ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Ninth Circuit prosecutors kicked off their third attempt to sentence convicted murderer Bessman Okafor to death Monday, telling a new panel of jurors that the evidence pointed to no other justified sentence.
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“Someone is going to die here tonight,” Ryan Williams quoted, recalling what victims overheard as they laid face down on the floor in 2012.
Okafor was the mastermind behind the shooting of 19-year-old Alex Zalvidar and two others in September of that year, one day before Zalvidar was scheduled to testify against Okafor in a home invasion case.
One of the survivors, Brienna Campos, became emotional as she testified about waking up to banging coming from her home’s living area, and being dragged to the living room at gunpoint, partially dressed.
“I laid there, heard a loud bang, pressure in the left side of my head, ringing,” she said, adding that she realized she had been shot on the left side of her head and played dead.
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Campos and her brother, who was also shot, later jumped a neighbor’s fence to get help.
A jury convicted Okafor in 2015 and sentenced him to death by an 11-1 vote.
However, the Florida Supreme Court later overturned the sentence because it wasn’t unanimous.
A second attempt was made at a death sentence in November, but the trial was derailed when a juror lied to the judge to get out of deliberations. The juror was later sentenced to six months in jail and fined.
“I just feel bad for all the jurors,” Rafael Zalvidar, Alex’s father, said. “They have to come back here again after what happened last time.”
Zalvidar said he liked the new panel, comprised of 10 men and four women. Most of the jurors are white, which defense attorneys attempted to protest.
State law recently changed to allow eight people to recommend a death sentence, rather than unanimity. The change has not been tested in front of the new, more conservative Florida Supreme Court.
However, if the new panel is not unanimous, it may cause prosecutors to return for a fourth time later on.
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Zalvidar said hearing about his son’s final moments never gets easier.
“These politicians and lawmakers, they keep on changing the laws and then we’re victimized again,” he said.
The trial is expected to last several weeks.
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