Florida carried out two executions in July 2025, putting convicted murderers Michael Bernard Bell and Edward J. Zakruski to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. The executions arrived amid a contentious acceleration of capital punishment in the state, with Governor Ron DeSantis signing death warrants at a pace not seen in decades and drawing national scrutiny.
Michael Bernard Bell, 54, spent 30 years on death row before his execution on July 15th for the December 1993 murders of Jimmy West and Tama Smith in Jacksonville. His case ended with a stunning twist: two key prosecution witnesses recanted their testimony just weeks before he died, claiming police had coached them into lying. The US Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Bell’s final words were as unexpected as they were brief. Strapped to the gurney with the IV lines already inserted, he looked up at the warden and said, “Thank you for not letting me spend the rest of my life in prison.” His chest rose once and then settled.He was pronounced dead at 6:25 p. m.
The road to that execution chamber began on a cold December night in 1993.
Bell was out for blood, driven by the killing of his brother Lamar five months earlier. Theodore Wright had shot Lamar, and the courts ruled it self-defense. But Bell told anyone who would listen that this wasn’t over, that he was going to settle the score.
Through his girlfriend, Erica Williams, Bell obtained an AK-47 assault rifle, a 30-round magazine, and 160 rounds of ammunition. He had a target in mind, but on the night of December 9th, he made a fatal error. He spotted what he believed was Theodore’s yellow Plymouth parked outside a Jacksonville liquor lounge, but Theodore had sold the car to his half-brother, 22-year-old Jimmy West.
Bell didn’t know that and didn’t care to check. He rushed home, picked up two friends, grabbed the rifle, pulled on a mask, and returned to the lounge with a single goal: kill Theodore Wright. When Jimmy West and 18-year-old Tama Smith stepped outside and climbed into the car, Bell emerged from the shadows and opened fire without a word.
He never looked at their faces or asked who they were. Twelve rounds tore through Jimmy West, killing him instantly. Tama Smith tried to duck, but four bullets struck her.
She was still breathing when paramedics arrived, but she died on the way to the hospital. A third woman curled into the floorboard and miraculously escaped unharmed.
Bell wasn’t finished.
He turned toward a crowd waiting outside the lounge and opened fire again. Witnesses dropped to the pavement as bullets ripped through the front wall. Stray shots struck a nearby house where three children were inside, but by some miracle, none of them were hit.
He vanished into the night, later telling his aunt, “Theodore got my brother, and now I got his.”
Despite numerous witnesses, police took a year to arrest him. The case cracked open inside a prison yard when two inmates, Henry Edwards and Charles Jones, reached out to investigators with a name.
Edwards claimed he had seen the shooting with his own eyes. Jones claimed Bell confessed. Both testified under oath, insisting they received no deals or favors in return.
Bell’s own girlfriend, Erica Williams, provided the final link. She admitted she helped him buy the AK-47 just one day before the murders. At trial in March 1995, Bell claimed self-defense, saying he thought Jimmy West was reaching for a weapon.
The jury didn’t buy it, convicting him of two counts of first-degree murder and unanimously recommending the death penalty for both killings.
During sentencing, a security guard described diving for cover as bullets sprayed across the lot, hitting the house next door where screaming children huddled inside. The state also revealed Bell had a prior armed robbery conviction from 1990.
His mother testified he was a working man who wasn’t capable of such violence, but the jury saw three aggravating factors against one faint mitigating circumstance. They handed down two death sentences.
Then Bell confessed to even more.
In 1989, at age 19, he had shot and killed his then-girlfriend LeShawn Coward and her two-year-old son Travis, allegedly over infidelity. On August 18th, 1993, he shot and killed Michael Johnson, his mother’s boyfriend, after tracking him down following an argument. These prior killings added 25 years to his sentence and revealed a pattern of violence spanning years.
For three decades, Bell’s defense attorneys fought through every avenue of appeal. They argued racial bias had tainted the trial, noting the prosecutor called Bell “a man who lived by the law of the jungle,” a phrase even his own defense attorney repeated before a mostly white jury. They cited inconsistencies in witness statements.
Every appeal failed.
In June 2025, Governor DeSantis signed Bell’s death warrant, making him the eighth person the state planned to execute that year, a number not seen in generations. Then came the revelation that upended everything.
Henry Edwards, the state’s key witness, signed a new sworn statement admitting he had lied in the 1990s. He claimed he was inside a store when the shooting happened and only heard gunshots, but Detective William Bolina showed him Bell’s photo and coached him on what to say in exchange for time out of jail.
Two days later, Charles Jones came forward with a similar story.
He claimed Detective Bolina and prosecutor George Bate told him exactly what to testify, that Bell had confessed and tried to sell the murder weapon afterward, in exchange for reduced charges. When he hesitated, they reminded him he would pay for changing his story. In 2025, Jones said the confession never happened and his testimony was coached, rehearsed, and rewarded.
Bell’s legal team filed new motions, hoping the recantations would stop the execution. But the judge ruled the new claims wouldn’t have changed the verdict. The date stayed locked in.
On the morning of July 15th, 2025, Bell woke at 6:30 a. m. His final meal was an omelette, bacon, home fries, and a glass of orange juice.
He met with a spiritual adviser; no one else came to visit.
