CORAL SPRINGS, Fla. — The husband of Coral Springs Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer Bowen shot her dead at their home with a shotgun that had been muzzled with a pillow, according to police records released Thursday.

Officers found the vice mayor’s body, wrapped in a comforter and black trash bags, in the bedroom of her home in the 800 block of Northwest 127th Avenue Wednesday after her coworkers became concerned that she had not shown up for scheduled city meetings.

Her husband, Stephen Bowen, is charged with first-degree murder.

City employees first noticed something was wrong when Metayer Bowen stopped responding to texts on Wednesday morning and did not appear for scheduled meetings, including a 9 a.m. City Commission meeting, according to a probable cause affidavit from Coral Springs Police. The last time anyone heard from her was at 8 a.m., when a city employee received a text message from her phone number titled “Discussion Items,” but nothing further.

The employee then texted Stephen Bowen, asking if he could tell his wife to contact her. Bowen responded that he “texted her. She is not picking up.”

“She didn’t show up for this morning’s Charter School board and commission meeting,” the employee responded.

“Where is she?” Bowen said, according to the affidavit. “Her car is not at home.”

Coral Springs Police Chief Brad Mock, who was at the commission meeting that Metayer Bowen missed, notified other police personnel about his concerns. Two officers were sent to the home she shared with Bowen. When they got there, no cars where outside and no one answered the door. A neighbor reported seeing Metayer Bowen walking her dog around midnight, but had not seen her since.

Police tried several times to contact Bowen, but he did not respond, according to the affidavit. His parents arrived at the home later that morning after Metayer Bowen’s mother requested they check on her daughter. They said that they had no way of getting into the house. The last time they talked to Bowen was Tuesday, they said, when he mentioned that he had a panic attack at work and was going to speak to Metayer Bowen about it.

His mother said she did not know of any “marital issues” between them. Bowen had also not responded to any of her calls, she told officers.

While investigating outside the Bowen home on Wednesday afternoon, a detective noticed damage to the exterior of the home’s second floor, including crumbled stucco and exposed wiring. “The outward, explosive-like damage was consistent with damage caused by projectiles,” the probable cause affidavit said.

Multiple police agencies began surveilling Bowen’s car, a black Ford F-150. They tracked him to a parking lot in Plantation shortly before 2 p.m., where he met with a man and handed him what appeared to be a gun-carrying case. Later, officers interviewed the man, who said he and Bowen are both Masons and that they met to discuss an “upcoming meeting.” During the meeting, Bowen asked him to hold a gun bag and ammo for him, he said, according to the affidavit.

Around that same time Wednesday afternoon, Coral Springs Police received a 911 call from a man who identified himself as Bowen’s uncle. Bowen had come to his house at around 10 a.m. that day, the uncle said, according to the affidavit, and said that he “did something to her” and “she was not alive,” referencing Metayer Bowen.

By that point, police said they had enough evidence to force their way into the couple’s home. In the bed of the second-floor bedroom, they found Metayer Bowen’s body, wrapped in blankets and black garbage bags. A sergeant recognized the vice mayor and declared her dead a little before 2:30 p.m.

A few minutes later, police arrested Bowen in Plantation.

When police interviewed Bowen’s uncle later that day, the uncle told them that Bowen had come to his house earlier that morning and gave him a gun and told him he needed him to hold it for a couple of weeks, according to the affidavit.

“Stephen Bowen explained that he shot her three times with a shotgun the previous night and then slept downstairs,” the affidavit said. “When asked why, Stephen Bowen said that he ‘couldn’t take it anymore’.”

When police searched the Coral Springs home, they found three spent shotgun shells wrapped in the comforter with Metayer Bowen’s body, and a pillow with burn marks and string “as if it were fashioned as a makeshift silencer,” according to the affidavit.

Bowen is being held in the Broward County main jail on charges of premeditated murder and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence. At a first-appearance hearing in Broward County Court Thursday morning, a judge ordered him held without bond.

Metayer Bowen and her husband were married in 2022, according to their Broward County marriage license.

Bowen, 40, worked at Delray Medical Center, according to the affidavit. He has an active license as a certified radiologic technologist that was issued in 2014 by the Department of Health. He was listed as the chief operating officer of Men of St. Luke Inc., a nonprofit based in Hollywood, as of 2025, state business records show. The organization originally registered in 2009 under the name The Most Worshipful Union Grand Lodge of Florida, St. Luke Lodge #530 and was described as a statewide Masonic organization.

