Death penalty recommended for man who ‘always wanted to kill’

A jury on Wednesday recommended that a former prison guard in training be sentenced to death for the execution-style murder of five women in a Florida bank five years ago.

The Highlands County jury recommended, by a vote of 9 to 3, that Zephen Xaver be sentenced to death for the January 23, 2019 massacre at the SunTrust Bank in Sebring, a community about 84 miles southeast of Tampa.

The jury deliberated for less than three hours before reaching its verdict.

Final sentencing rests with District Judge Angela Cowden, who could reject the jury’s recommendation and sentence 27-year-old Xaver to life in prison without parole. The judge is expected to set a sentencing date later.

Under a 2023 Florida law, all that was needed for Cowden to impose that sentence was for the jury to vote 8-4 for the death penalty. State law required a unanimous jury recommendation for a judge to impose the death penalty, but Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature changed that after a jury voted 9-3 to spare the gunman who murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in 2018.

A prosecutor argued on Wednesday at the trial to determine the death sentence against the murderer that Xaver deserved the death penalty for the massacre. He described it as “shockingly evil” and planned long in advance.

Assistant District Attorney Bonde Johnson also told jurors in his closing argument that the defendant committed the massacre at the SunTrust Bank in Sebring to satisfy his years-long desire to experience the killing by forcing the women to lie down before executing them.

“He didn’t kill one person to really know what it was like to kill. He killed five. He watched them lying there on the ground. They were under his control, for his pleasure, as he shot each one,” Johnson said.

But defense attorney Jane McNeill had asked the twelve jurors to spare Xaver because he was mentally ill and had been hearing voices since childhood telling him to kill himself and others. He had sought help, she said, but never really got any.

“We ask you to show Zephen what he perhaps least deserves – compassion, mercy and mercy,” McNeill said, her voice breaking before the jury began its deliberations. “Compassion is not a limited resource. Mercy is not limited. Mercy is not limited. Sentencing Zephen to life in prison is the right thing to do.”

The jury was inside the closed chamber while deliberating whether Xaver should be sentenced to death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Xaver pleaded guilty last year to five counts of first-degree murder for the January 23, 2019, killings in Sebring. The trial was delayed for years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, legal disputes and an attorney’s illness.

Xaver’s victims included 65-year-old customer Cynthia Watson, who had been married for less than a month; 55-year-old bank teller and mother of two; 38-year-old Ana Pinon-Williams, a trainee bank teller and mother of seven; 54-year-old bank teller and mother of two and grandmother; and 31-year-old bank teller Jessica Montague, mother of one and stepmother of four other children.

He ordered them to lie on the ground and then shot them while they screamed “Why?”

During the two-week trial, prosecutors portrayed Xaver as a cold and calculating killer who pretended to hear voices to hide his violent impulses. His lawyers countered that he had a long history of psychotic episodes. A defense doctor told jurors he had a small, benign brain tumor that could explain his behavior – a prosecution doctor testified that he did not have one.

In 2014, the principal of Xavier’s high school in Indiana contacted police after he told a counselor that he was having dreams about killing classmates and exhibiting other alarming behavior. His mother, Misty Hendricks, promised to get him psychological help. She testified in court that she stopped him from taking his medication when he was 17 because he seemed to be getting better.

He joined the army but was discharged during basic training in 2016 for having homicidal thoughts. Those thoughts persisted, the jury heard.

“It’s all I can think about, it’s all I hear every day, it’s all I see every day. It’s all I smell and taste every day: blood, death and murder. It’s all that happens to me 24/7,” Xaver wrote to a friend. He posted similar messages online.

In 2018, he moved to Sebring. The local prison soon hired him, but he quit after two months. That was one day after he bought his gun and two weeks before the massacre.

On the morning of the murders, he had a long text message conversation with a friend, telling her that it would be the “best day of his life,” but refusing to say why.

Just minutes before he entered the bank, he finally told her that he was about to die. Then he added “the funny part.”

“I’m taking some people with me because I’ve always wanted to kill,” he wrote.

After the murders, Xaver turned himself in after speaking on the phone with a sheriff’s crisis negotiator. He told a detective, “I deserve to die for this.”

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