The 30th Execution of 2025
Curtis Windom, convicted of killing his girlfriend, her mother and a
man he claimed owed him $2,000, was put to death by lethal injection on August 28, 2025, marking a record 11th execution in
the state of Florida this
year, reported The Guardian.
Windom, 59, was pronounced dead at 6.17pm local time
at Florida state
prison near Starke, authorities said.
Windom became the 30th person executed this year in the US,
with Florida leading the way behind a flurry of death warrants signed by the
state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. A
12th man, David Joseph Pittman, 63, is scheduled to be put to death in Florida
on 17 September.
Windom, whose final appeals for a stay were rejected on
Wednesday by the US supreme court, was sentenced to die for the 7 November 1992
killing of Johnnie Lee, Valerie Davis and Mary Lubin in the Orlando area.
Court records show a friend told Windom that day that Lee,
who supposedly owed Windom the $2,000, had won $114 at a greyhound racetrack.
Windom told the friend that “you’re gonna read about me” and that he planned to
kill Lee.
Windom went to a Walmart to buy a .38-caliber revolver and a
box of 50 shells, according to court testimony. Not long after that, Windom
drove to find Lee, located him and shot him twice in the back from his car,
followed by two more shots standing over the victim at close range.
Then Windom ran to Davis’s apartment and fatally shot his
girlfriend “with no provocation” in front of a friend who witnessed the murder,
court records show. Windom randomly shot and wounded another man before
encountering Davis’s mother, Mary Lubin, as she drove to her daughter’s
apartment. Lubin was shot twice in her car at a stop sign.
Windom received death sentences for the murders and a
22-year sentence for the attempted murder. Davis was the mother of one of
Windom’s children, a daughter who has been campaigning to halt her father’s
execution.
“We’ve all been traumatized,” the daughter, Curtisia Windom,
told the Orlando Sentinel. “It hurt. It hurt a lot. Life was not easy growing
up. But if we could forgive him, I don’t see why people on the street who
haven’t been through our pain have a right to say he should die.”
Windom’s lawyers have filed numerous appeals over the years,
including a claim that evidence of his mental problems should have been
introduced at trial. But the Florida supreme court ruled that was not
prejudicial against Windom because prosecutors then would have presented
evidence that Windom was a drug dealer and the two women he killed were police
informants.
Many of Windom’s appeals have focused on claims that he was represented
by an incompetent lawyer when it came to presenting mental health evidence.
Since the US supreme court restored the death penalty in
1976, the highest previous annual total of Florida executions was eight, in
2014. Florida has executed more people than any other state this year, while
Texas and South Carolina are tied for second place, with four each.
The most recent execution in Florida took place on 19 August
when Kayle Bates, 67, was put to death for the killing of a woman he abducted
from a Florida Panhandle insurance office.
Florida executions are carried out using a three-drug lethal injection: a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state’s department of corrections.
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