later than planned to pick up the children, telling the sitter that the mother was running late because court was taking longer than expected.
The sitter told police the texts didn’t “sound” like Fields because they didn’t “resemble the wordings” Fields had used in the past, court records stated.
Louis then fled the county, driving south where he was arrested Nov. 4, 2011, near mile marker six on Big Copitt in the Florida Keys after a brief police chase.
Louis allegedly drove Fields’ car through the partially closed gate of a private residence and off the boat dock, into the ocean, according to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
The pursuing officer observed Louis talking on a cell phone and ingesting a “white substance” the officer suspected was cocaine, he wrote in his report.
A 10-inch knife was found in the car but authorities would not comment on whether it was the murder weapon.
Fields was found Nov. 10, two days after her 27th birthday, face down and partially covered by a polo shirt in the wooded lot after an extensive search by law enforcement.
According to the autopsy report, conducted by Orange/Osceola Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jan. Garavaglia, Fields died from multiple stab wounds including one, which punctured her left lung. Animal activity to her body also was noted in the report.
Fields’ mother Sherry Fields told detectives her daughter and Louis lived together for approximately two years until about a month before the murder. Fields told her mother that Louis had physically abused her during their relationship, the police report stated.