An unusual murder trial is underway in Florida, where a plastic surgeon is accused of killing an attorney he had clashed with in court and placing his body in a dumpster that prosecutors say was later taken to a landfill.
Dr. Tomasz Kosowski, 47, is representing himself while wearing an orange jail uniform. He faces a first-degree murder charge and could receive the death penalty. Kosowski waived his right to a jury trial, leaving a Pinellas County judge to determine his fate.
Kosowski was arrested in March 2023 in connection with the disappearance of attorney Steven Cozzi. He has remained jailed ever since and maintains that he is innocent.
The two men first became connected through a legal dispute.
Tomasz Kosowski was accused of killing Steven Cozzi. (Pinellas County Sheriffs Office)
Beginning in 2019, Cozzi worked on a civil lawsuit involving money Kosowski allegedly was owed for work connected to personal injury cases. Cozzi helped represent the corporate defendants Kosowski was suing.
Court records show that Kosowski grew increasingly hostile toward Cozzi during the yearslong litigation. He blamed the attorney for his difficulties in the case and repeatedly sought to have him removed as defense counsel.
“He made a bunch of completely unwarranted, inappropriate accusations about Steve throughout the litigation,” Jake Pillsbury, an attorney who worked with Cozzi, testified in court.
Pillsbury said Cozzi had told others that Kosowski confronted him in a restroom during a deposition, called him “a scumbag” and declared that he was going to win.
The behavior left people close to Cozzi concerned for his safety.
Cozzi’s husband, Michael Montgomery, suggested arranging “some kind of on-site security” if Cozzi had to meet with Kosowski again.
Blood-spattered discovery
On March 21, 2023, Cozzi and Kosowski were both scheduled to participate in a teleconference hearing at 10 a.m.
Montgomery described the morning as ordinary. Cozzi brought him coffee, and the two briefly spoke before Cozzi left for work. It was the last time Montgomery saw him.
Roughly 10 minutes before the hearing, Cozzi left his phone, keys, wallet and other belongings on his desk before heading to the office restroom.
He never joined the scheduled teleconference.
Later, Cozzi’s boss entered the restroom and discovered blood spatter, according to court records.
Security video from the day Cozzi disappeared shows someone arriving at about 8:30 a.m. in a silver Toyota Tundra. Prosecutors allege the person was Kosowski.
Investigators said a man wearing dark gloves entered the building carrying a box “large enough to conceal a human body.”
Steven Cozzi vanished in Florida. Tomasz Kosowski was charged with his murder. (Largos Police Department)
At 10:22 a.m., the same man was captured leaving the building while pulling a wagon draped with a reddish-orange blanket.
The man could be seen struggling with the weight of the cart while pulling it to the truck, records show.
That day, the Tundra was driven to Kosowski’s home in Tarpon Springs, Florida, videos pieced together from multiple surveillance cameras showed, according to court records.
On the way, the truck passed a Flock camera that captured an image of “a red bag or blanket in a cart that appeared to contain what resembles a human body located in the bed of the truck,” according to arrest records.
Two days later, investigators arrived at Kosowski’s home with a search warrant and found the Tundra in the garage with blood in the truck bed, on the driver’s side headrest, on the driver’s side floorboard and on the garage floor.
Cozzi’s DNA was found in the Tundra and Kosowski’s garage floor, court records show.
In the search of Kosowski’s vehicles, investigators found a ballistic vest with a “substantial amount” of blood on it. They also found one iPhone and a “burner phone”––the term for an inexpensive, prepaid device meant to be discarded.
Law enforcement officials also found a vest meant to be worn by a medical first responder, sheriff’s office patches, a foldable bike, a gas can, $282,000 in cash, two passports and black, industrial-sized garbage bags.
Investigators also found a black duffel that the prosecution has called “a murder bag.” Inside, there were lighters, a Taser, scissors, brass knuckles, a crowbar, ski masks and a Guy Fawkes mask.
The bag also contained a syringe, a needle and a vial of succinylcholine, a paralytic drug. It was labeled in a way that connected it to Kosowski’s plastic-surgery office in Miami.
Surprising maneuvers caught on video
After Kosowski was arrested, police informed him they’d be searching his body to collect possible DNA and fingernail clippings, and would be taking photographs of him, the prosecution said.
