Free Republic

DAYTONA BEACH, FL (AP) -- A judge delivered death sentences Thursday to the ringleader and a participant in the bloody beating deaths of six people over an Xbox video game system. Troy Victorino, 29, and Jerone Hunter, 20, were sentenced by Chief Circuit Judge Bill Parsons after their convictions on first-degree murder for the 2004 slaughter of six people in a Deltona house. Neither man showed emotion when the verdicts were read. A jury recommended death for both Hunter and the 6-foot-7, 270-pound Victorino, but the final decision of life in prison without parole or death rested with Parsons.

Days before four men were accused of beating six people to death with baseball bats, they were shopping for aluminum bats and joking about bashing people to death, documents released Wednesday about the Deltona mass murder show. "We could take this bat and swing it and knock 'em over the head and crush their skull in," New Smyrna Beach Wal-Mart employee Brenda Palmatier quoted one of the suspects as saying. Palmatier said she recognized the four suspects shown on television news reports as the men in the store last Aug. 4. "The guy with the bushy hair then turned around...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Florida prison officials fired a probation officer and three supervisors today accused of failing to keep custody of the lead figure in the beating and stabbing murders of six people in Deltona last week. Corrections Secretary James Crosby said the probation officials missed two key opportunities to put Troy Victorino in jail. One of those times was Thursday before the killings that night. Victorino was arrested July 29 on a battery charge. Officials say that a day later police notified probation officers who were supposed to send a report to a judge requesting an arrest warrant...