3 Death Row Executions in February 2026 — Their Crimes and Final Words | USA Death Row Story…..
we are going to walk through every execution carried out in the United States during the month of February 2026. We will go through the crimes that put each man on death row, the final words they chose to speak, and the last meals they requested before the state ended their lives.
Three men, three very different crimes, three very different endings. But before we get into any of it, drop a comment and let us know where in the world you are watching from. We genuinely love hearing from you and it helps us understand just how far this community has grown. Now, let’s get into it.
The first execution of February 2026 took place in the state of Florida. On February 10th, after spending more than 35 years behind bars, a man named Ronald Palmer Heath was put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. He was 64 years old. I But to understand how Ronald Heath ended up strapped to that gurnie, to know why the state of Florida decided his life had to end, we have to go back.
Back past the 35 years he spent on death row. back past the trial, the verdict, the sentencing. We have to go all the way back to the very beginning because Ronald Heath did not become the man who committed this crime overnight. He had a history and that history matters. Ronald Palmer Heath was born in 1961. He grew up in a world that did not offer him much.
And by his teenage years, it was already becoming clear that the path he was walking was leading somewhere dark. He was 16 years old the first time he took someone’s life. 16. Most kids that age are worried about school, about their friends, about the weekend. Ronald Heath was committing murder. His victim was a man named Michael Lee Green.
And the way Heath took his life was not impulsive or accidental. He stabbed Michael Green 23 times. A 23. Then he crushed his skull and set his car on fire, destroying evidence, trying to erase what he had done. He was convicted of seconddegree murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. But he did not serve those 30 years. He served 10.
A decade behind bars for a killing that brutal. And then the system handed him back his freedom. And for a brief stretch of time, it looked like maybe, just maybe, the years inside had changed something in him. He got out in 1988. He stayed out of trouble, at least visibly. People who knew him might have believed the worst was behind him.
They were wrong. Because exactly 6 months after walking out of prison, Ronald Heath killed again. Before we get to what happened on the night of May 23rd, 1989, we need to talk about the man who lost his life. Because Michael Sheridan deserves more than a few lines. He deserves to be remembered for who he was, not just for how he died.
Michael Sheridan was 33 years old. Oh, he was a traveling salesman. The kind of man who spent his working life on the road, moving from city to city, shaking hands, making conversation, trying to earn a living. He had a family back home waiting on him, a wife, people who loved him. To them, this was just another business trip, just another week away that would end with him walking through the front door, bags in hand, the same way it always did.
Michael was the kind of person who could talk to anyone, friendly by nature, easy to be around. He was not the type to sit in a hotel room all night staring at the walls. When he had downtime in a new town, he went out. He introduced himself. He bought rounds. He made the most of wherever he found himself. That quality, that openness, that warmth is what drew him into the orbit of two men he had never met before.
and it is ultimately what cost him everything. On the evening of May 23rd, 1989, a Michael Sheridan walked into a bar called the Purple Porpus Lounge in Gainesville, Florida. It sat near the University of Florida campus. It was the kind of place that felt comfortable and low-key on a Tuesday night. Michael was already in a social mood, already a few drinks in.
And when he spotted two men sitting in a booth nearby, he did what he always did. He started talking. Their names were Kenneth Heath and Ronald Heath. Brothers. Michael did not know either of them. Oh, he had no reason to be suspicious of them. To him, they were just two guys in a bar. And within a short while, the three of them were deep in conversation, talking about baseball, about nothing in particular, about the easy kind of nothing that fills time in a place like that.
And then Michael, generous as he was, offered to buy them drinks. He ended up covering the entire bar tab for both brothers before the night was over. The credit card receipt was in his name. He handed it over without a second thought. Just being who he was, just being Michael Sheridan. He had no way of knowing that one of the men sitting across from him had already killed before.
He had no way of knowing that while he was laughing and talking and being his usual generous self, the older brother, Ronald, was watching him with a very different kind of attention. Ronald noticed the gold chains hanging at Michael’s neck. He noticed the watch on his wrist, the bracelet on his arm. I He noticed that Michael had money and was willing to spend it.
He noticed that Michael was clearly drunk, clearly alone, and clearly not paying attention to who he was really sitting with. Ronald leaned over to his younger brother, Kenneth, and made a suggestion. If they could get Michael to leave with them, they could take everything he had. Kenneth agreed. Just after midnight, the three men walked out of the purple porpus together.
