On May 21st, 2026, after spending 20 years on death row, Richard Knight was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. But the reason he ended up on death row, his cousin’s girlfriend asked him to move out of her apartment. She told him he could leave in the morning. Instead, Richard went for a walk. Then, he came back.

 And before the night was over, a mother and her four-year-old daughter were dead on the floor of their own apartment. The mother was 6 weeks pregnant with her second child. This is what happened. In the summer of 2000, Richard Knight was living in a Broward County apartment with his cousin Hans Mullings, Hans’s girlfriend, Odessia Stevens, and Odessia’s four-year-old daughter, Hanessia.

It was a small apartment, and Richard had overstayed his welcome. Hans and Odacia had asked him to move out multiple times, but every time he stayed. On the night of June 27th, Hans was at work. He spoke to Odessia around 900 p.m. and she told him she was going to bed. Hans left his office to run some errands.

 And just like that, Richard was alone inside the apartment with Odessia and her daughter. Sometime that night, the argument started up again. Odessia told Richard she was done. She was done supporting him, done waiting for him to figure it out, and done asking politely. She wanted him gone. Richard asked her for more time. He told her he had just gotten a job, but Odysia had heard it before. She told him no.

 He could leave in the morning. So, Richard walked out the front door and into the Broward County night. And as he walked through the neighborhood, something inside him shifted. With every step, he got angrier. He replayed the conversation. He stewed on it. And by the time he turned around and walked back to the apartment, he was not the same person who had left.

He went straight to the master bedroom. Odacia and Hanessia had gone to bed. The argument was over. The decision had been made. He was leaving in the morning. But Richard woke her up, and this time the conversation did not end with words. Richard turned around, walked to the kitchen, and grabbed a knife.

 When he stepped back into the master bedroom, Odessia was on one side of the bed. Four-year-old Hanessia was lying on the other. He went to Odessia first. He began stabbing her, not once, not twice, but over and over and over again. She tried to fight him off with her bare hands. She tried to push him away, but the blows kept coming.

 Eventually, she stopped fighting back and curled into a fetal position on the floor, trying to protect herself from the knife. And then Richard turned to the other side of the bed. He began stabbing her, too. He kept going until the knife blade snapped in his hand. The blade literally broke from the force.

 So, he stopped, walked back to the kitchen, and grabbed another one. When he returned to the bedroom, Hanessia was no longer on the bed. She had crawled across the floor and made it to the closet door. bleeding from stab wounds in her chest and neck. She had dragged herself across the bedroom floor trying to get away.

 She was drowning in her own blood by the time he walked back in. And Richard was not done. He went to the kitchen a third time. He accidentally sliced his own hand on one of the broken knife pieces from the first blade. He grabbed yet another knife, and when he walked back out toward the living room, he saw that Odessia had moved.

 She had crawled all the way from the master bedroom through the hallway to the front of the apartment. She was lying on the living room floor near the entrance, still alive, covered in her own blood. Richard walked over, rolled her onto her back, and continued stabbing her. When the blood from her body covered his hands, he wiped them clean on the carpet next to her.

 And then, as if none of it had happened, he went to the bathroom. He peeled off his blood soaked t-shirt and jean shorts and shoved them under the bathroom sink. He stepped into the shower. He cleaned himself up. He put on a pair of blue polo pants and dress shoes. Then he walked back out to the living room, stepped around the blood, and started wiping down the knives near the front door.

That is when he heard the knock. Richard looked through the peepphole. Broward County police officers were standing in the hallway outside the apartment. He did not open the door. He turned around, sprinted to his bedroom, and climbed out the window into the night. What Richard did not know was that the upstairs neighbor in the apartment building had been listening.

Around midnight, she had heard loud thumping sounds coming through the walls. She heard two female voices. One of them was a child crying. She picked up her phone and called 911 at 12:21 in the morning. The crying continued after the police cars arrived. Officer Vincent Saxs was the first to reach the apartment.

 He noticed the lights were on in the master bedroom and hallway. He knocked on the front door. Nothing. He walked around the outside of the building. And while he was circling the unit, the lights inside went dark. A bedroom window that had been cracked open moments earlier was now swung wide open with the blinds hanging out of it.

Saxs pulled out his flashlight and aimed it through the dining room window. There was blood everywhere. Inside the apartment, he found Odessia on the living room floor near the entrance, surrounded by broken knife pieces. And in the master bedroom, little Hanessia was curled up on the floor next to the closet door.

Meanwhile, Officer Natalie Mockchnney had walked around to the far side of the building. And there, on the other side of a row of hedges about a 100 yards from the apartment, she spotted a man. He was visibly wet, even though it was not raining. He was wearing dress clothes and dress shoes. He told her he had been out jogging.

But he had a scratch across his chest, a scrape on his shoulder, fresh cuts on both of his hands. There was blood on his shirt and there was blood on a $10 bill sitting in his pocket. Inside the apartment, two people he knew were found dead. And the man who did this to them had just told a police officer he was out for a jog.

The case against Richard Knight took 6 years to make it to trial. But the story of who he was goes back further than that night in Broward County. Richard was born in Jamaica. His mother abandoned him when he was an infant, and a family called the Knights took him in from a hospital on the island. By all accounts, he grew up quiet.

 His teachers described him as respectful and artistically talented. A high school art teacher in Jamaica called him pleasant and eager. A former boss at a construction company said he was one of the best workers he had ever hired. And even his former fiance’s mother called him decent and honorable, a person who always kept to himself.

But people close to him had also noticed something else. Richard would black out without warning. On one occasion at his fiance’s mother’s house, his eyes rolled back. He started frothing at the mouth and he collapsed. A doctor told the family he needed psychiatric evaluation. But that never happened.

