Former prison guard trainee is sentenced to death for killing 5 women at a Florida bank

By TERRY SPENCER The Associated Press

FILE - This Jan. 23, 2019, file, booking photo released by the Highlands County Sheriff's Office shows Zephen Xaver. (Highlands County Sheriff's Office via AP, File)[ASSOCIATED PRESS]

A former prison guard trainee who executed five women inside a Florida bank almost six years ago was sentenced to death on Monday as his judge called the slayings calculated, heinous and cruel.

Zephen Xaver, 27, appeared to gulp but otherwise showed no emotion as Circuit Judge Angela Cowden pronounced the sentence at the Highlands County Courthouse in Sebring. After a two-week penalty trial, a jury in June voted 9-3 to recommend that Cowden sentence Xaver to death.

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.

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.

At gunpoint, Xaver ordered the women to lie on the floor and then shot each the head as they begged for mercy.

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.

Under a new Florida law, death penalty sentences can be rendered by a jury vote of 8-4 rather than a unanimous recommendation. The change was adopted after the 2018 Parkland high school shooter could not be sentenced to death for murdering 17 people despite a 9-3 jury vote. McNeill called the new law unconstitutional.

Xaver moved to Sebring, a city of about 11,000, in 2018 from near South Bend, Indiana. In 2014, his high school principal contacted police after Xaver told others he was having dreams about hurting his classmates. His mother promised to get him psychological help.

He joined the Army in 2016. A former girlfriend, who met him at a mental hospital where they were patients, told police he said joining the military was a “way to kill people and get away with it.” The Army discharged him after three months. In 2017, a Michigan woman reported him after he sent her text messages suggesting he might commit “suicide by cop” or take hostages.

Despite his psychological problems and dismissal from the Army, Florida hired Xaver as a guard trainee in November 2018 at a prison near Sebring. He quit two months later, two weeks before the shootings and the day after he bought his gun.

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.”