A former prison guard trainee who executed five women inside a Florida bank almost six years ago was sentenced to death on Monday as his judge called the slayings calculated, heinous and cruel.
Zephen Xaver, 27, appeared to gulp but otherwise showed no emotion as Circuit Judge Angela Cowden pronounced the sentence at the Highlands County Courthouse in Sebring. After a two-week penalty trial, a jury in June voted 9-3 to recommend that Cowden sentence Xaver to death.
Cowden said the weeks of planning that Xaver performed before the 2019 murders at Sebring's SunTrust bank, the enormity of the crime and the fear the victims felt as they were shot greatly outweighed the two dozen mitigating factors his attorneys had presented, including his history of mental illness, his benign brain tumor and his jailhouse embrace of Christianity.
“May God have mercy on your soul,” Cowden told Xaver.
Xaver pleaded guilty last year to five counts of first-degree murder for the slayings of customer Cynthia Watson, 65; bank teller coordinator Marisol Lopez, 55; banker trainee Ana Pinon-Williams, 38; teller Debra Cook, 54; and banker Jessica Montague, 31.
At gunpoint, Xaver ordered the women to lie on the floor and then shot each the head as they begged for mercy.
Kiara Lopez told Xaver and the court that her mother Marisol had welcomed him into the bank with a smile, an act he repaid by murdering her.
“You shattered me into a million pieces," Lopez said. “I will celebrate the day you die, whenever that might be. Let it be known that you will always be a killer, a coward, a nobody and a waste of human life.”
Michael Cook, Debra's husband, also called Xaver a coward and told the judge, “I have absolutely no sympathy for him.”
Xaver’s lead public defender, Jane McNeill, had asked that Cowden spare her client, saying a life sentence would put an end to the case instead of dragging it out for a decade of appeals and possibly a retrial if the sentence is overturned.
“The only way for this matter to be brought to an end so that the families of the victims and this community is able to move forward is a life sentence,” McNeill argued. The sentence will be automatically appealed.
Under a new Florida law, death penalty sentences can be rendered by a jury vote of 8-4 rather than a unanimous recommendation. The change was adopted after the 2018 Parkland high school shooter could not be sentenced to death for murdering 17 people despite a 9-3 jury vote. McNeill called the new law unconstitutional.
Xaver moved to Sebring, a city of about 11,000, 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.
He joined the Army in 2016. A former girlfriend, who met him at a mental hospital where they were patients, told police he said joining the military was a “way to kill people and get away with it.” The Army discharged him after three months. In 2017, a Michigan woman reported him after he sent her text messages suggesting he might commit “suicide by cop” or take hostages.
Despite his psychological problems and dismissal from the Army, Florida hired Xaver as a guard trainee in November 2018 at a prison near Sebring. He quit two months later, two weeks before the shootings and the day after he bought his gun.
Hours before the murders, Xaver began a long, intermittent text message conversation with a former 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.”
FILE - A Highlands County Sheriff's SWAT vehicle is stationed out in front of a SunTrust Bank branch, Jan. 23, 2019, in Sebring, Fla., where authorities say five people were shot and killed. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)
FILE - This Jan. 23, 2019, file, booking photo released by the Highlands County Sheriff's Office shows Zephen Xaver. (Highlands County Sheriff's Office via AP, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street’s worst crisis since COVID slammed into a higher, scarier gear Friday.
The S&P 500 lost 6% after China matched President Donald Trump’s big raise in tariffs announced earlier this week. The move increased the stakes in a trade war that could end with a recession that hurts everyone. Not even a better-than-expected report on the U.S. job market, which is usually the economic highlight of each month, was enough to stop the slide.
The drop closed the worst week for the S&P 500 since March 2020, when the pandemic crashed the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 2,231 points, or 5.5% Friday, and the Nasdaq composite tumbled 5.8% to pull more than 20% below its record set in December.
So far there have been few, if any, winners in financial markets from the trade war. Stocks for all but 12 of the 500 companies that make up the S&P 500 index fell Friday. The price of crude oil tumbled to its lowest level since 2021. Other basic building blocks for economic growth, such as copper, also saw prices slide on worries the trade war will weaken the global economy.
