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Home News Cases and articles Child killer awaits execution Child killer awaits execution
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
STARKE, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35, Orlando) -- The state of Florida is moving forward with plans to execute Richard Henyard
after fifteen years on death row. He was sentenced to death in 1994
after a heinous crime spree in January of the previous year.
Prosecutors proved that Henyard and an accomplice, Alphonso Smalls,
kidnapped a woman and her two children from a Eustis parking lot. They
drove them to a rural area. They raped the woman and shot her four
times, leaving her to die. Then the pair shot her two daughters to
death as they cried for their mother.
Smalls is serving eight
consecutive life sentences. He was fourteen when the crimes were
committed -- too young to face the death penalty. Henyard was eighteen.
Dorothy Lewis survived the shooting and stumbled to a house to get
help. She lived to testify against Henyard and Smalls in the murders
of her two children. She will not attend the execution and is not
granting interviews with the media.
Henyard is in a small cell on death row at Florida State Prison.
His godmother met with him on Friday. Henyard spent time with a
Muslim cleric on Tuesday afternoon, as he prepared to die. He plans no
final statement.
He ate his final meal around 11 a.m. this
morning. It included fried rice; two pieces of fried chicken; turkey
sausage; chocolate chip cookies and Coca-Cola.
Read Henyard's Case File (includes graphic material)
Read Henyard's Death Warrant (PDF)
Corrections
officials say there will be twelve citizen witnesses to the execution,
mostly journalists and friends of the victims family.
Henyard
has two appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court, trying to block the
execution. A judge in Jacksonville rejected an appeal this afternoon,
and a new appeal has been filed with a higher court in Atlanta.
Florida's Death Row Roster