Bowen frequently posted videos of himself at tactical shooting ranges on his personal Instagram. One video pinned to his profile depicts him on a wild boar hunt, smoking a cigar. His bio reads, “God | Husband | Armed.”

Several posts on the account also show him and Metayer Bowen celebrating their relationship.

“Three years of building, dreaming, and loving each other through everything,” he wrote in his latest post last November for their anniversary, with a photograph of him and Metayer Bowen at their wedding.

Several state politicians expressed shock about the vice mayor’s sudden death, which they referred to in written statements as a shooting death.

No prior domestic violence filings involving the couple appear in Broward court records, and Bowen did not have any criminal history in Broward besides two misdemeanor drug arrests that prosecutors declined to pursue.

Metayer Bowen, 38, was first elected in 2020, won reelection in 2024 and last November was appointed by the commission to serve a second, one-year term as vice mayor, according to her bio on the city’s website. She was the first Black and Haitian-American woman to hold a seat on the city commission and an environmental scientist who formerly served on the Broward County Soil and Water Conservation District.

City Manager Catherine Givens said at the news conference the city will have a behavioral health program available to employees.

“What’s worse is the tremendous grief that her family must endure. If you knew Nancy, her family was everything,” Givens said. “… She wasn’t just a leader; she was the light in every room that she entered. She was a steady voice in difficult times, a compassionate soul who lifted others up and a friend to so many.”

Commissioner Joshua Simmons spoke on behalf of the commission, which he said is now “incomplete.”

“She had such a good heart. She truly cared about people, even when people were saying some of the most horrible things about her and us,” Simmons told reporters. “She still cared, rolled up her sleeves, went to every event that she could go to because she truly cared about people and making sure people had a relationship with their elected officials.”

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in 2024 named Metayer Bowen as its Caribbean vote director in Florida, the South Florida Sun Sentinel previously reported.

Rep. Dan Daley, D-Coral Springs, and Rep. Christine Hunschofsky, D-Parkland, attended the news conference, who were both close friends of Metayer Bowen.

Her family shared a statement on Metayer Bowen’s social media Wednesday evening.

“Throughout her years in public office, she led with integrity, compassion, and an unwavering sense of purpose,” the family’s statement said. “She believed in bringing people together, listening to those she served, and working tirelessly to create positive change in her community. To us, she was a source of strength, wisdom, and love — someone who always put others before herself.”

“While many knew her as a leader and advocate, we knew her as a sister, a daughter, and a friend whose warmth and laughter filled every room. Her legacy will live on not only in the policies she helped shape but in the countless lives she touched.”

Metayer Bowen’s younger brother, Donovan Joshua Leigh Metayer, died by suicide in their family home in December at age 26. He was a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland during the 2018 mass shooting and struggled with mental health issues afterward, according to a GoFundMe online fundraiser for funeral expenses.

Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat representing the Orlando area, in a statement shared on social media Wednesday said that Metayer Bowen’s family has “already experienced deep loss” with his suicide.

“Nancy and I worked side by side in the reproductive rights movement for years, and I’ve been honored to call her not just a colleague, but a dear friend,” Eskamani wrote. “She was brilliant, compassionate, and deeply committed to justice. I’m heartbroken by this loss, her future in politics and leadership was only just beginning, and our communities will feel that absence profoundly.”

Metayer Bowen also held the title of vice chair of Haitian Outreach for the Florida Democratic Party. In a statement Wednesday evening, Chair Nikki Fried called Metayer Bowen’s death “sudden and horrific.”

“Nancy was not simply our Vice Chair of Haitian Outreach. She was a scientist. An environmentalist,” Fried said in the statement. “A brilliant barrier-breaker who made history as the first Black and Haitian American woman elected to the Coral Springs City Commission. A Vice Mayor who showed up every single day for the people she served. She loved her community deeply and believed, with every fiber of her being, that a better and more equitable future was possible for all of us.”

Metayer Bowen was a graduate of Florida A&M University and earned her master’s degree in health science from Johns Hopkins University.

In 2011, she was an intern in the White House during the Obama administration and an intern for then-U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson in his Tallahassee office before becoming the program manager of two nonprofit foundations in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The Coral Springs Police Department Crimes Against Persons Unit asks anyone with information regarding this incident to call Detective Daniel Powers at 954-346-1223 or email dpowers@coralsprings.gov.

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