Joe Sullivan and Nathan McCants

Joe Sullivan and Nathan McCants were co-defendants in the burglary that preceded the sexual-assault case against Sullivan. McCants was seventeen and Sullivan was thirteen when, on May 4, 1989, they and fifteen-year-old Michael Gulley entered Lena Bruner’s empty home in Pensacola, Florida. The relationship between the two boys became consequential not simply because they had committed a burglary together, but because McCants’s account helped implicate Sullivan in a violent crime that occurred hours after they had left the house.

The Burglary and Its Aftermath

That morning, the three boys broke into Bruner’s home. McCants took money and jewelry, and the boys left. In the afternoon, Bruner was sexually assaulted in her home by someone she could not clearly see. The assault was separate in time from the burglary; Sullivan admitted taking part in the earlier break-in but denied knowing about or participating in the later attack.

Within minutes of the assault, McCants and Gulley were apprehended together, and McCants had Bruner’s jewelry. Sullivan was not arrested that day. After learning that the other boys had implicated him, he turned himself in the following day. His account therefore distinguished his admitted role in the burglary from the sexual assault he denied committing.

From Co-Defendants to Accuser and Accused

Facing serious felony charges, Gulley accused Sullivan of the sexual battery. The prosecution also relied on accounts from both Gulley and McCants, whom the book describes as offering self-serving stories. Gulley claimed that Sullivan had confessed to the rape in a detention facility before trial; the account does not attribute that particular confession claim to McCants. The distinction matters: McCants’s role in implicating Sullivan was part of the prosecution’s case, but the specific alleged confession belonged to Gulley’s testimony.

Sullivan testified that he had joined the burglary but had not committed the sexual battery. The case thus turned on a consequential asymmetry between the boys’ admitted shared conduct and the separate accusation against Sullivan: participation in the break-in placed him at the house, while the prosecution used the other boys’ accounts to connect him to the later assault.

Unequal Outcomes

The co-defendants’ sentences diverged sharply. McCants was sentenced as an adult to four and a half years and served six months. Gulley, despite admitting involvement in about twenty prior burglaries and a previous sex crime, was adjudicated and sentenced as a juvenile and spent only a short time in juvenile detention. Sullivan, by contrast, was indicted in adult court at thirteen, without a review of whether his case belonged in juvenile or adult court.

Sullivan received a life-without-parole sentence for a non-homicide offense. After years of challenges to such sentences for children, he was released from a Florida prison on December 1, 2017, and later moved to Joseph House, a home for formerly incarcerated people with significant disabilities. McCants’s limited prison term and Sullivan’s decades-long path to release mark the lasting imbalance produced by the case: the boy who admitted the burglary served only months, while the younger co-defendant remained imprisoned for decades over an assault he denied committing.

Significance of the Relationship

The account presents McCants and Sullivan first as boys involved in the same break-in, then as co-defendants whose positions diverged once the sexual-assault investigation began. McCants’s possession of the stolen jewelry tied him to the burglary, while his account helped place Sullivan under suspicion for the later assault. The book does not establish that McCants alone caused Sullivan’s conviction; it shows instead how his implication, alongside Gulley’s accusation and the prosecution’s other evidence, became part of the case against him.

Their different treatment also illuminates the stakes of prosecuting children as adults. McCants was sentenced as an adult but served only a short term; Sullivan was sent directly into adult criminal court at thirteen and condemned to die in prison. His eventual release makes the contrast visible across time, while leaving the original distinction intact: the shared burglary did not lead to shared responsibility or remotely comparable consequences.