A South Carolina man was sentenced to death after the jury found him guilty of killing his own five children with his bare hands. After slaying his children, Timothy Jones Jr drove around with their bodies for nine days before disposing of the bodies in garbage bags on the side of an Alabama dirt road.
Jones Jr. showed zero emotion as the jury delivered the death penalty verdict, which took less than two hours of deliberation. Another verdict that could have been chosen was life without the chance of parole.
The children, ages 1 to 8, were murdered in their Lexington home in August of 2014. While prosecutors pushed for the death sentence, Jones’s lawyer requested that the jurors show some mercy, stating that the family has already lost 5 loved ones and seen too much death but wanted to still love Jones even if only through prison bars.
Jones is only the second person to be sent to South Carolina’s death row since 2014 and the state has not executed anyone since 2011 and lacks the drugs to carry out lethal injection.