SEBRING, Fla. — A Florida judge sentenced the former prison guard trainee who shot and killed five women inside a Sebring bank in 2019 to death.
Back in June, the jury voted 9-3 in favor of the death penalty for 27-year-old Zephen Xaver. On Monday, Circuit Judge Angela Cowden took the recommendation and sentenced him to death.
The judge said the suffering the women experienced is best described as a "torturous murder." She also said the shooting was "heinous and cruel."
It was "cold and calculated," she said.
Xaver pleaded guilty last year to five counts of first-degree murder for the Jan. 23, 2019, massacre at a SunTrust Bank in Sebring, a community located about 85 miles southeast of Tampa.
Xaver's victims included customer Cynthia Watson, 65, who had been married less than a month; bank teller coordinator Marisol Lopez, 55, who was a mother of two; banker trainee Ana Pinon-Williams, a 38-year-old mother of seven; bank teller Debra Cook, a 54-year-old mother of two and a grandmother; and banker Jessica Montague, 31, a mother of one and stepmother of four.
He ordered them to lie on the floor and then shot them as they cried out, “Why?”
A woman whose 55-year-old mother, Marisol Lopez, was killed in the shooting gave a statement to the court before the sentencing.
Kiara Lopez, 27, said she’s spent the majority of her twenties grieving.
“You shattered me into a million pieces. I’ll never be able to find the pieces to put myself back together again and I loathe you for it,” she said. Lopez described the immense pain she has experienced as a result of the shooting.
She said she's had nightmares for years and will never forget what the gunshot wound looked like on the side of her mother's head.
"I will celebrate the day you die and let it know that you will always be a killer, coward and a waste of human life," she said.
Michael Cook, who lost his wife Debra in the shooting, describes Xaver as a coward.
"I have absolutely no sympathy for him," he said. "If they would let me, I would be the one to pull the switch on him."
Xaver's lawyer reminded the court of the statement he made expressing his remorse that he submitted. She also said the change in Florida's law was unconstitutional and if the previous law was still in effect, Xaver would have been sentenced to life without parole.
Under a 2023 Florida law, a jury only has to vote 8-4 in favor of the death penalty. Previous Florida law required a unanimous jury recommendation for a judge to impose a death sentence. It was changed after a 9-3 jury vote spared the life of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz.
In 2014, Xaver's high school principal in Indiana contacted police after he told a counselor that he dreamed of killing classmates, among other alarming behaviors. His mother, Misty Hendricks, promised to get him psychological help. She testified at trial that she stopped his medications at 17 because he seemed to be doing better.
He joined the Army but was discharged during boot camp in 2016 because of homicidal thoughts. Those thoughts continued, the jury heard.
“It’s all I can think of, it’s all I hear every day and it’s all I see every day. It’s all I smell and taste every day: blood, death and murder. It’s all I have happening 24/7,” Xaver wrote a friend. He made similar posts online.
He moved to Sebring in 2018. The local prison soon hired him, but he quit after two months. That was the day after he bought his gun and two weeks before the massacre.
The morning of the killings, he had a long text message conversation with a girlfriend, telling her it would be the “best day of his life” but refused to say why.
He finally told her just minutes before he entered the bank: he was about to die. He then added “the fun part.”
“I’m taking a few people with me because I’ve always wanted to kill," he texted.
