A former prison guard trainee who executed five women inside a Florida bank almost six years ago was sentenced to death on Monday as a judge called the slayings calculated, heinous, and cruel. Zephen Xaver, 27, appeared to gulp but otherwise showed no emotion as Circuit Judge Angela Cowden pronounced the sentence at the Highlands County Courthouse in Sebring, the AP reports. After a two-week penalty trial, a jury in June voted 9-3 to recommend that Cowden sentence Xaver to death.
Cowden said the weeks of planning that Xaver performed before the 2019 murders at Sebring's SunTrust bank, the enormity of the crime, and the fear the victims felt as they were shot greatly outweighed the two dozen mitigating factors his attorneys had presented, including his history of mental illness, his benign brain tumor, and his jailhouse embrace of Christianity. "May God have mercy on your soul," Cowden told Xaver.
Xaver pleaded guilty last year to five counts of first-degree murder for the slayings of customer Cynthia Watson, 65; bank teller coordinator Marisol Lopez, 55; banker trainee Ana Pinon-Williams, 38; teller Debra Cook, 54; and banker Jessica Montague, 31. At gunpoint, Xaver ordered the women to lie on the floor and then shot each in the head as they begged for mercy. Kiara Lopez told Xaver and the court that her mother Marisol had welcomed him into the bank with a smile, an act he repaid by murdering her. "You shattered me into a million pieces," Lopez said. "I will celebrate the day you die, whenever that might be. Let it be known that you will always be a killer, a coward, a nobody, and a waste of human life."
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Under a new Florida law, death penalty sentences can be rendered by a jury vote of 8-4 rather than a unanimous recommendation. The change was adopted after the 2018 Parkland high school shooter could not be sentenced to death for murdering 17 people despite a 9-3 jury vote. (More death penalty stories.)
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