Deliberations move into second day

Kim Smith

Thursday, July 20, 2000 | 11:23 a.m.

Jurors were continuing deliberations today in the capital murder trial of Zane Floyd, the former Marine convicted in last summer's quadruple slaying at a Las Vegas grocery store.

The nine women and three men deliberated three and a half hours Wednesday without coming to a decision as to whether Floyd should get life in prison or the death penalty. After over three hours this morning, they still had not reached a decision.

Floyd was convicted July 13 of almost a dozen criminal charges stemming from a four-hour crime spree that began with the repeated rape of an outcall service dancer and ended with the deaths of four grocery store employees. A fifth employee survived two shotgun blasts by playing dead.

After giving himself up, Floyd told police he had intended to commit suicide, but he first wanted to fulfill two longtime fantasies -- one involving sex and the other experiencing how it felt to kill someone.

In order to give Floyd the death penalty, jurors have to find that at least one of the three aggravating circumstances outlined by prosecutors exist. They must also decide that the aggravator or aggravators outweigh any of the mitigators pointed out by the defense attorneys.

Clark County District Attorney Stewart Bell said Floyd created a risk of death to more than one person, killed more than one person and the slayings were random and without apparent motive.

"It's 100 to nothing," Bell said. "The aggravators far, far, far, outweigh any of the mitigators the defense could bring forward."

Killed in the rampage were Lucy Tarantino, 60, Dennis "Troy" Sargent, 31, Chuck Leos, 40, and Thomas Darnell, 40.

During their closing arguments, Deputy Public Defenders Curtis Brown and Doug Hedger gave jurors 16 reasons Floyd should live. They pointed to the fact that Floyd was born prematurely to a woman who used drugs and alcohol during her pregnancy, that he was abandoned before his birth by his father and that he suffered from attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder.

At the time of the slayings, the defense attorneys said Floyd had no significant criminal history, he was only 23, he was drunk and he was suffering from severe emotional distress that caused him to "snap."

Brown said that it wasn't so much the stress that Floyd was under that day as the fact that he didn't have a lot in the way of support. To illustrate his point, he showed jurors a videotape of an animated bridge that grew increasingly unsteady as different factors in Floyd's life were piled on and support was taken away. The bridge ultimately fell under the weight of those factors.

Hedger also showed the jurors a video of Floyd taken at the time of his arrest, pointing out how confused and dazed he look.

Executing Floyd will not bring back his victims and maybe by keeping him alive, doctors can study him and learn what happened that day so it doesn't happen again, defense attorneys said.

Scientists study crashed planes all of the time, Brown said.

"Zane crashed. He was a plane that went straight down and he crashed," Brown said.

Floyd does well in structured settings and prison is as structured as you can get, they said.

"To protect society, you don't have to kill," Brown said.

Brown told jurors that if people today can't show compassion, understanding and mercy, "we're all in trouble."

"There's no room in our system for justice," Brown said. "Mercy is the highest attribute of all. There's been enough killing in this case."

Chief Deputy District Attorney William Koot said Floyd's "remorsefulness" is up for debate, as is his confusion that morning.

"He wasn't confused when he was running through that store. The defense didn't show you that video four times," Koot said. "Look at the video of (surviving victim) Zachary Emenegger four times and see how confused he (Floyd) was."

The defense attorneys said Floyd should be credited for being cooperative with police after the rampage, but the fact of the matter is he would've tried to get away with it if the police hadn't surrounded the store, Koot said.

Tarantino was shot as she pleaded with Floyd to spare her, Koot reminded the jurors.

"To have to go through life with the image of her begging for her life and the last moments of her life ... those are nightmares for her three girls and will be for life," Koot said.

And then Koot said, there's 7-year-old Cody Sargent, who no longer has a father; LeAnna Parkey-Leos, who lost her husband of one year and four days and Mona Nall, who through years of adversity forged an incredible bond with her brain-damaged son, Thomas.

Not to mention the 25 people who hid wherever they could during the shooting spree, the outcall dancer who was raped and Emenegger, who faces many more surgeries, Koot said.

"Zane Floyd's parents have been victimized just as much by him as our victims, but it's not Valerie's fault and it's not Mike's fault," Koot said. "The fault lies 100 percent, not 99 percent, 100 percent with Zane Floyd."