Defense says Florida murder charge came too late in sidewalk death case

Jacob John Kohlhas went from a battery case to a murder case after Alisa Marie Toth died from injuries investigators say began with a push outside his Miami home. The 72-year-old has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers are now attacking the charge on timing, arguing the state waited too long to upgrade the case.

Police said the confrontation happened on Oct. 21, 2025, in the 2900 block of Southwest 30th Court, where Kohlhas and Toth were strangers. According to the account laid out in court records and local reporting, Kohlhas called 911 to report that someone had fallen on the sidewalk outside his home. First responders found Toth unresponsive. Officers said Kohlhas told them he stepped outside after seeing Toth standing on the public sidewalk, told her to leave, and then pushed her backward onto the pavement.

What happened after the fall is what turned a street-corner dispute into a homicide case. Doctors found internal bleeding on a CT scan, diagnosed a traumatic brain injury and a subdural hematoma, and Toth was later declared brain dead on Nov. 1 before dying on Nov. 6. A medical examiner ruled her death a homicide caused by blunt trauma. Prosecutors first brought aggravated battery charges, then dropped that count in April 2026 and returned on June 12 with a second-degree murder charge, the same day Kohlhas was arrested on the new count.

That filing date is now the center of the defense challenge. Kohlhas’s attorneys say the murder case should be barred because too much time passed before the charge was filed, even though the injuries that led to Toth’s death were inflicted months earlier. In plain terms, the dispute is not over whether the sidewalk incident happened, but over when the law says the clock starts to run in a death that follows earlier injuries. The defense is trying to make the gap between the October encounter, Toth’s November death, and the June murder filing fatal to the case.

Florida prosecutors, meanwhile, appear to be leaning on the state’s homicide statute, which says a prosecution for a capital felony, a life felony, or a felony that resulted in a death may be commenced at any time. Kohlhas remained jailed without bond at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center after the arrest, according to Miami-Dade County records. For now, the case stands at the same curb where it began: a sidewalk encounter, a fatal fall, and a legal battle over whether the murder charge arrived before the clock ran out.