On June 2nd, 2026, after spending 30 years on death row, Andrew Richard Lucart was executed in Florida. And the reason he ended up there, it was something that should never have been possible. A year before he ever met Gabrielle, Andrew had already been in a courtroom for hurting a baby, a different one.

 The court knew, and they let him walk out with probation. So when a single mom needed someone she could trust around her two little girls, the man living under her roof was someone the state had already caught once. The youngest was 5 months old. She was out of time before she could walk, while Andrew got 30 more years.

The first baby’s name was Jillian. She was 8 months old. Andrew shook her so hard she ended up with broken bones, internal bleeding, and a head injury that left her with seizures and damaged vision. He pleaded guilty to felony child abuse and walked out with probation. And while he was still on it, he moved in with a woman named Misty Rue and her two little girls at 1052 Epson Lane in Jacksonville.

 The youngest was a baby named Gabrielle Hansshaw. This is what happened to her. It was February 25th, 1996, a Sunday. Nothing about the day felt wrong. The family had spent the afternoon running errands together, all four of them in Misty’s car, Andrew in the passenger seat, and the two girls in the back. They came home.

 Misty’s father headed out to play golf, and Misty carried Ashley, her 2-year-old, into the bedroom for a nap. Ashley had been sick all day, clingy and fussy, and Misty wanted to stay close to her. So Andrew offered to watch the baby. For a while, everything was quiet. Then Andrew came into the bedroom and grabbed a clean diaper.

 He said he was going to change Gabrielle. Misty told him the wipes were in the den. He took the diaper and the baby and he walked out of the room. That was the last time Misty ever saw her daughter alive. Then around 5:00, something changed. Misty heard a car door slam in the driveway. Then the engine. She went to the window and saw Andrew behind the wheel of her white oldsmobile already pulling away.

 She ran for the garage, but he was gone. She ran back inside and searched the house room by room. The baby was nowhere, and the cigarettes they always kept on the table in the garage, his and hers were gone. For 30 minutes, Misty stood in that house alone. No baby, no car, no explanation. Then the phone rang. It was Andrew calling from a convenience store on Normandy Boulevard and he sounded like a man falling apart.

 He told Misty to call 911. He said that while he stepped outside for a moment, a man in a blue Chevy blazer had walked into the house and taken Gabrielle, just grabbed her and drove off. He said he tried to chase the blazer but lost it. And then his voice cracked and he told her that if anything happened to that baby, he was going to kill himself.

Misty called 911 and within minutes deputies arrived at the house. A helicopter was in the air over Jacksonville. Search teams spread out across the area looking for a blue blazer that, as it turned out, did not exist. Because later that night, Andrew would change the story. He would tell a detective the baby wasn’t taken from the house at all.

 She was taken from the car at the convenience store. A completely different version. And the search had barely even started. Miles away in rural Klay County, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper named Richard Davis was standing outside his house when he heard that helicopter overhead. He called in to ask what was going on and was told a baby had been taken.

While he was on the phone, a man came walking out of the dark with no shirt and no shoes through a ditch across the trooper’s yard with his hands in the air. That man was Andrew. He said, “I’m the one they are looking for.” Richard asked him where the baby was. And Andrew looked at him and said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

 Read me my rights.” About a block away from Richard’s house, they found Misty’s car. Off the road, the engine still running, the doors unlocked, but no baby inside, no car seat, nothing. What followed was one of the strangest nights in the history of that county. Because even with a missing baby, even with a man who walked out of the dark and surrendered himself, Andrew was not under arrest.

 Nobody had enough to arrest him for. As far as any of the officers knew, this was a distraught boyfriend who had just watched someone steal a child. And a man who kept saying over and over that he wanted to die. So, they kept him in handcuffs for his own protection, gave him cigarettes when he asked, and let him talk.

 And Andrew talked. He couldn’t stop, but he also couldn’t keep his story straight. Every time someone pushed back on a detail, a new version appeared, and the old one quietly disappeared. At one point, standing by the patrol car, Andrew said something to a deputy that nobody knew what to do with. Almost to himself, he said, “I wish he hadn’t messed in her diaper.