Sixteen days later, Florida carried out its second execution of the month. Edward J.
Zakruski, 60, was executed on July 31st for the murders of his wife and two young children in 1994. His case was a study in calculated brutality, one that even the judge described as among the most heinous imaginable.
On June 9th, 1994, Zakruski, a technical sergeant in the US Air Force, received a phone call at work from his seven-year-old son, Edward III, known as Kim.
The boy said his mother, Sylvia, wanted a divorce and planned to take the children. Zakruski didn’t argue or raise his voice. He quietly left the base during lunch, drove to a hardware store, and bought a machete.
Then he returned to work and finished his shift as if nothing had changed.
That evening, he made sure he arrived home first. He hid the machete in the bathroom and laid out a crowbar and rope within arm’s reach.
When 34-year-old Sylvia walked through the door, unaware and exhausted, he struck her in the head with the crowbar, once, then again. She was unconscious but still alive, so he dragged her to the bedroom, wrapped the rope around her neck, and finished it.
Then he called his son into the bathroom to brush his teeth.
When Kim walked in, Zakruski raised the machete and swung. The boy raised his arm in a desperate attempt to block the blow, leaving a deep gash in his wrist. But his father didn’t stop.
The blade landed across his head, neck, and back until the seven-year-old collapsed and died just feet from the sink.
Zakruski called his five-year-old daughter Anna next, using the same soft command to come brush her teeth. She walked in without fear.
She, too, tried to protect herself, but the machete fell again and again until her body collapsed beside her brother. Zakruski then returned to the bedroom, dragged Sylvia’s body into the bathroom next to her children, and brought the machete down one final time to ensure she was dead.
He didn’t panic.
He walked out, drove to Orlando, flew to Hawaii, assumed the name Michael Green, and settled on a secluded religious commune, living in a makeshift shack and working for food and shelter. For four months, he seemed to have vanished. Then Unsolved Mysteries aired his story in October 1994, and the family sheltering him recognized him instantly.
Nine days later, Zakruski walked into a police station and turned himself in. Back in Florida, he faced three counts of first-degree murder. He even tried to escape from the Okaloosa County Jail in August 1995, reaching the outer fence before guards caught him.
On March 19th, 1996, he walked into court and confessed to all three murders.
The sentencing phase was gut-wrenching. Prosecutors described the murders as heinous and cruel, pointing out that Anna had likely seen her brother’s blood on the floor before she died.
They argued no child should die that way and no father should inflict that horror on his own family. His defense asked for mercy, claiming Zakruski cracked under emotional strain and believed he was saving his children from a painful future in Korea.
The jury delivered split decisions: seven voted for death in Sylvia’s case, seven for death in Kim’s case, but in Anna’s case, the vote was tied six to six.
The judge overrode the jury’s deadlock and sentenced Zakruski to death a third time. In his statement, he said Anna likely knew what was happening, that her final moments were filled with fear, and that he could not imagine a more heinous or atrocious way of dying.
For 29 years, Zakruski filed appeal after appeal.
In 2017, he seized on Florida’s new requirement for unanimous jury recommendations in death penalty cases, but courts ruled the law couldn’t be applied retroactively. In September 2018, the Florida Supreme Court dismissed another appeal. His execution was no longer a question of if, but when.
In June 2025, Governor DeSantis signed his warrant. On July 31st, Zakruski woke around 5:00 a. m.
and declined a spiritual adviser. His last meal was fried pork chops, potatoes, bacon, fried onions, toast, root beer, a slice of pie, a scoop of ice cream, and a cup of coffee.
At 6:00 p.
m. , the curtain rose on the witness room. Fourteen witnesses watched as the white sheet-covered Zakruski faced the warden’s question.
His response was chillingly composed: “I want to thank the good people of the Sunshine State for killing me in the most cold and calculated, clean, humane, and efficient way possible. I have no complaints whatsoever.”
Then, in a calm voice, he began reciting Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” his words trailing off partway through the poem.
The drugs began to flow at 6:04 p. m. He gasped a few times, his chest rising and falling in sharp jolts, then his breathing slowed.
He was pronounced dead at 6:13 p. m.
The two July executions underscore a dramatic surge in Florida’s use of the death penalty under Governor DeSantis, who has signed more warrants this year than any other state has carried out in recent memory.
The pace has reignited fierce debates over capital punishment, the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and the irreversible finality of decisions rendered decades ago.
Bell’s execution leaves an unresolved shadow. Henry Edwards and Charles Jones either spoke the truth in the 1990s or in 2025, and the courts have ruled it immaterial either way.
But for the families of Bell’s five victims and for Bell himself, the question of what really happened in that Jacksonville investigation may never be fully answered.
Zakruski offered no such ambiguity. He confessed, he accepted his sentence, and he faced his death with a calm that observers found deeply unsettling.
Reciting a poem about woods and snow in his final moments, he offered a strange, quiet image of a man who had long made peace with what he had done.
Florida carried out two executions in July 2025, and the state shows no signs of slowing down. As August begins, more warrants are expected, more appeals will be filed, and more families will wait for final answers.
But for Michael Bernard Bell and Edward J. Zakruski, the story is over, and the state of Florida has closed its books on both of them.