A Michael thought they were going somewhere to smoke marijuana. Kenneth had told him his brother had some. That was the excuse. That was the door they opened for him. And Michael walked right through it, the way a friendly, trusting person does when they have no reason not to. They got into Kenneth’s car. Ronald got behind the wheel.
And he did not drive them somewhere to smoke. He drove them out of town, away from the lights, away from other people, down into the kind of quiet rural darkness that Elatchua County had plenty of in those days. He turned off onto a dirt road. No street lights, no houses, no one around for miles. They parked. They got out. Someone lit a joint.
And for a moment, maybe Michael thought it was fine. Maybe he thought this was just where they had ended up. Maybe he was too relaxed, too trusting, too far gone in the night to feel the tension that was tightening around him like a rope. Then Ronald made a motion with his hand, a gesture his brother recognized immediately and said quietly to Kenneth, “Did you get it?” Kenneth reached under the seat of the car and pulled out a small caliber handgun.
He pointed it directly at Michael Sheridan and told him, “This was a robbery. Hand over the wallet. Take off the jewelry. Michael looked at them. He could not believe what he was seeing. These were men he had bought drinks for an hour ago. Men he had laughed with. And now one of them had a gun pointed at his chest. Are y’all serious? He asked.
They were serious. But Michael did not comply. Whether it was the alcohol, whether it was shock, whether it was pure human instinct to refuse to be robbed in the middle of nowhere by two men he had trusted, he refused. He told them no. He said he was not going to give them anything. Kenneth pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit Michael in the chest. He stumbled backward and sat down on the ground and clutching the wound. He said it hurt. He was sitting in the dirt in the middle of the night, shot alone with two men who had already decided what was going to happen to him. Ronald walked over. He demanded the wallet, the chains, the watch. He stripped Michael of everything he could reach while Michael lay there wounded.
But there was one thing he could not find. The bracelet he had seen earlier at the bar. Ronald bent down over the dying man and said if Michael handed it over and they would get him to a hospital. Michael could not give it. Either it was somewhere he could not reach or it was simply gone. It did not matter. The offer was never real.
Ronald walked back to the car. When he returned, he was holding a hunting knife he had brought along. He walked up to Michael Sheridan and stabbed him in the neck. He tried to cut his throat, dragging the blade back and forth, but the knife was not sharp enough. It did not finish the job the way Ronald wanted it to.
So he turned to his younger brother and gave him a direct order. Shoot him in the head. Kenneth fired twice. Two bullets entered Michael Sheridan’s skull just above his left eye. And that was the end. Michael collapsed in the dirt of that road and died there. Miles from anyone who could help him. miles from the family waiting at home, far from the life he had been living just a few hours earlier when he walked into a bar and bought drinks for two strangers. He was 33 years old.
Uh he was somebody’s son. He was somebody’s husband. He had done nothing wrong. The brothers were not done. They picked up Michael’s body and carried it deeper into the trees, dumping it where they hoped it would stay hidden. Ronald wiped the hunting knife clean and put it back in the car.
They drove back to the parking lot of the purple porpus where Michael’s rental car was still sitting exactly where he had left it. Ronald handed Kenneth the keys and told him to follow. They drove the rental car out to another remote stretch of road. They cut the fuel line and set the car on fire, watching it burn.
The knife went into the flames, too. Evidence gone. Then they went back to their lives. The very next morning, less than 12 hours after leaving a man dead in the woods, Ronald and Kenneth Heath drove to the Oaks Mall in Gainesville and went shopping. Clothes, shoes, more things they wanted. All of it paid for with the credit cards they had taken from Michael Sheridan’s wallet.
Ronald told Kenneth to sign the receipts because his handwriting was better. Kenneth did. They came back the next day and kept going, spending, buying, moving on. Their run finally came to an end when a clerk at an electronic store grew suspicious about the card and started asking questions the brothers could not answer. They walked out of the store quickly and drove back toward Jacksonville.
On the way, they stopped at a bridge over the St. John’s River and threw the handgun into the water. It was never recovered. Ronald went home to a trailer in Douglas, Georgia, where he was living with his girlfriend. He settled in. He seemed to believe he had gotten away with it. Michael Sheridan’s body was found on May 30th, 1989, 6 days after he was murdered.
By that point, the condition of the remains made a precise time of death difficult to determine, but the medical examiner estimated he had been dead somewhere between 3 and 10 days. The cause was clear. Three gunshot wounds, two to the head, one to the torso, and a sharp force injury to the neck that told investigators someone had tried to cut his throat before finishing him off with a bullet.
