A man ac*cused of bl*udgeoning his roommate to d*eath with a sledgehammer took an offer of 30 years in p*rison in Circuit Court Thursday in exchange for pleading guilty to second-degree m*urder.
Franklin Paul Crow, 59, was indicted on a charge of first-degree m*urder in connection for the February 2006 ho*micide of 58-year-old Kenneth Matthews, an auto parts delivery man whose body was discovered by his landlord at his home on Southeast 95th Street Road in Moss Bluff.
Crow faced up to life in p*rison if tried as charged. Circuit Judge David Eddy accepted the plea deal and adjudicated the defendant g*uilty.
“We feel that in light of his age, this will be a life term for him. We’re satisfied the sentence is justified and the court was satisfied that it protects society,” Assistant State Attorney John Moore said.
Crow — a tall, heavily-tattooed man with long dark hair and a wispy goatee — did not say much at the brief hearing, except to snap at a Star-Banner photographer who took photos as he was being fingerprinted. His lawyer, Chief Assistant Public Defender Bill Miller, stood beside him until he was escorted out of the courtroom.
Nearly a dozen members of the v*ictim’s family attended the hearing. They stood up from their seats and cast a steely gaze on the han*dcuffed defendant as he was led out of the courtroom.
“This is not the justice we wanted to see, but it was the best,” Midge Pennington, the victim’s sister, said with resignation afterwards, adding she would have liked to see Crow receive the d*eath penalty, or “see the same thing happen to [Crow]” as had happened to her brother.
Moore’s co-counsel, Assistant State Attorney Jeremy Powers, read aloud in court a letter Pennington, 65, had written a couple of months after her brother’s d*eath, which expressed her sev*ere sense of loss.
“My main question of course is, why? Why did you k*ill my brother?” he read. “Why, why, why did you have to beat him so badly? Are you some kind of sadistic bastard that gets a th*rill out of hurting other people?”
Matthews, Pennington said, was a trusting, kind-hearted man, someone who would “give the shirt off his back, he was just that kind of person.” A Vietnam War veteran, he liked to hunt, fish and ride his motorcycle. He had first met Crow at Ma Barkers Hideaway, a bar popular with bikers in Ocklawaha, she said in comments following the hearing. He had taken Crow in as a roommate, and provided for him by feeding him, giving him “a roof over his head,” and even bringing him to his family’s Thanksgiving gathering.
The arrest affidavit says that after they had been together for a year, Crow turned on his flatmate and hit him eight times with the handle of a sledgehammer and twice with the claw end of a hammer. At the time, he told police that Matthews had pulled out a gun during an argument over a roll of toilet paper.
Matthews’ skull was broken, his left hand’s fingers were broken, and he was badly hurt in the head and face. His body could only be identified by fingerprints that were already known. Crow was arrested a few days after the mu*rder. He has been convicted of grand theft and battery before.
He first denied having anything to do with what happened, but then he admitted to ki*lling the person. Crow wrote Judge Eddy a three-page letter by hand from jail in April 2008 in which he talked about being locked up.
“I have accepted the fact I’ll never see my people again, or go fishing, or ride my motorbike anymore,” it said. “I was born and raised as a Lakota Indian. I think of myself as a warrior. “It’s hard for me to speak out, but if I’m wrong, which I know I am, I’m ready to accept it and deal with it,” the letter said.
Florida law does not offer the possibility of parole, although inmates can potentially see their pri*son time reduced for good behavior, according to Powers. Having received nearly three years jail credit time served, Crow would still be required to serve 22½ years in pri*son even with model behavior, he said.
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