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In what could be a record ninth execution this year in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday signed a death warrant for a man convicted of using a crowbar and a machete to murder his wife and two children in 1994 in Okaloosa County.
Edward Zakrzewski, 60, is slated to be executed July 31 at Florida State Prison. He received three death sentences in the murders of his wife, Sylvia, his 7-year-old son Edward and his 5-year-old daughter Anna, according to documents posted Tuesday evening on the Florida Supreme Court website.
Florida has executed seven men this year and is slated to execute Michael Bell on July 15 in the 1993 murders of two people in Jacksonville. If Bell and Zakrzewski are put to death by lethal injection, the state would break a record of eight executions set in 1984 and 2014.
That record applies to the period since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a U.S. Supreme Court decision had halted executions.
A letter Tuesday from Attorney General James Uthmeier to DeSantis and a 1996 sentencing order said Zakrzewski committed the murders after his wife wanted a divorce.
The documents said Zakrzewski hit his wife multiple times with a crowbar, tried to strangle her with a rope and hit her with the machete. They said he then killed his children with the machete.
Circuit Judge G. Robert Barron wrote in the 1996 order that Zakrzewski went to an Army Surplus store on his lunch hour in June 1994 and purchased the machete after finding out his wife was filing for divorce. It said he took the machete home, sharpened it and placed it, the crowbar and a rope in a bathroom.
“The evidence in this case, along with the testimony of the defendant, indicates that the murder of Sylvia Zakrzewski was the product of probably months and undeniably hours of cool, calm reflection, and careful planning without any pretense of legal or moral justification,” Barron wrote.
The sentencing order said Zakrzewski, a U.S. Air Force veteran, turned himself in after being identified by friends on the television show “Unsolved Mysteries.” He pleaded guilty.
A jury recommended that he be sentenced to death in the murders of his wife and son and life in prison in the murder of his daughter, Barron wrote. But the judge overrode the jury’s recommendation in the girl’s murder and imposed three death sentences.
Tuesday’s death warrant came as Bell’s attorneys have gone to the Florida Supreme Court to try to prevent his execution. It also came a week after the June 24 execution of Thomas Gudinas in the May 1994 murder of a woman in downtown Orlando.
The state this year also executed 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.
–Jim Saunders, News Service of Florida