” Late that night, officers put Andrew and Misty together in the back of a squad car. What nobody told Andrew was that there was a tape recorder inside. It ran for 40 minutes, and that tape is where Andrew buried himself. He sat next to the mother of the baby he had killed, and he couldn’t help it. He told Misty the baby was taken from the car, not the house, the opposite of what he told her on the phone.

 He said he might go to jail for 15 years. A strange thing to say if your child was taken by a stranger. Then Andrew asked Misty something that gave the whole game away. He asked her, “Did you tell them something about me doing bodily harm to myself?” She said, “No.” And Andrew said, “See, that’s why they handcuffed me real fast.” He wasn’t grieving.

 He was checking whether his story had held. The threats, the marks on his neck, all of it was designed to keep him out of an interrogation room. And by the early hours of February 26th, he admitted it. He had never actually tried to hurt himself. Not really. The sun came up and the search only got bigger.

 Dogs, ATVs, divers in the water, and every officer out there was still looking for a blue Chevy Blazer that Andrew had invented out of thin air. That morning, a detective drove Andrew back over his claimed route. They pulled into the convenience store, and the detective knew immediately. The layout didn’t match. Andrew saw his face and started adjusting the story again.

Back at the Klay County Command post around 10:30 that morning, a local detective named Jim Redmond asked if he could have a few minutes alone with Andrew. He sat down next to him in the front seat of a parked car. And for a while, Andrew stuck to the same story he had been telling all night. But Jim wasn’t buying it.

 At some point, someone passed Jim a photograph of Gabrielle through the window. Andrew noticed, glanced at it, then turned away fast, and said he didn’t want to see it. Jim asked him plainly whether he was making all of this up because he had hurt the baby. Andrew went quiet. Then he said the baby was in Duval County, and he said that if Jim would just drive him away from the other officers, he would tell him what really happened.

Jim drove to a culde-sac a few minutes away where no one else could hear. And that is where after 18 hours of stories and lies and invented kidnappers, Andrew finally told the truth, or at least his version of it. He said he dropped the baby. He said he picked her back up and knew right away she was hurt.

 He said he tried to revive her by shaking her hard. And he said he realized she was dead. Then he told Jim where to go. He gave directions to a pond off Normandy Boulevard out in a rural stretch where no one would think to look. When they got there, he wanted to get out and pull her body from the water himself. The detectives told him no.

 And there she was, Gabrielle Hansshaw, floating in a shallow pond, still wearing the same dirty diaper Andrew swore he had been in the middle of changing. He had first told Jim that he waited in and laid her gently on her back. But later back at the county jail, he admitted that wasn’t true either. He threw her.

 He threw her body into a pond and then drove to a phone and called her mother to say someone had kidnapped her. When the case went to trial, the body told the real story, and it did not sound anything like any version Andrew had ever given. The medical examiner, Dr. Fuo, took the stand and walked the jury through what she found.

 Fresh bruises on Gabrielle’s tiny hand and arm from just before she died. Five separate bruises across her skull and underneath two fractures in two different spots, each caused by its own blow. These were not from a fall. These were not from a diaper change gone wrong. And when the prosecutor asked how much force it takes to fracture a skull, the doctor answered in a way no one in that courtroom forgot.

 If you use your fist, she said, it will be that force that you need to fracture the skull. Then the prosecution turned to the diaper. Andrew’s story rested on the idea that Gabrielle died while he was changing her. >> I got scared and I started to panic and I ran outside and threw the diaper away and jumped in the car and started up and left. I felt bad.

I felt guilty. But a technician had found a clean, open diaper sitting in the play pen, untouched, and Gabrielle was pulled from that pond, still wearing the dirty one. He never changed it. Every version he ever told was built on a lie. So Andrew took the stand and told the jury one final version.

 He admitted he was 6’1 and 225 lb. He told the jury the baby kept pushing herself up on her elbows and he used force to push her back down over and over until she stopped moving. He said he tried mouth to mouth. He said that later getting out of the car with her body, he accidentally hit her head on the door and he admitted finally that he had lied in every single version he gave before this one.

