SEBRING, Fla. — A Florida jury recommended Wednesday afternoon that the former prison guard trainee who shot and killed five women inside a Sebring bank in 2019 be sentenced to death.
After a weeklong hearing, the jury voted 9-3 in favor of the death penalty for 27-year-old Zephen Xaver. The jury deliberated less than three hours before reaching its verdict.
The final decision rests with Circuit Judge Angela Cowden, who could reject the recommendation and sentence Xaver to life in prison without parole. The judge is expected to set a sentencing date later.
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.
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?”
Assistant State Attorney Bonde Johnson told jurors during closing arguments that Xaver carried out the mass shooting at Sebring's SunTrust bank to satisfy his yearslong desire to experience killing, forcing the women to lie down before executing them.
“He didn't murder one person to truly know what it would be like to kill. He killed five. He watched them lying there on the floor. They were under his control, for his enjoyment, as he shot each one,” Johnson said.
But defense attorney Jane McNeill asked the 12 jurors to spare Xaver, saying that he is mentally ill, hearing voices since childhood urging him to kill himself and others. He sought help, she said, but never truly got it.
“We ask you to show Zephen what he may least deserve — compassion, grace and mercy,” McNeill said, her voice breaking. “Compassion is not a limited resource. Grace is not limited. Mercy is not limited. Sentencing Zephen to life is the right thing to do.”
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 behavior. 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.