The credit card trail led investigators directly back to the brothers. Store clerks at the Oaks Mall picked Kenneth out of photo lineups. The trail of purchases spread across two days. us across multiple stores pointed straight to two men who had been using a dead man’s money like it was their own. Ronald was arrested at his trailer in Douglas, Georgia.
When investigators searched the residence, they found multiple items purchased with Michael Sheridan’s stolen credit cards. But the piece of evidence that sealed Ronald Heath’s fate was something simpler than any of that. Sitting in the trailer right there in plain sight was Michael Sheridan’s gold watch are the one Ronald had ripped off the wrist of a dying man in the middle of a dark dirt road. He had kept it.
Kenneth, facing the same charges as his older brother, made a deal. He agreed to testify against Ronald in exchange for a reduced sentence. In 1990, he pleaded guilty and received life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years. The judge noted in the sentencing order that Kenneth had acted under the dominating influence of his older brother.
Kenneth Heath remains incarcerated to this day. Ronald Heath went to trial in 1990 and fought every step of the way. The prosecution’s case against Ronald Heath was not complicated because the evidence was overwhelming. They had the credit card receipts, a paper trail of two men spending a dead man’s money the morning after they killed him.
They had store clerks who identified Kenneth from photo lineups. They had the stolen watch found in Ronald’s own home. and they had Kenneth himself on the stand telling the jury exactly what happened that night on that dirt road in Elatchua County. Kenneth did not try to minimize his own role.
He admitted he was the one who first pointed the gun. He admitted he pulled the trigger both times, but he painted a picture of a night that was entirely orchestrated by his older brother. Ronald had suggested the robbery. Ronald had driven to the remote location. Ronald had told him to shoot Michael in the head. He and Ronald had gone back to stab the man when the shooting was not enough.
The defense tried to flip the script. They argued that Kenneth was the more culpable party, that Ronald had played a secondary role, that the brother with the gun in his hand, the brother who actually pulled the trigger, bore more of the moral weight. The jury disagreed entirely. They found Ronald Palmer Heath guilty of firstdegree murder, armed robbery, conspiracy to commit forgery.
It and multiple counts of forgery and uttering. Every charge, every count. In the penalty phase, the jury heard what Ronald had done when he was 16 years old. The murder of Michael Lee Green. The 23 stab wounds, the skull crushed, the car set on fire. They heard about the decade he spent in prison and how quickly he returned to violence after his release.
They heard the prosecution’s argument that this was not a man who made a single catastrophic mistake. This was a man who had already proven what he was capable of, been given a second chance and used that chance to do it again. The jury voted 10 to2 to recommend the death penalty. Without hesitation, the judge agreed. Ronald Palmer Heath was sentenced to die in Florida’s electric chair.
For the next three and a half decades, Ronald Heath sat on Florida’s death row and fought. His attorneys filed appeal after appeal, raising every argument available to them. They challenged the constitutionality of a nonunanimous jury recommendation. the fact that 10 to two was considered enough under Florida law to send a man to his death.
While two jurors had voted to spare his life, they challenged the reliability of Kenneth’s testimony, arguing that a deal-making witness with everything to gain from cooperation could not be trusted to tell the truth. They argued that the disparity between his sentence and his brothers, death versus life. I when it was Kenneth who actually pulled the trigger was fundamentally unjust.
Court after court heard these arguments. Court after court rejected them. The conviction stood. The sentence stood. In February 2026, his time was up. On February 10th, 2026, Ronald Heath woke up at 5:07 in the morning in his cell at Florida State Prison. He had spent 35 years inside those walls.
He had watched other men on the row be taken away and never return. I He had written letters and filed briefs and held on through the kind of long, grinding, unspectacular waiting that most people will never understand. That morning, two people came to see him one last time. His mother was there and a friend.
He did not request a spiritual adviser. He did not want one. When prison officials offered him a special last meal, the tradition of allowing a condemned person to choose what they eat on their final day, Ronald Heath declined. He ate the same standard cafeteria tray as every other inmate in the prison, the same food, the same tray, no special requests, no final indulgence.
After 35 years, he apparently did not want anything the state had to offer. At 6:00 in the evening, the curtain to the execution chamber was raised. Ronald Heath was already strapped to the gurnie, an IV line inserted in his arm. The warden stepped forward and asked if he had any last words.
He looked up and said, “I’m sorry. That’s all I can say.” Yes, thank you. 35 years. That was it. No lengthy statement, no declaration of innocence, no words for the family of Michael Sheridan who had come to watch. Just three sentences that carried the weight of more than three decades in one breath.
