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The heinousness, the cruelty, the atrocity of the murder was reflected in the brevity of the jury’s deliberations, and in the unanimity of its verdicts.
An all-white jury of 10 women and two men took 22 minutes last Friday to find Jermaine Williams Sr. guilty of the premeditated murder of wife Yolonda Williams, 50, by stabbing her some 20 times in the driveway of their Bunnell home in August 2024.
Today, the same jury–10 women, two men–took an hour and 38 minutes to recommend the death penalty for Williams. It did so by an emphatic 11-1 vote, and unanimous votes on each of the four aggravating factors. The prosecution needed a minimum of eight jurors to carry the death recommendation.
It is the first recommendation of death for a defendant in Flagler County since 2009. He becomes the fifth person to be convicted and sentenced to death in Flagler County since 1924, though only one of the four previously convicted has been killed by the state (Louis Gaskins in 2023). Three sentences were commuted to life in prison.
The jury reached its verdict on the strength of four “aggravators” the prosecution submitted, including the claim that Yolonda’s death was “heinous, atrocious and cruel.”
“She knows her life is flashing through her at that moment, and she’s going to die,” Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis told the jury, playing the video that showed Yolonda’s last moments, up close, with Yolonda “bleeding from every extremity.”
“That, ladies and gentlemen, is heinous, atrocious, and cruel.,” Lewis said. “Jermaine Williams inflicted that on her, and she didn’t die instantly. She didn’t have the pleasure of just dying quickly. She lived for 20-five to 20-six minutes with that torture, with that knowing in the back of her mind that she was going to die, 26 minutes.”
Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis’s Closing:
Williams stood and sat impassively, as he had for the entirety of the trial, as the clerk read the verdict, as several members of Yolonda Williams’s family quietly cried, diagonally across the room from where he sat.
Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols did not sentence Williams today. He is entitled to a Spencer hearing where the defense will present additional mitigating factors in a last attempt to prevent a death sentence. That will take place in August. Nichols will impose the sentence at a subsequent hearing.
The penalty phase of the trial, which can stretch for days, lasted a day and a half. Lewis and Assistant State Attorney Helen Schwartz wrapped up their prosecution with a tactical cogency that mixed the clinical, the factual and the emotional with a few strategic and theatrical moves to make a merciless case for four aggravating factors, only one of which they had to prove.
The factual was documented by, among mounds of evidence, a number of videos showing Williams’s attack and Yolonda’s agony. The clinical traced Williams’s history of crimes, abuse and torture of Yolonda, especially a 2022 incident that led to his arrest and conviction, and his own serial womanizing, which included a 30-year relationship with another woman, with whom he had a child.
The strategic was a rebuttal witness. After the defense had a neuropsychologist testify to Jermaine’s anger and sense of loss after his mother had died, weeks before the killing, and to his fear that he was losing Yolonda, rationalizing the killing as a way to reassert his manhood, the prosecution put on its own neuropsychologist to all but ridicule the claim that Williams was out of control.
There was no passion, as the defense claimed. There was no rage, or loss of control.
“He had a plan,” Dr. Jason Demery, the neuropsychologist, testified as he deconstructed the video that showed Jermaine in the moments immediately before he attacked Yolonda, and the attack itself. “By the time he turned and walked away, he had already made his decision: get the knife, carry out an organized planned attack. This is goal-directed behavior in that he is obviously stabbing Ms. Williams here with the intent of killing her.”
The emotional was a series of victim-impact testimonies by Yolonda’s sister, mother, aunt and others that filled out the portrait of how Lewis described Yolonda to the jury in his closing argument this morning: “You see, in trial we throw around names, photographs, but what this case is about is about a living, breathing human being,” he said. “This case was about Yolanda Williams, a mother, a daughter, an aunt, a cousin, a friend, a beloved member of the community, and she is no longer with us, ladies and gentlemen, because this defendant killed her.”
The theatrical is Lewis’s signature skill, an ability to recreate moments and scenes at the edge of mimicry, as when he slowly walked out of the courtroom today in the middle of his closing, absented himself briefly, then slowly walked back in to recreate that moment when Jermaine left Yolonda by her car, slowly walked into the house, grabbed a large knife, and slowly walked back out to assault her. In Lewis’s recreation, the moment was made grim with deliberation as much as the defense’s claim of a crime of rage was made to look absurd.
The rest was filling in blanks as Lewis walked through the jury through its own thinking process to rule out the defense’s mitigating factors one after the other, to demolish its claims that Williams had an “inability to deal with loss of self or control” or that he was “under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance” or “under extreme duress.”
“I took you through the mitigators, ladies and gentlemen. You heard them all,” Lewis said. “Those mitigators, in comparison to the aggravators, are far outweighed by the aggravators. Not just far outweighed, but it’s just a mountain outweighed in this case.”
In response, in an attempt to provide mitigating factors that might have swayed the jury against death and for life in prison–the jury’s only other choice–defense attorneys Junior Barrett and Anthony Eric Leonard could barely depend on their own witnesses.
Jermaine’s brother was put on the stand to tell a history of traumatic abuse at their father’s hand when he and his brothers were young, only to speak of it all as normal discipline that seemingly left no mark, and of David Williams, their father, as a good man with whom they’ve remained close–so close that it was the father’s routine every morning to drive by Jermaine’s house on his way to work. David Williams himself, who was not asked about the abuse, downplayed his son Jermaine’s reaction to his mother’s death weeks before the killing. It had only “somewhat” affected him, and only to make him “less comical.”
The defense’s attempted ace was its neuropsychologist, whose testimony backfired, ending with a narrative that all but rationalized Williams committing murder to remain king of his castle.