 Instead, Richard eventually left Jamaica and moved to the United States, settling into his cousin Hans’s apartment in Broward County, Florida, the same apartment where Odessia and Hanessia were sleeping on the night of June 27th. The defense would bring all of this into the Broward County courtroom during the trial.

 They even called a nuclear medicine specialist who testified that a PET scan of Richard’s brain showed possible pathology, potentially a seizure disorder. But the specialist could not say with certainty whether any of that had played a role in what happened that night. The jury heard it and the jury rejected it. Richard was charged with two counts of firstdegree murder.

 The trial began at the Broward County Courthouse in April of 2006, nearly 6 years after Odessia and Hanessia were killed. The physical evidence laid out in the courtroom left no room for doubt. Richard’s DNA was recovered from underneath Odessia’s fingernails, scraped out from where she had clawed at him, trying to save her own life.

 His blood was on the knife blades from the crime scene, on the shower curtain in the bathroom, and on his own clothing stuffed under the sink. Both Odysius and Hanessia’s blood was on his boxers, his t-shirt, his jean shorts, and the polo pants he had been wearing when the officers found him outside in the hedges. But it was the testimony from inside the Broward County Jail that sealed it.

 A man named Steven Witet had been housed with Richard in the weeks after his arrest. And during that time, Richard had told him everything. Not a partial story, not a denial, everything. He described the argument with Odessia inside the apartment, the walk through the neighborhood, the anger building with every step, coming back through the front door, grabbing the knife from the kitchen, walking into the bedroom where Odessia was on one side and Hanessia was on the other, stabbing Odessia until she curled into a ball on the floor, the

knife breaking in his hand, walking back for another, finding Hanessia at the closet door, returning to the living room, room where Odessia had dragged herself through her own blood, rolling her over the shower, the knock, the window. Every detail matched the forensic evidence. Every single one. The medical examiner who had examined both bodies took the stand in the Broward County courtroom and described what Richard had done.

 Odessia had 21 stab wounds. 14 of them were concentrated in her neck. She had 24 additional puncture and scratch wounds across her body. There was bruising around her throat from what appeared to be a belt or a cord, and she had deep defensive wounds on both of her hands where she had grabbed at the blade trying to stop it.

 Odessia was 6 weeks pregnant at the time of the attack. And that was not it. The medical examiner estimated that Odessia had been conscious for 10 to 15 minutes after the attack started in the master bedroom. She had been awake and aware through the stabbing. She had tried to fight back. She had tried to run. She had made it all the way from the bedroom to the living room.

 And she had been found there and attacked again. 10 to 15 minutes. That is how long Odysius Stevens fought for her life on the floor of her own apartment while her daughter lay bleeding in the bedroom behind her. Hanessia had four stab wounds in her upper chest and neck. She had defensive wounds on her small hands where she had tried to block the knife.

There were bruises on her arms from being grabbed and bruises on her neck consistent with manual strangulation. The jury found Richard guilty on both counts of firstdegree murder. At the penalty phase, every single juror voted for death. The judge agreed for the murder of Odessia. The court found two aggravating circumstances.

Richard had been convicted of another violent capital felony and the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel. For Hanessia, the court added a third. The victim was under 12 years of age. Richard Knight was sentenced to death in March of 2007. And for the next 19 years, he sat on death row inside Florida State Prison while the appeals process slowly ran its course.

 The Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee upheld everything in 2011. His postconviction motions were denied in 2017. The federal court said no in 2019. The United States Supreme Court in Washington declined to hear the case. But in the final weeks before his execution date, his defense attorneys made one last push. They filed an emergency motion before the Florida Supreme Court pointing to something that had never been explained. A fingerprint.

A single latent fingerprint recovered from the blade of the murder weapon. It did not belong to Richard. It did not belong to Odessia. It did not match any known person connected to the case. His lawyers argued the state had never answered the question of who else had touched that knife. But the state of Florida fired back within hours.

 Prosecutors called the claim untimely, procedurally barred, and meritless. They pointed to Marcy’s Law, the Florida Victim’s Rights Amendment, and argued that the families of Odessia and Hanessia had a constitutional right to a prompt and final conclusion to a case that had been in the courts for more than 20 years.

 The time has come for Knight’s death sentence to be enforced, the state wrote. and the Florida Supreme Court denied the stay. On April 23rd, 2026, the day after Chadwick Willisy was executed at Florida State Prison in Starky, Governor Ronda Santis signed Richard Knight’s death warrant. It was his eighth death warrant of 2026.

Richard woke up at 4:40 in the morning on the day of his execution. He remained compliant throughout the day. He was allowed to request a special last meal, but he declined. He did not meet with any visitors. He did not ask for a spiritual adviser, and nobody came to see him. Or maybe nobody wanted to. Later that evening, he was walked to the execution chamber at Florida State Prison.

 Earlier that same day, an execution in Tennessee fell apart. The execution team spent over an hour trying to find a vein in Tony Kurthers. Witnesses in the room described seeing blood and visible signs of pain on his face. The execution was called off. Within hours, Richard’s attorneys filed an emergency motion arguing Florida should stop his execution, too, because they did not want their client to suffer the same pain.

 But the motion was denied. The execution moved forward. At 6:00 p.m., the curtain to the witness room went up. Richard was already strapped down with his arms extended and an IV line in place. The warden asked if he wished to make a final statement. Richard looked up and said, “I want to give thanks to Yahweh who is the most high.

” Yahweh is the Hebrew name for God. Those were his last words. He did not mention Odessia. He did not mention Hanessia. And he did not apologize. The execution process began immediately after. Richard closed his eyes and barely moved as the drugs entered his system. After about 10 minutes, a medic was called into the room. He was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m.

 Richard Knight was 47 years old. What do you think? Has justice been served? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.