 And then the prosecutor asked about the cigarettes. Because for a man in a blind, overwhelming panic, Andrew had still managed to stop on his way out, walk to the garage, and grab his smokes. He admitted it. He didn’t forget the cigarettes. He just forgot the baby in the pond. And when asked why he did any of it, all he had left was six words.

 I felt bad. I felt guilty. The jury was out for an hour and a half and they came back with guilty verdicts on both counts. Then came the penalty phase and this is where the jury finally heard about Jillian. The first baby, everything Andrew had already done before Gabrielle. The shaking, the head injury, seizures, and lasting damage to her vision, the guilty plea, and the fact that on the day Gabrielle died, Andrew was still on probation for it.

still technically under the court’s watch. The facts said it clearly enough. The system caught him once, let him walk, and a second baby paid for it. Andrew’s defense team did what they could. They brought in family, and they brought in a psychologist named Dr. Crop, and they tried to build a picture of how Andrew became what he was.

 His father was a violent alcoholic who gave him his first drink at 4:00. By 8, he was using drugs. By 13, he was drinking every day. An uncle abused him as a child. His sister died in a car crash when he was a teenager. Dr. Crop told the court Andrew had an IQ of 79 and a condition called intermittent explosive disorder, which meant he could snap violently without warning, completely out of proportion to whatever set him off.

 The doctor called him a seriously disturbed individual. The judge listened. He gave some of it weight. The jury came back with a vote of 9 to3 for death. And when the foreman read the recommendation, Andrew sat perfectly still. By a vote of 9 to3, advise and recommend to the court that it imposed the death penalty upon Andrew Richard Lukart.

>> No reaction, no tears, nothing. But behind him, his mother could not hold it together. She stood up and ran out of the courtroom screaming. Outside the courthouse, a reporter asked Misty one question. >> You want the death penalty for Andrew Lucart? >> Yes. >> The judge followed the jury’s recommendation.

 He weighed everything the defense had presented against what Andrew had done, and he decided the crime was heavier. He sentenced Andrew to death for the murder of Gabrielle Hansshaw and to 15 years in prison for the abuse. After the verdict, a reporter caught Andrew on the courthouse steps and asked if he was scared. He wasn’t. >> No, I’m not scared.

>> Why not? >> I’m right with God. That’s why. >> And then the waiting began. Andrew was transferred to Florida State Prison. And for the next three decades, that is where he stayed. His lawyers filed appeal after appeal, but every single one was denied. When the death warrant was finally signed, Andrew tried one last time.

 His lawyers told the court that Andrew had developed kidney disease and that the chemicals of the lethal injection would build up in his blood pass through his lungs over and over again, burning them with each cycle, and that Andrew would be conscious for it, aware, suffocating, terrified. They asked the court to stop the execution.

 A five-month-old ended up in a pond. And 30 years later, the man who put her there stood before a judge and asked to be protected from pain. The Florida Supreme Court denied him. And on May 1st, 2026, Governor Ronda Santis signed his death warrant. On June 2nd, that warrant was carried out. Andrew woke up at 5:15 that morning, his last morning.

 According to a Department of Correction spokesman, he was calm and compliant from the moment he opened his eyes. He was allowed to request a final meal, but he declined. He had no visitors. Not a single person came to see him. The only one he met with was a spiritual adviser. The man who once looked into a camera and said he was right with God spent his final hours with a man of God.

 At 6:00 that evening, the curtain of the execution chamber went up. Andrew was already strapped to the table, an IV in his arm. A priest sat at the foot of the gurnie, praying over him as he lay there. The warden asked Andrew if he had any final words. Andrew raised his head. He looked at the front row of the viewing area where Misty was sitting and he said, “I’m sorry.” Then he recited a Bible verse.

Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. It’s what Jesus Christ said while he was being crucified.” The drugs began to flow. Andrew lost consciousness almost immediately. A few minutes in, the warden shook him and shouted his name. There was no reaction. A medic was called in to check his vitals, and at 6:19 p.m.

, Andrew Richard Lukart was pronounced dead. He was 53 years old. Andrew got to turn 53. Gabrielle never made it past 5 months. What do you think? Has justice been served? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.