Melissa Payne will not face charges for fatally shooting a man during a fight over a parking space at a North Lauderdale, Florida, Walmart, prosecutors said on Thursday, Sept. 3. The Broward County State Attorney’s Office ruled that the state’s “stand your ground” law makes her immune from arrest and prosecution.
Bart DiGuglielmo, 62, was shot once in the abdomen on June 30 outside the store at 7900 W. McNab Road. He was taken to Broward Health Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead the same day. The Medical Examiner ruled the cause of death a gunshot wound and the manner homicide. Payne told deputies she acted in self-defense, and prosecutors concluded they could not prove she was wrong.
Stephen Zaccor, the office’s Homicide Trial Unit Division Chief, opened his memo on the case bluntly. “A dispute over a parking space. In a Walmart parking lot. The facts surrounding the June 30, 2026, homicide of Bart DiGuglielmo are as tragic as they are absurd,” he wrote. Nearly nothing about the encounter was in doubt, he added, because cameras caught the whole thing.
One parking space, two drivers
The trouble started when Payne and DiGuglielmo both tried to pull into the same spot. Payne was driving a Chevy Malibu with her niece and her niece’s baby in the car. DiGuglielmo was alone in a white Kia SUV.
A “brief stalemate” followed, according to the memo, and both drivers stepped out. DiGuglielmo then abandoned his car in the travel lane, grabbed a shopping cart and walked into the Walmart. While he was inside, Payne pulled into the disputed space and parked. For a moment, the argument looked like it was over.
The threats came before the gun
About 90 seconds later, DiGuglielmo returned to his SUV. Three witnesses told investigators they heard him threaten her, one recalling that he said he was going to “mess her car up.” He then drove off at a high rate of speed, only to park about two aisles away and start walking back toward her car.
Rather than heading into the store, DiGuglielmo stood under a tree near Payne’s vehicle, smoking a cigarette and watching her. One witness described him as “visibly angry” and said he was shaking as he stared. Payne’s niece had gone into the store before the shooting, leaving her infant daughter in the car.
How the shooting happened
DiGuglielmo eventually walked up to Payne’s car. She got out holding her phone in her left hand and a gun in her right. A witness heard her warn that she would shoot if he kept coming at her, the memo said. Another bystander shouted, “It’s not worth it!”
Payne kept backing away and kept warning him. “Don’t come over here!” “Don’t come near my car!” “Don’t try that!” she said, according to prosecutors. DiGuglielmo backed off at first, then started advancing again while making hand gestures. With his keys in his hand, he motioned as if he was about to damage her vehicle.
That is when Payne fired one shot, striking him in the abdomen. She set the gun on the roof of her car afterward. She had been on the phone with her husband as it all unfolded, and told him, “Bae, I shot. Call the cops,” according to the memo.
It was all caught on camera
Prosecutors leaned hard on the footage. The confrontation was recorded on multiple devices, including a nearby parked Tesla, a cellphone and parking-lot surveillance cameras. “There is relatively no dispute about what actually happened because the entire incident was captured by various video recording devices,” Zaccor wrote.
That video cut in more than one direction. It did not paint Payne as blameless, prosecutors said, but it did match her account. When she described the encounter to police, her version lined up with what the cameras showed. Her “recitation of the facts was consistent with the various sources of video evidence,” the memo stated.
Why Florida law protected the shooter
Florida’s stand your ground law lets a person who is not engaged in criminal activity, and who is somewhere they have a right to be, meet force with force without retreating. The National Conference of State Legislatures counts at least 31 states with no duty to retreat.
Payne met those conditions, prosecutors said. She was in a public parking lot, she is not a convicted felon, and she was legally allowed to carry the firearm, so, Zaccor wrote, “she was not doing anything unlawful at the time she used deadly force.” That meant she had the right to stand her ground if she reasonably feared death or great bodily harm.
The memo stopped short of calling Payne right. “The video does not demonstrate that [Payne] was in the right, rather it demonstrates that the State of Florida cannot overcome her claim that she was in reasonable fear of great bodily harm by clear and convincing evidence,” prosecutors wrote. Under the law, they added, she “did not have to wait to be attacked before resorting to deadly force. She did not have to retreat as long as her fear was reasonable and no evidence has been presented to disprove that.”
What Payne told deputies
Body camera video released Sept. 3 showed Payne explaining herself to a deputy at the scene. She said DiGuglielmo had made several threats about her vehicle and had trailed her through the lot.
“You’re following me, I circled around the cars, I told him several times to back up,” Payne said. She said he walked up on her several times before the shot was fired. “You walked up on me several times and it went from there,” she added. Payne was briefly taken into custody by the Broward Sheriff’s Office and released after saying she acted in self-defense.
The man who was killed
DiGuglielmo, of Lauderhill, spent his working life around emergencies. His daughter, Amanda DiGuglielmo, said in an interview that her father worked as an emergency room trauma nurse for 30 years. He was also a U.S. Army veteran and a sergeant.
She described him as a devoted family man, a twin brother, a father of three and a grandfather. “He was a great man. He was a father, he was a grandfather (and) he was a brother,” she said. Asked what she would miss most, she said everything, from calling him to sharing lunches and holidays.
His family rejects the ruling
Amanda DiGuglielmo and her attorney, Melissa Rodriguez, do not accept that the shooting was self-defense. Rodriguez said the family had always argued the situation did not warrant stand your ground immunity, and that criminal charges should have been filed. Amanda was very disappointed to learn prosecutors would not pursue the case, her attorney said.
“This is not a situation in which deadly force was reasonable,” Rodriguez said. “All of the references are to damage to the vehicle, damage to property, and while I understand this was a heated situation and a lot might have been said, damage to property does not constitute a reasonable ground for deadly force.” The daughter, she said, has been heartbroken.
The statute also grants immunity from civil suit, but a charging decision does not settle that question. Under a 2017 Florida Supreme Court ruling, a determination in a criminal case does not bind a civil plaintiff, so Payne would have to establish immunity again in any lawsuit the family brought. The criminal case, for now, is closed.
