Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a death warrant to execute a man convicted of kidnapping a 6-year-old girl from her bedroom in 1979 and raping and murdering her in Brevard County.
Bryan Frederick Jennings, 66, is scheduled to be executed Nov. 13 and could be a record 16th inmate put to death by lethal injection this year in Florida. The state has carried out 13 executions and is slated to put to death Samuel Smithers on Tuesday and Norman Grim on Oct. 28.
Jennings was convicted of murdering Rebecca Kunash on May 11, 1979, in Merritt Island. A 1986 sentencing order included with documents posted Friday on the Florida Supreme Court website said Jennings in the early morning hours went to the window of the child’s bedroom and saw her asleep.
“He forcibly removed the screen, opened the window, and climbed into her bedroom,” the sentencing order by then-Circuit Judge Charles Harris said. “He put his hand over her mouth, took her to his car and proceeded to an area near the Girard Street Canal on Merritt Island.”
The judge wrote that Jennings raped the girl and then slammed her head on the ground, fracturing her skull.
“While she was still alive, defendant (Jennings) took her into the canal and held her head under the water until she drowned,” the sentencing order said.
At the time of the murder, Jennings was a 20-year-old U.S. Marine home on leave from Okinawa, Japan, the order said.
Harris wrote that the murder “was committed in a cold, calculated and premeditated manner without any pretence of moral or legal justification.” A jury recommended by an 11-1 vote that Jennings receive the death penalty.
“The defendant had driven by her house earlier in the evening, gone to her window and saw her asleep,” the sentencing order said. “He left only to return a short time later. At that time he made a conscious decision to enter her room and did so.”
Friday’s death warrant would continue a record pace that has included the state carrying out two executions in May, two in June, two in July, two in August, two in September and planning two in October. Victor Tony Jones was executed Sept. 30 for the 1990 murders of a couple in Miami-Dade County.
The previous modern-era record for executions in a year was eight in 1984 and 2014. The modern era represents the time since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, after a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling halted it.
Smithers, 72, is scheduled to be executed Tuesday at Florida State Prison for the 1996 murders of two women in Hillsborough County. His attorneys have filed a last-ditch appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court to try to halt the execution.
Grim, 65, was sentenced to death for murdering a woman in Santa Rosa County in 1998.
In addition to Jones, the state this year executed David Pittman on Sept. 17; Curtis Windom on Aug. 28; Kayle Bates on Aug. 19; Edward Zakrzewski on July 31; Michael Bell on July 15; Thomas Gudinas on June 24; Anthony Wainwright on June 10; Glen Rogers on May 15; Jeffrey Hutchinson on May 1; Michael Tanzi on April 8; Edward James on March 20; and James Ford on Feb. 13.
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