Jurors took less than an hour for a decision on whether a Florida man should die for the extremely brutal murders of two brothers aged 12 and 14.
Mark Wilson, 32 was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder in the killings Tayten Baker, and Robert.
According to police, the boys had been beat to death with a hammer at their Florida home before having their throats slit.
Sarah Baker, their mother who claimed she discovered Tayten’s bloody and battered body, found them.
“You could tell that his throat was severed completely through, almost to the bone, because that’s when I realized there was no pulse,”She spoke during Wilson’s trial.
“I ran over to Robert, and I’m screaming at him to call 911, and I rip his blanket off and all I can remember is his head flipped forward and then it banged back up against the wall,” the mother testified. “He was the same thing, soaked in blood, and I didn’t get a good look at what his injuries looked like, but I did as far as Tayten’s. In that moment, I started screaming, like, at the top of my lungs.”
According to police, Wilson’s aunt was Wilson’s girlfriend at the time. The couple had been living on the Bakers’ property.
The mother said that Wilson and her sister stayed with the family for a number of years.
She claimed that she saw nothing unusual the night prior to the 2020 killings. However, she said Wilson was sharpening her knife during what she called a “normal conversation”.
Florida law allows Wilson to be executed only if all jurors recommend the death penalty. They did so in this case.
The final decision will be made by a judge in December’s hearing.
The killings were particularly brutal and horrific according to authorities. Investigators learned that Wilson had told them that he hadn’t slept in three nights before the murders, and that he had been using meth for a long time.