Jury Wants the Ex-prison Guard Trainee Who Killed Five People at a Florida Bank to Be Put to Death

On Wednesday, a jury said that a former jail guard trainee should be put to death for killing five women in a Florida bank five years ago in a way that looked like an execution. The killings fulfilled his long-held desire to kill.

Zephen Xaver should be put to death for the murders that happened at the SunTrust Bank in Sebring on January 23, 2019, about 85 miles southeast of Tampa. The jury decided 9-3 in favor of this.

When the verdicts were given by the judge after less than three hours of deliberation, Xaver, 27, looked straight ahead and didn’t show any emotion.

Circuit Judge Angela Cowden makes the final choice. She could go against what the jury said and give Xaver a life sentence without the chance to get out. After a hearing next month, she said, she would decide when to sentence the person.

According to a law from 2023 in Florida, the jury only had to decide 8-4 in favor of the death penalty for Cowden to carry it out. State law used to say that a judge needed a unanimous decision from a jury to put someone to death. But after the shooter who killed 17 people at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature changed the law.

Xaver pleaded guilty last year to five counts of first-degree murder. This ended a hearing that had been set to happen but had been put off for years because of the COVID-19 pandemic, legal disputes, and sick lawyers.

Someone named Cynthia Watson, 65, who had been married for less than a month, was one of Xaver’s victims. Others were Marisol Lopez, 55, a bank teller coordinator and mother of two; Ana Pinon-Williams, 38, a mother of seven; Debra Cook, 54, a bank teller and grandmother of two; and Jessica Montague, 31, a mother of one and stepmother of four.

He told them to lie on the ground, and as they cried out, “Why?” he shot each of them in the head.

Earlier Wednesday, prosecutor Bonde Johnson said that Xaver should be put to death because the massacre was planned ahead of time, was “shockingly evil,” and met his long-held desire to kill.

“He didn’t kill anyone to really understand what it’s like to kill.” He killed five. He looked at them as they lay on the ground. They were under his control, and he shot each one for fun, she said.

But Xaver’s lawyer, Jane McNeill, asked the jury to not convict him because he is mentally ill and has been hearing voices since childhood telling him to kill himself and others. She said he asked for help but never really got it.

McNeill told the panel, “We ask you to show Zephen what he may least deserve: compassion, grace, and mercy.” Her voice broke as she said, “Sentencing Zephen to life is the right thing to do.”

During the two-week trial, the prosecutors said that Xaver was a cold-blooded killer who claimed to hear voices to hide his violent urges. His lawyers said that he has had mental episodes for a long time.

In 2014, Xaver’s Indiana high school principal called the cops after he told a counselor that he had dreams about killing other students. It was his mother, Misty Hendricks, who said she would get him mental health help. She said in court that she stopped giving him his medicines when he was 17 because he seemed to be getting better.

He joined the Army, but because he thought about killing someone, he was kicked out of boot camp in 2016. Those thoughts kept going.

“Every day, all I hear and see is that. It’s all I can think about. Every day, all I can smell and taste is blood, death, and murder. Xaver wrote a friend, “It’s all I do 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” He wrote things like this online.

In 2018, he moved to Sebring. He got a job at the nearby prison but quit after two months. In that time, two weeks had passed since the day he bought the gun.

He texted a lover for a long time the morning of the killings, telling her it would be the “best day of his life,” but he wouldn’t say why.

He finally told her he was going to die right before he went into the bank. Then he added “The fun part.”

“I want to kill some people, so I’m taking some with me,” he texted.

After that, Xaver made suicide threats but gave up in the end.

Defense witnesses said Xaver was a quiet, nice kid who had trouble in school and then became bad as a teen.

Melissa Manges, Xaver’s high school counselor, said that he wanted more help for his troubling ideas but could not get into any long-term residential programs.

She said, “Zephen was let down by the system.”

The state attorney for the area, Brian Haas, was happy with the decision, but he said in a statement that the victims should be the focus, not “the monster who committed these crimes.”

“On that terrible day in January 2019, five women were killed. They were mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and so much more to many people.” “While they waited for justice, their families went through a lot without them,” he said.