Relatives: Suspect would not have killed 8 kin

updated 6:15 p.m. ET Sept. 6, 2009

BRUNSWICK, Ga. - The brother of a Georgia man charged with slaying his father and seven others in a mobile home insisted Saturday that the suspect would never harm his family, and he also speculated that a dispute over drugs could have prompted the killings.

Family members spoke to reporters outside a graveside funeral for seven of the victims slain a week earlier inside the home they shared near the Georgia coast.

Their grief was mixed with shock after police charged 22-year-old Guy Heinze Jr. on Friday with eight counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his father, uncle, aunt and four cousins. The eighth victim was a boyfriend of one of the cousins, and his funeral arrangements are pending.

"I know my brother didn't do this. My brother has a conscience," 16-year-old Tyler Heinze said outside the rural cemetery where seven caskets topped with roses were resting atop freshly dug graves.

"I can say there was drug involvement in the house and I think somebody ripped somebody off and somebody needed to get their money back," said Tyler Heinze, who once lived at the mobile home but had moved in with his stepfather before the killings.

"Maybe somebody in the house double-crossed someone. It could've been my brother who double-crossed somebody, and it could be part of his fault that somebody came in there and did this."

‘My whole family’s dead!’
Police have refused to say how the victims died or what evidence they have against Guy Heinze, who reported the gruesome scene to authorities Aug. 29 in a chilling 911 call. He frantically told a dispatcher "My whole family's dead!" and said they appeared to have been beaten to death when he found them.

Heinze had been jailed soon after the slayings on charges of illegal possession of prescription drugs and marijuana, as well as lying to police and evidence tampering.

Video   Eighth victim dies in Georgia trailer killings Aug. 31: An eighth victim dies in a mass shooting incident at a Georgia trailer park, and police have arrested the family member who called 911 on evidence tampering and drug charges. MSNBC's Contessa Brewer reports. msnbc tv

Tyler Heinze declined to speak in detail about drug use at the mobile home.

"I'm not going to sit here and ruin my family's name," he said. "I don't want people to think my family was trash. They were hardworking people."

The suspect worked construction jobs hanging drywall and wanted to be a truck driver like his father, said his grandfather, William Heinze. The family called the suspect "Little Guy," until he outgrew his father.

"He loved his dad. I know in that 911 call that we heard on the news, he was devastated to find his dad dead like that," the grandfather said. "I just can't believe it, unless they really had some proof."

Copper-colored casket
Dozens gathered for the funeral at the Young's Island Community Church of God in McIntosh County, about 20 miles north of the mobile home park where the slayings occurred in neighboring Glynn County.

The copper-colored casket of the family patriarch, 44-year-old Rusty Toler Sr., sat beneath a green tent with the coffins of his two sons — Russell Jr., 20, and Michael, 19 — on either side. In front of them were two white caskets containing Toler's daughters, 22-year-old Chrissy and 15-year-old Michelle.

Beside the Toler men sat the caskets of Toler Sr.'s sister Brenda Gail Falagan, 49. Draped in an American flag, a nod to his prior Army service, was Guy Heinze Sr. He and Toler Sr. had been inseparable since childhood and referred to each other as brothers, though they were not blood relations, said Heinze Sr.'s father, William Heinze.

One victim, identified by police as Chrissy Toler's 3-year-old son, Byron Jimerson Jr., survived with critical injuries and remained hospitalized in Savannah.

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