Retired librarian William Bryan Cruse received two death sentences Friday for his shooting rampage at two shopping plazas that left six people dead and 10 wounded.
Circuit Judge John Antoon sentenced the 61-year-old Cruse to the electric chair in the shooting deaths of two police officers who tried to halt the massacre in nearby Palm Bay, a central Florida coastal city.Antoon added four consecutive sentences of life in prison without possibility of parole for at least 25 years in the other shooting deaths and three years on 26 other counts, for a total of 103 years. Parole would be possible only if the death sentences were overturned.
Cruse, dressed in a red jail outfit, expressed little reaction to the proceedings, except he appeared to wipe his eyes at one point when a shooting victim read a statement before the judge.
A Polk County jury convicted Cruse last April 5 on 32 counts of murder, attempted murder and kidnapping in the April 23, 1987 incident.
Besides the police officers, those killed were an engineer, two college students from Kuwait and a woman sitting in her car outside a store.
In addition to the 10 wounded, the jury found that Cruse tried to kill 14 other people and held two women hostage inside the supermarket, where he barricaded himself for more than seven hours following the shootout.
Cruse told investigators after he was captured that he "got into trouble" because everybody believed he was homosexual.
The trial jury rejected arguments from specialists and Cruse's public defenders that he was temporarily insane because of delusions brought on by mental illness. Prosecutors argued that under Florida law, mental illness is only one factor in a legal definition of criminal insanity.