A prison guard trainee who executed five women inside a Florida bank has been sentenced to death.
Zephen Xaver, 27, appeared to gulp but otherwise showed no emotion as Judge Angela Cowden pronounced the sentence at the Highlands County Courthouse in Sebring.
At gunpoint, Xaver ordered his victims, all women, to lie on the floor and then shot each the head as they begged for mercy.
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.
Hours before the murders, Xaver began a long, intermittent text message conversation with a former girlfriend in Connecticut, telling her “this is the best day of my life” but refusing to say why. Fifteen minutes before the shootings, he texted her, “I’m dying today,”
Then, from the bank parking lot he texted, “I’m taking a few people with me because I’ve always wanted to kill people so I am going to try it and see how it goes. Watch for me on the news.”
After a two-week penalty trial, a jury in June voted 9-3 to recommend that Cowden sentence Xaver to death.
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.
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.”
Michael Cook, Debra’s husband, also called Xaver a coward and told the judge, “I have absolutely no sympathy for him.”
Xaver’s lead public defender, Jane McNeill, had asked that Cowden spare her client, saying a life sentence would put an end to the case instead of dragging it out for a decade of appeals and possibly a retrial if the sentence is overturned.
“The only way for this matter to be brought to an end so that the families of the victims and this community is able to move forward is a life sentence,” McNeill argued. The sentence will be automatically appealed.
