Governor Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant Tuesday for a man found guilty of killing his wife and two children in Okaloosa County in 1994 with a machete and crowbar, perhaps marking the ninth execution in Florida this year.
The execution of 60-year-old Edward Zakrzewski is scheduled for July 31 at Florida State Prison. In records released Tuesday night on the Florida Supreme Court website, he was found guilty of the murders of his wife, Sylvia, his 7-year-old son Edward, and his 5-year-old daughter Anna, and was given three death sentences.
Michael Bell, who was responsible for the 1993 killings of two individuals in Jacksonville, is scheduled to be put to death on July 15; Florida has already executed seven men this year. The state would break a record of eight executions set between 1984 and 2014 if Bell and Zakrzewski were executed by lethal injection.
That record covers the years after the capital penalty was brought back in 1976 following an execution ban imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
According to a 1996 sentencing ruling and a letter given to DeSantis on Tuesday by Attorney General James Uthmeier, Zakrzewski killed his wife because she wanted a divorce.
According to the records, Zakrzewski repeatedly struck his wife with a crowbar, attempted to strangle her with a rope, and struck her with a machete. They claimed that he then used the machete to murder his kids.
In the 1996 order, Circuit Judge G. Robert Barron stated that Zakrzewski bought the machete during his lunch break in June 1994 after learning that his wife was divorcing him. It said that after sharpening the machete at home, he put it in a bathroom with a rope and a crowbar.
Without any pretense of legal or moral justification, Barron stated, “The evidence in this case, along with the defendant’s testimony, indicates that the murder of Sylvia Zakrzewski was the product of probably months and undeniably hours of cool, calm reflection and careful planning.”
According to the sentence decision, Zakrzewski, a member of the United States Air Force, handed himself in when friends recognized him on the television program Unsolved Mysteries. He entered a guilty plea.
Barron said that a jury recommended that he be sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his daughter and to death for the killings of his wife and son. However, the court handed three death sentences, overriding the jury’s recommendation in the girl’s murder.
Bell’s lawyers have petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to try to stop his execution, and Tuesday’s death warrant followed suit. It also happened one week after Thomas Gudinas, who was convicted of killing a lady in downtown Orlando in May 1994, was put to death on June 24.
This year, the state also executed Glen Rogers on May 15, Jeffrey Hutchinson on May 1, Michael Tanzi on April 8, Edward James on March 20, James Ford on February 13, and Anthony Wainwright on June 10.
Jim Saunders, Florida News Service
