Steven Cozzi

Steven Cozzi was a Florida attorney with the Blanchard Law firm in Largo, on the west coast of the state near Tampa Bay, who disappeared from his office on March 21, 2023, in circumstances that investigators quickly treated as a homicide. His phone, keys and wallet were left behind at his desk, and detectives found blood in the office bathroom that they said pointed to a violent attack. His body was never recovered, and prosecutors later argued it had been driven to a landfill in Collier County days after he vanished.

Cozzi practiced civil litigation and, in the years before his death, was representing clients who had been sued by Tomasz Kosowski, a Pinellas County plastic surgeon, in a contentious lawsuit that grew out of a bad online review and a medical billing dispute. Investigators came to believe that Kosowski's anger over that case turned into a fixation on Cozzi personally, and that he planned and carried out an attack on the lawyer inside the Blanchard Law office.

Kosowski was arrested less than a week after Cozzi disappeared, on March 27, 2023, and was held in jail through more than three years of pretrial proceedings while he faced a first-degree murder charge that carried the possibility of the death penalty. He eventually dismissed his public defender and chose to represent himself at trial, and he waived his right to a jury, leaving the verdict to a judge alone.

That trial opened in Clearwater in September 2026. Prosecutors spent six days presenting evidence, including cell-site data placing Kosowski near the law office and later near his own home, DNA and blood evidence linking him to the crime scene and his truck, and surveillance video they said showed him entering the building with an empty box and leaving hours later pulling a heavy wagon. Kosowski, who did not testify or call witnesses, spent much of the trial challenging how prosecutors said he had moved a body that weighed roughly 190 pounds.

On September 23, 2026, Judge Joseph Bulone found Kosowski guilty of first-degree murder in Cozzi's death, more than three and a half years after the attorney vanished. A separate sentencing phase will follow, at which the judge will decide whether Kosowski is sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole.

Cozzi's disappearance and the long search for answers had already drawn wide attention in the Tampa Bay area, and his husband spoke publicly during the case about the loss. Cozzi's body has still not been found, and for his family the conviction closes one chapter of a case that began with an ordinary day at the office and ended without a resting place to visit.