DELAND, Fla. (Court TV) — Nearly two decades after they were convicted of brutally murdering six people, a jury recommended that two men be put to death.
Troy Victorino (L) and Jerone Hunter (R) appear in court during jury selection for their resentencing. Both men were initially given the death penalty for their roles in killing six people at a Florida home, but those sentences were overturned. (Pool/Court TV)
Troy Victorino and Jerone Hunter were initially sentenced to death for the murders of Erin Belanger, Roberto Gonzalez, Michelle Nathan, Anthony Vega, Jonathan Gleason and Francisco “Flaco” Ayo-Roman. Two other men, Robert Cannon and Michael Salas, were sentenced to life in prison for their roles in the slayings.
Following a resentencing hearing, a jury recommended death for both Victorino and Hunter. The judge will formally sentence them on a date to be determined.
A coworker of one of the victims found the bodies at Belanger’s home on Aug. 6, 2004. Inside the home, police said they found the victims in several different rooms. They had been beaten to death with baseball bats and had cuts to their throats that the medical examiner determined were inflicted after death. Belanger had a postmortem laceration from her vagina through her abdominal cavity, consistent with being inflicted by a baseball bat.
In an interview with police, Hunter admitted that the group had gone to the home wearing black, with scarves covering their faces and armed with aluminum bats. Prosecutors said the motive centered around an Xbox video game console, which Victorino believed Belanger had stolen, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported.
Both men were convicted and sentenced to death for four counts of murder in 2006.
A 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision led to both Victorino and Hunter’s sentences being overturned because the jury had not been unanimous in the penalty phase. A mistrial was declared during a 2023 resentencing when Florida’s governor signed a new law eliminating the requirement for a unanimous jury decision to apply the death penalty, so the attorneys could determine whether the new law would apply to this case. A judge ruled that the new statute will apply at resentencing, meaning a majority of eight jurors, rather than a unanimous decision, will result in death.
