Convicted Killer Michael Bruyette Runs for Palm Bay City Council Again, With Voting Already Underway
Michael J. Bruyette, who remains on parole for a murder in Massachusetts, has qualified for a second run at Palm Bay City Council. He is on the ballot for Seat 4 with two other opponents. Early voting for the August 18 primary began today, and mail ballots are already in circulation.
Bruyette first ran for Seat 3 in 2024 and finished last in a six way field. This time he switched seats, qualified on June 8, and has built his campaign around public safety, often speaking at city council meetings with inaccurate and even false information. This year he’s running with the support of another candidate running for Seat 5, Isabelle Wright.
But the questions The Space Coast Rocket first raised in 2024 about his eligibility, his account of his own crime, and his status as a supervised parolee remain unresolved, and they are back on the table with a primary ten days away.
The Killing, According to the Official Record
Bruyette was 19 in June 1985 when he pleaded guilty in Hampden Superior Court, Massachusetts, to second degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the death of Thomas Grimshaw. He was sentenced on July 9, 1986 to life in prison with the possibility of parole, plus a consecutive seven to ten years for the conspiracy count.
According to the Massachusetts Parole Board’s own account of the case, Grimshaw’s estranged wife, Lisa Grimshaw, recruited Bruyette and two other young men to kill her husband. She told them he had a $300,000 life insurance policy and offered to share the payout if they helped. On the night of June 5, 1985, she lured her husband to a boat launch in Chicopee with the promise of sex, where Bruyette and an accomplice were waiting with baseball bats. Bruyette took Grimshaw’s wallet after the killing.
That is a materially different account than the one Bruyette has given reporters. He told Fox News Digital in 2024 that it was “nothing more than me intervening on a guy that kept repeatedly raping his ex-wife,” and told Fox 35 Orlando that he “was protecting a woman.” Neither account squares easily with a guilty plea to conspiracy to commit murder, a charge that by definition requires planning before the fact rather than a reaction in the moment. The record supports a plot solicited for money. It does not establish that Grimshaw was a rapist.
Can He Legally Hold the Seat?
Article VI, Section 4(a) of the Florida Constitution disqualifies anyone convicted of a felony from voting or holding office until their civil rights are restored. Florida’s 2018 automatic restoration amendment, which restores voting rights after a sentence including parole is complete, specifically excludes murder convictions, and it only ever covered the vote, not office-holding.
Massachusetts law works differently. It automatically restores a person’s civil rights, including the right to vote, once they are released from incarceration, even while still on parole. Florida has generally deferred to that kind of out of state restoration under principles of comity, which is why Bruyette was able to register to vote and qualify as a candidate at all.
Voting rights and office-holding rights are not the same thing under Florida law, and the distinction has already cost someone a seat. In December 2022, Governor DeSantis declared a Broward County School Board seat vacant after member-elect Rod Velez took office with his voting rights restored under Amendment 4 but without the separate restoration of civil rights needed to hold office. Board certified Florida trial attorney Geoffrey Golub told LiveNOW from FOX in 2024 that Bruyette “would seem” eligible to hold office under Article VI, but added that the outcome would have been different had the murder happened in Florida.
Florida’s qualifying process does not independently test that question. Candidates for local office sign a sworn oath affirming they are constitutionally qualified for the office they seek, and state election law treats a city clerk’s review of that paperwork as ministerial, meaning the clerk checks that the form is complete, not that the underlying claim is true. Whether Bruyette’s Massachusetts restoration actually satisfies Article VI, Section 4(a) for a municipal office in Florida has never been tested by a court or ruled on by the state.
Would His Parole Terms Let Him Serve?
As The Space Coast Rocket reported in 2024, Bruyette’s 2016 parole grant, which followed a 2011 revocation after a domestic violence arrest in Palm Bay, came with conditions that included close supervision and a curfew. Those were the terms attached to his release nearly a decade ago. What his conditions look like today, under continuing Interstate Compact supervision in Florida, has not been independently confirmed.
That matters because Palm Bay City Council meetings, workshops, and special sessions routinely run into the evening. If Bruyette is still subject to a curfew or reporting restrictions, that could conflict with the basic duties of the seat. Bruyette has said his parole officer signed off on his candidacy, but a green light to run is not the same as a green light to attend a 7 p.m. council meeting for four years.
What Voters Have Already Told Him
Palm Bay voters have weighed in on Bruyette once before. In the 2024 primary for Seat 3, he finished sixth out of six candidates with merely 833 votes, trailing the field by a wide margin. The two candidates who advanced to that runoff, Chandler Langevin and Alfy Agarie, split more than 47 percent of the vote between them.
This cycle, Bruyette faces a better funded incumbent. He’s now also facing a litany of campaign finance violations for his chronic failure to follow Florida’s campaign finance laws to include virtually all of his campaign materials lacking the legal disclosures required by the state. Making it worse, even after being informed of the violations of the law, Bruyette still uses the same illegal materials in his campaign today.
Under Palm Bay’s charter, if no candidate clears 50 percent in the August 18 primary, the top two finishers move on to the November 3 general election. Early voting in Brevard County is open now through August 15.
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