TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Zephen Xaver, the man who killed five women at a Sebring bank, will learn whether he’ll spend life in prison or be sentenced to death in the coming weeks.
Xaver pled guilty last year to five counts of first-degree murder for shooting and killing the women at a Suntrust Bank in 2019.
Even after years of delays, the victims’ families will still have to wait for closure. The sentencing trial is expected to last until the end of June.
Under a new Florida law, the jury does not have to reach a unanimous decision to sentence Xaver to death. The jury’s vote only has to be 8-4 in favor of execution.
Defense attorneys are expected to request leniency from the jury, citing Xaver’s history of mental illness.
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.
Xaver moved to Sebring 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.
“I just killed five people.”
In the courtroom, Kristen Johnson, the 911 operator who fielded a call from Xaver after the murders, took the stand. Jurors heard the full 44-minute audio recording, listening as Johnson tried to keep Xaver calm while he discussed the killings and threatened suicide.
Xaver called 911 from a back room inside the bank and refused to open any doors for law enforcement. He clung to the 9 mm handgun, purchased shortly before the murders, throughout the phone call.
He said keeping the gun to his head “kept the voices quiet.”
“I just killed five people,” Xaver told Johnson. “I didn’t think I could do it.”
He calmly answered Johnson’s questions, stating that he killed the women because he “felt like (he) could.” He described where the victims, some still breathing, were located before saying he wanted to turn the gun on himself.
Xaver revealed that he quit his job with the Florida Department of Corrections two weeks before the shootings. He purchased the handgun at around the same time.
“The voices told me to kill the inmates,” Johnson said. He said those same voices, which he’s heard since he was 11 years old, told him to kill the bank shooting victims.
Despite his psychological problems and dismissal from the Army in 2016, Florida hired Xaver as a guard trainee in November 2018 at a prison near Sebring. A former girlfriend, who met him at a mental hospital, told police he said joining the military was a “way to kill people and get away with it.” He was discharged after three months.
“Watch for me on the news.”
About five hours before the murders, Xaver began a long, intermittent text message conversation with a 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.”
He then entered the bank, a sweatshirt covering his vest. Security video shows him smiling as he approaches Lopez, according to police reports. They briefly speak, before he pulls his gun and points it at her and the other women. He orders them against the wall before telling Lopez to lock the doors.
When she returns, he orders the women onto the floor face down. After shooting them, he calls police on his cellphone.
He had been in the bank less than four minutes.
Police spoke with Xaver for about an hour before a SWAT team broke into the bank. He surrendered a short time later and confessed in a taped interview with detectives. That statement has not been released, but will be played at the trial along with the security video.
Shortly after the shooting, the bank was torn down. The site is now a park with a memorial to the victims.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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