Florida man guilty of killing five women in a bank in 2019

ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (AP) — A Florida man pleaded guilty to the fatal murder of five women at a small-town bank branch in 2019 and faces either life in prison or a death sentence at the punishment stage next year.

Court records show that Zefen Xaver, 25, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to five counts of first-degree murder. He had previously pleaded not guilty, and trial was originally scheduled for January in Sebring, located about 84 miles (135 km) southeast of Tampa.

The Highlands County Judge has now set the punitive portion of the case for January 16, 2024.

Xaver admitted that on January 23, 2019, he shot and killed four SunTrust Bank branch employees and one customer. All five victims were ordered to lie on the floor and then shot at one by one, investigators said. They added that the robbery did not appear to be the motive and that Xavier had nothing to do with the victims.

“We believe it was an accidental act,” Sebring Police Chief Carl Hoglund said shortly after the murder. “Apart from the fact that he may have been driving by and saw that it was a bank, we have no known evidence that he targeted this bank for any specific reason.”

Investigators say Xavier called 911 from the bank and told the dispatcher what he had done, then refused to leave the bank building when heavily armed police arrived. After a two-hour standoff, Xavier finally gave in and was taken into custody, where he remains to this day.

Four SunTrust employees were killed that day: Ana Pignon-Williams, Debra Cook, Marisol Lopez, and Jessica Montagu. The deceased client was Cynthia Watson. Police said one officer who was in the back break room escaped the massacre.

There were troubling signs that Xavier, formerly of Indiana, was addicted to guns and killing people. A former girlfriend said after the murders that Xavier revealed that he had dreams in high school about hurting other students.

“He got kicked out of school for having a dream where he killed everyone in his class and he threatened it for so long and he dreamed about it and everything,” ex-girlfriend Alex Gerlach said after the Florida Murder.

According to police records, employees at a school in Bremen, Indiana contacted police in 2014 after Xavier reported the dream and his mother agreed to take him to a mental health center. No other action was taken. Michigan police released information about a 2017 incident in which he sent a message to a girl from that state that “the police officer may be thinking about suicide and hostage taking.”

Prior to the shooting, Xaver trained for about two months to become a corrections officer at the nearby Avon Park Correctional Facility. He resigned two weeks before the bank was killed.

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