A Florida jury convicted Henry Segura of murdering his ex-girlfriend and her three children in 2010. A 6-person jury convicted Segura after deliberating for nearly 4 hours on Tuesday.
Segura faces the death penalty. He has been behind bars for nearly a decade since the murders.
Segura was accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend Brandi Peters, 26, her six-year-old twin daughters, Tamiyah and Taniyah Peters, and his own son, 3-year-old JaVante Segura.
The prosecution says Segura killed Peters because he didn’t want to pay her $23,000 in back child support for their son.
All four bodies were found in Peters’ Tallahassee, Florida home on Nov. 20, 2010.
Peters was found in a pool of blood near the front door. Her children were stacked in a bathtub partially filled with bloody water.
One of the twins was shot in the back of the head. The other two children were drowned.
Segura was arrested 10 months later in Le Sueru County, Minnesota, where he fled after the murders.
Segura’s first trial in 2015 ended with a hung jury. The jurors voted 8-4 for acquittal back then.
The defense chose a 6-person jury for the retrial. They hoped they would have better luck with just 6 jurors.
The evidence against Segura was circumstantial, but he had a motive to kill her. He also lied repeatedly about his whereabouts at the time of the murders.
Segura initially lied and said he was not at Peters’ home the day she was killed. But investigators discovered his secret phone, and the phone’s GPS put him at the crime scene.
Segura then changed his story and admitted he was in Peters’ home that day, but he claims he was there to have sex with her, not kill her.
Complicating the murder case was a mentally ill federal inmate, James Carlos Santos, who claims he is a “drug kingpin” who ordered a hit on Peters after she stole drugs and $90,000 from the cartel. The jury didn’t buy his “confession”.
Santos claims Peters was a drug mule for his drug cartel that he operated from inside the prison walls.
The prosecution noted that Peters lived with her children in Section 8 housing and could barely afford the rent.
A prison psychologist diagnosed Santos with a plethora of mental disorders ranging from schizophrenia to grandiose delusions. He also took credit for other murders that he could not have committed because he was incarcerated at the time.