After that, camera footage from inside the patrol car shows Kosowski struggling to bring his hands from behind his back, underneath his feet and up to his face.
He then began to “meticulously suck on each of his fingers,” a member of the prosecution team told the judge.
“He’s using his tongue and getting up underneath it and slurping. He’s using his teeth almost as a nail file, trying to destroy any trace of evidence that might bring him back to Steven Cozzi.”
The prosecution argues that Kosowski began planning the killing long before he allegedly murdered Cozzi.
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Authorities say Steven Cozzi was killed at this law office in Florida. (Google Maps)
More than a month before the attorney’s disappearance, Kosowski allegedly visited Cozzi’s home without his knowledge and photographed a car in the carport, according to the prosecution team.
Kosowski also visited Blanchard Law Firm where Cozzi worked. He drove around the building and took photos multiple times before Cozzi’s disappearance, the prosecution has alleged.
In early March 2023, Kosowski began searching Cozzi and Montgomery online, seeking information about their wedding and records about previous and current addresses, prosecutors said.
An employee of the building that housed the Blanchard Law Firm told investigators that a week before Cozzi’s disappearance, she found a man in a mask hiding in the office utility closet.
Suspicious, she asked him why he was there, court records show. He told her it was because of a power outage and walked away.
She watched him leave in a grey Toyota Tundra, investigators said.
Fingerprints matching Kosowski’s were later found in that closet.
Investigators never found Cozzi’s body.
Searching for Cozzi
On the day Cozzi disappeared, Kosowski’s cellphone was allegedly tracked traveling toward his second home in Miami. He pulled off on a dirt road in South Florida near the Everglades where there’s a dumpster, court records show.
Records of his cellphone’s location show he returned to the dumpster two days later, the prosecution alleges. The team argues that Kosowski returned to the garbage collection container to see if it had been emptied.
Law enforcement later investigated the dumpster and a K-9 trained in human detection alerted on it, indicating the presence of human remains. But a body was not found.
Investigators tracked down the garbage truck driver who collected that dumpster on his route. He remembers that day.
“It was a smell that he had never experienced,” a member of the prosecution team told the court.
“He described that smell as vile. He had to crush the trash back in his garbage truck so many times, because the stench was so overwhelming––and this is someone who is a garbage truck driver.”
The day he drove that load, the garbage truck driver stopped at a store to buy air freshener because he “could not stand the scent that was in his nose while he was driving around,” the prosecution said.
That smell was “Steven’s body decaying in the Florida heat for two days.”
Video captured by a camera mounted on the garbage truck captured the load from the dumpster tumbling into the truck. That footage shows “a lot of black industrial-sized garbage bags, similar to the ones that Dr. Kozowski had in the trunk of his car,” a prosecution team member told the judge.
Video shown in court shows bags falling into the truck that are “consistent with a human body,” the prosecution team said.
Law enforcement officers visited the landfill where the garbage truck dumped that load, but it was more than a week after it was deposited.
By that time, more than 6,000 tons of compacted garbage had been piled atop the load.
Still, in an attempt to recover the body of Cozzi, they sifted through the landfill for days, officers testified in court.
“His hearse was a dump truck, and his burial site… is at the Collier County Landfill,” a prosecutor told the court.
The prosecution team has called dozens of witnesses to testify before Judge Joseph Bulone.
In July 2025, a written plea of not guilty was submitted by an attorney representing Kosowski at the time. In that plea, he requested a trial by jury.
More than a year later, on Aug. 31, Kosowski told the court he’d changed his mind and wanted a judge to decide his fate.
His trialbegan on Sept. 14.
For the first three days of the trial, Kosowski sat mostly quiet, blandly staring at witnesses, taking notes and giving short answers to questions from the judge. On the fourth day, he began cross-examining some of the prosecution’s witnesses who had presented evidence.
He has objected to evidence obtained from his body, from his Toyota Corolla and from his residence, according to court records. His motions to suppress the evidence were denied.
On Sept. 18, the fifth day of his trial, he asked the judge to strike a key witness’s testimony about DNA evidence. He argued that the witness, a DNA expert, didn’t provide enough of his own interpretation of the numbers.
Bulone denied the motion, but said Kosowski could challenge the DNA findings in closing arguments.
News Media was not able to reach Kosowski for comment.
The trial is set to resume on Sept. 22.