McCoy deserves death, jury says (MUG)

DeFUNIAK SPRINGS — A Walton County jury has recommended that Thomas Ford McCoy Jr. be put to death for murdering a former co-worker more than two years ago.

The 12-member jury took about two hours to sift through a weeks’ worth of testimony and evidence to arrive at an 11-1 decision.

Its recommendation will be given strong consideration by Circuit Judge Kelvin Wells, who will sentence McCoy early next year. A date had not been set Friday.

McCoy already had pleaded guilty to fatally shooting Coca-Cola vending machine repairman Curtis Brown on April 10, 2009, at Northwest Florida State College’s Chautauqua Center in DeFuniak Springs.

Brown, a former co-worker of McCoy’s, was ambushed by a false service call and shot six times. Each shot would have been fatal, according to a medical examiner’s testimony.

The jury was asked to determine whether McCoy should be put to death by lethal injection or spend the rest of his life in prison.

“We respect the jury’s verdict,” said attorney John Jay Gontarek, who represented McCoy with lawyer Sharon Wilson.

Gontarek said state law requires a death sentence would be appealed to Florida’s Supreme Court.

After the verdict was read, emotions that had been held in check during the long week in court bubbled to the surface. Brown’s wife broke into sobs as she and other relatives of the victim left the courtroom.

Assistant State Attorney Bobby Elmore, who argued for the death penalty recommendation, said Brown’s relatives chose not to speak to the media after the hearing.

Elmore used his closing argument Friday morning to hammer home the cold, calculated nature of McCoy’s crime.

 “Hate, hate, hate made him do this. Hate drove him,” Elmore said. “We’d like to understand his hate … we’d like to understand it, but the point is not how he came to hate, the point is how that hate grew. He wasn’t full of sadness when he put that gun in his hand. He could have controlled it.”

In her closing argument, Wilson tried to convince jurors that McCoy deserved compassion.

During the week she had provided evidence of a history of mental illness in the McCoy family and testimony from a clinical psychologist who found he was suffering from major depression with homicidal and suicidal tendencies when he shot Brown.

“Mental disabilities are part of the diverse frailties of humankind … consider how they affected him over his life. He’s a flawed human being. He was born with a flaw, like a fault line in the earth,” Wilson said. “He sought help. He knew something wasn’t right. But finally the pressure on this fault line was too great. Something had to give, and it did, and here we are.”

Wilson closed her argument with a plea: “Lock him up for the rest of his life, but please don’t kill him. We’ve had enough of that already.”

No one from McCoy’s family was in the courtroom Friday when the jury’s recommendation was read. None of the people who testified on his behalf as friends were present, either.

McCoy’s only reaction came shortly after the recommendation was read when he removed his glasses and used a handkerchief to wipe his eyes.