The defense was not trying to exonerate Williams. Only to spare his life. To keep him from being “put to death by the state of Florida,” Barrett told the jury.
But it couldn’t overcome the raw brutality of the crime, the seeming wantonness and contempt of the murderer–a contempt Williams displayed many times in the courtroom when he would typically look away from witnesses he did not care for–and the emotional impact of the loss, which, as Barrett noted to the jury, had left one of the jurors in tears.
“It is understandable. This whole trial is an emotional trial,” Barrett told the jury. “One of the instructions the judge will give you is that what you heard from the family member is not evidence. It should not be taken into consideration in your ultimate recommendation of life or death.”
If it could not be taken into consideration, it nevertheless took up a couple of hours of the penalty phase, and it did so because prosecutors know what defense attorneys know: victim-impact statements are not evidence, but carry a weight at times heavier than evidence in clinching a decision.
Against those statements and the prosecution’s evidence Barrett was reduced to pleading, and to contradicting the prosecution’s case, at one point defending his expert witness against the prosecution’s derision of her credentials. (He spent altogether too much of his allotted time on that detail.) He contested the prosecution’s claim that Williams was not angry, or that something hadn’t happened to trigger him, to walk back into the house and to feel rage building up.
“Something happened that day. Something happened that led him to what he did,” Barrett said, starting with a phone call Yolonda received from a mystery person, which led to an argument, though he described the killing as the result “of a lifetime of events.”
But Barrett had no means to counter the impact on the family and the impact the family members’ statements had on the jury.
“Since this unimaginable crime was committed, I’ve been unable to sleep at night. I’m constantly afraid that when I wake up, I will get another call that someone has died,” Yolonda’s sister, Shawna Denise Hester, who is raising Yolonda’s two youngest children, testified. “Her death consumes me, literally eats me up at night. I would speak to my sister every day on the phone and just talk about life. We were planning for her to move to New York with my other sister to give her and the kids a better life.”
Of the children she is raising, now 16 and 18, Hester said “they live with the death of their mother every day. The kids still receive therapy every week to cope with the death of their mother.” The 18 year old is terrified of men, severely depressed and unwilling to go to college, for fear of separation from home. Her younger brother blames himself for not stopping the crime.
She had the gallery in tears. So did the next several people, including the aunt who, in the most powerful of the statements, gave voice to Yolonda’s five children.
“My whole life changed,” she said, quoting 16-year-old Jace, the boy who had attempted to stop his father from killing his mother. “The woman I loved, and the man that said he loved us: I can never look at him again for what he stole for me and my siblings. Even though I am the youngest, I am trying to be strong for each of them. No child, no person should ever witness what I did. The trauma of seeing my mother murdered has affected every part of my life. It stole my sense of safety, my innocence, and the future I should have had for my mother.”
The aunt ended with a valedictory of grief about her niece: “Yolanda was the heart of the family. Her smile brought comfort, her laugh brought joy, and her jokes brought light, even during difficult times. Her home was open for family gatherings and community events, because of her loss, our families will never be the same. There is an emptiness in every gathering, every milestone, and every ordinary day that she should be here with us to share. We live with the pain of knowing we will never hear her laughter again, never see her smile again, and never experience the warmth of her presence that made our family whole. Yolanda’s absence is nothing; is something we will never ever move on from. It is a loss we carry every single day while we continue living. A part of our family was taken that day Yolanda was murdered.”
And there was Yolonda’s mother: “Her life mattered, her presence mattered, her voice, her laughter, her style, and her unmistakable swag–it all mattered. I will always hold tight to the memory of my beautiful girl, her quiet spirit, her brilliant mind, her amazing gift in the kitchen, and her big dreams of writing her book and owning her business. She was my daughter, but she’s also my true friend. The pain of her absence has shaken me to my very core. To be completely honest, after I lost her, the grief was so heavy that I wanted to die. But I had to consciously force myself to breathe one day at a time. But even in the deepest heartache, I find comfort knowing that her spirit is not gone. She is still here with us, woven into the very fabric of our lives, forever loved and never forgotten. Yolanda Charmaine Williams, my daughter.”
In an interview last week, State Attorney R.J. Larizza, who elected to seek the death penalty for Williams after deliberations with an internal committee, said he did so in part because the family was largely in favor of death.
“This time with these folks, it was especially difficult when I sat down with the family because you had a 14-year-old son who witnessed it,” Larizza said, recalling the time of that decision two years ago. “It’s their father. I mean, they got kids involved, and you’re asking the family, ‘What do you want to see happen?’” The family, he said, “pretty much was on our side. Absolutely, not entirely.”
Larizza always meets with families who have been victimized by a murder. “I want them to be prepared for what’s going to happen,” he said. “Their life is forever changed. They’re never going to be the same,” he said. “Think after something like this, how can you be the same? So you just try to share a little bit of that emotion with them. When I go in these meetings, I feel the emotion coming from them. I feel it. It’s there in that room.”
The State Attorney met with the family again last Friday, after the verdict. “They were relieved and they were happy,” he said. “I told them, don’t underestimate the toll that this process has taken on you. Go home and and try to find some peace, whether it be with family, with friends. But but we still got a ways to go. We still got a job to do. But don’t underestimate the impact of what you’ve gone through already because the relief you’re feeling now is good, but this process is not over and this process will have an impact upon you that will be far-reaching. I just I ask them to take care of themselves basically, and listen to themselves and to their mind and their body as they kind of decompress from this.”
The job still to be done that Larizza was referring to was the penalty phase that ended today when the jury of 10 women and two men rendered its verdict.
For Williams, death will still be a distant abstraction as years, possibly decades, of appeals now begin.
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