China’s response to U.S. tariffs caused an immediate acceleration of losses in markets worldwide. The Commerce Ministry in Beijing said it would respond to the 34% tariffs imposed by the U.S. on imports from China with its own 34% tariff on imports of all U.S. products beginning April 10. The United States and China are the world’s two largest economies.
Markets briefly recovered some of their losses after the release of Friday morning’s U.S. jobs report, which said employers accelerated their hiring by more last month than economists expected. It’s the latest signal that the U.S. job market has remained relatively solid through the start of 2025, and it’s been a linchpin keeping the U.S. economy out of a recession.
But that jobs data was backward looking, and the fear hitting financial markets is about what’s to come.
“The world has changed, and the economic conditions have changed,” said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock.
The central question looking ahead is: Will the trade war cause a global recession? If it does, stock prices will likely need to come down even more than they have already. The S&P 500 is down 17.4% from its record set in February.
Trump seemed unfazed. From Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida, he headed to his golf course a few miles away after writing on social media that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH.”
The Federal Reserve could cushion the blow of tariffs on the economy by cutting interest rates, which can encourage companies and households to borrow and spend. But the Fed may have less freedom to move than it would like.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Friday that tariffs could also drive up expectations for inflation. That could prove more damaging than high inflation itself, because it can drive a vicious cycle of behavior that only worsens inflation. U.S. households have already said they’re bracing for sharp increases to their bills.
“Our obligation is to keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored and to make certain that a one-time increase in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem,” Powell said.
That could indicate a hesitance to cut rates because lower rates can give inflation more fuel.
Much will depend on how long Trump’s tariffs stick and what kind of retaliations other countries deliver. Some of Wall Street is holding onto hope that Trump will lower the tariffs after prying out some “wins” from other countries following negotiations.
Trump has given mixed signals on that. On Friday, he said an official from Vietnam said his country already “wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.” Trump also criticized China’s retaliation, saying on his Truth Social platform that “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED - THE ONE THING THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO!”
Trump has said Americans may feel “some pain” because of tariffs, but he has also said the long-term goals, including getting more manufacturing jobs back to the United States, are worth it. On Thursday, he likened the situation to a medical operation, where the U.S. economy is the patient.
“For investors looking at their portfolios, it could have felt like an operation performed without anesthesia,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.
But Jacobsen also said the next surprise for investors could be how quickly tariffs get negotiated down. “The speed of recovery will depend on how, and how quickly, officials negotiate,” he said.
On Wall Street, stocks of companies that do lots of business in China fell to some of the sharpest losses.
DuPont dropped 12.7% after China said its regulators are launching an anti-trust investigation into DuPont China group, a subsidiary of the chemical giant. It’s one of several measures targeting American companies and in retaliation for the U.S. tariffs.
GE Healthcare got 12% of its revenue last year from the China region, and it fell 16%.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 322.44 points to 5,074.08. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,231.07 to 38,314.86, and the Nasdaq composite fell 962.82 to 15,587.79.
In stock markets abroad, Germany’s DAX lost 5%, France’s CAC 40 dropped 4.3% and Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 2.8%.
In the bond market, Treasury yields fell, but they pared their drops following Powell’s cautious statements about inflation. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.01% from 4.06% late Thursday and from roughly 4.80% early this year. It had gone below 3.90% in the morning.
AP Writers Jiang Junzhe, Huizhong Wu and Matt Ott contributed.
Trader Christopher Lagana works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Trader Robert Charmak works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Traders Jonathan Muller, left, and Michael Capolino work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Trader Mark Muller and Specialist James Denaro work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Trader Anthony Carannante works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Trader Peter Mancuso works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Traders work in their booth on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Specialist Michael Pistillo works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Trader Vincent Napolitano works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Specialist Anthony Matesic works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
US President Donald Trump appears on a television screen at the stock market in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Robert Greason works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
A screen displays financial news as traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
A screen displays financial news as traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
