A former prison guard trainee who massacred five women at a Florida bank in 2019 was sentenced to death on Monday.
Circuit Judge Angela Cowden levied the harsh penalty on Zephen Xaver, 27, based on the weeks of planning he undertook, as well as the cruelty and savagery of the crime. The sentence mirrored a jury’s recommendation in June, which voted 9-3 for execution.
The sentencing hearing took place at the Highlands County Courthouse in Sebring, Fla., the same city where Xaver executed 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, on Jan. 23, 2019.
He pleaded guilty last year to five counts of first-degree murder for the killings, which investigators said were random.
Xaver — 21 when he went on the murderous rampage — burst into the bank branch in the small city about 70 miles southeast of Tampa, ordered the women to lie on the floor, and shot them in the head as they begged for mercy. He then called police from inside the bank and told them, “I have shot five people,” investigators later said. When police arrived, Xaver barricaded himself inside the bank and held out until a SWAT team forced him to surrender.
Ex-girlfriend Alex Gerlach said after the shootings that he had long held a fascination with guns and death, and that she had raised warnings that were not taken seriously. Other women he had dated had similar stories of disturbing communications. His high school principal in Indiana had called police in 2014 when the then-16-year-old Xaver told others he was having dreams that involved hurting his classmates.
The mental health issues and other mitigating factors led his public defenders to ask for life in prison. But the jury had disagreed, and so did the victims’ relatives.
“I have absolutely no sympathy for him,” Debra Cook’s husband, Michael Cook, told the judge at Monday’s sentencing hearing.
“You shattered me into a million pieces,” said Kiara Lopez, noting that her mother, victim Marisol Lopez, had welcomed Xaver into the bank with a smile. “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.”
With News Wire Services