As the drugs began to flow, Ronald Heath barely reacted. He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed and became shallow. And then it stopped entirely. 8 minutes after the curtain went up, a medic was summoned. 2 minutes after that, at 6:12 in the evening, Ronald Palmer Heath was pronounced dead. He was 64 years old.
Michael Sheridan was 33 when Ronald Heath and his brother drove him down a dirt road and took everything from him. He never got to be 64. Let us know in the comments. Do you think 35 years on death row before execution is justice? Or does the length of the weight change something about what justice even means? Drop your thoughts below.
Just 2 days after Ronald Heath was executed in Florida, another man was put to death in a different state. On February 12th, 2026, the state of Oklahoma executed Kendrick Antonio Simpson by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in Mallister. He was 45 years old. And the reason he was there, the reason two young men with their whole lives ahead of them were dead came down to a single moment inside a hiphop club on a January night in 2006.
Someone said something about his hat. That is not a simplification. That is genuinely factually what started it. A passing comment about a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. Something so small, so insignificant, so completely beneath the level of a human life that it should never have mattered at all. But it mattered to Kendrick Simpson.
It mattered enough that before the night was over, he had put an AK-47 out the window of a moving car and emptied it into the vehicle carrying the men who had set it. Two people were killed. A third was left to carry the memory of watching his best friends bleed out in a car he could not escape. And even that, even that was not the first time Kendrick Simpson had pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger.
To know why the state of Oklahoma had to kill the man he became, we have to go back to the beginning. We have to understand where Kendrick Simpson came from, what was done to him, and what he chose to do with it. Kendrick Antonio Simpson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1980. New Orleans has always been one of the most beautiful and most dangerous cities in the United States.
The parts of it that make the postcards, the music, the food, the architecture, the culture exist right alongside neighborhoods where poverty and violence have always been grinding realities. Kendrick grew up in the latter. He grew up in a world where danger was not an abstract concept. It was a neighbor. He had lived on the block.
By the time he was a teenager, he had already been exposed to levels of violence that would leave marks on anyone. He was assaulted as a child. He watched things happen around him that no child should witness. And then when he was 16 years old, something happened that changed the course of his entire life.
A friend of his, someone close to him, asked Kendrick to do something unconscionable. He wanted Kendrick to kill a government witness to murder someone to protect someone else from legal consequences. I Kendrick refused. That refusal should have been the end of it. That refusal should have been the moment the story turned in a different direction.
Instead, the friend responded to Kendrick’s answer by ambushing him. He shot Kendrick five times, five bullets. Kendrick was 16 years old. He was rushed to a hospital and spent two months there. much of that time in a coma. Over the next 7 months, he went through 16 separate surgeries to repair what the bullets had done to his body. He he survived.
Physically, he survived. But what those months did to his mind, the hypervigilance, the paranoia, the sense that any perceived threat could become a deadly one at any moment would follow him for the rest of his life. A psychologist who later evaluated him diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Real documented clinical PTSD, the kind that comes from surviving something that should have killed you and then living in permanent readiness for the next attempt. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Kendrick Simpson was among the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the storm. He ended up in Oklahoma City, a refugee in a city he did not know, carrying all of the weight from the life he had left behind.
He was 25 years old, living in a new place. I still carrying the trauma and the hyper vigilance and the hair trigger awareness that had been built into him by a childhood of violence and a near-death experience that had left him forever changed. And on the evening of January 15th, 2006, he and two friends decided to go out. Before leaving that evening, Kendrick went inside his house and made a decision that should never have been made.
He picked up an AK-47 assault rifle and brought it with him. The three of them, Kendrick, his friend Jonathan Dalton, and another man named Latango Robertson went to a house party first where they spent hours drinking and using drugs. By the time they arrived at Fritzies, a hip hop club in Oklahoma City, it was somewhere between midnight and 1:00 in the morning on January 16th.
Inside the club, Kendrick moved through the crowd while Jonathan and Latango found a table. And as he walked through the room, he passed three men he had never seen before. Their names were Glenn Palmer, watch Anthony Jones and London Johnson. They were close friends, men who had known each other since they were kids. The kind of bond that turns boys into brothers over years of shared history.
Glenn was 20 years old. Anthony was 19. London was with them. And they were just out for a night, the way young men go out. not looking for trouble, not looking for anything except a few hours away from the ordinary. As Kendrick passed them, one of them made a comment about his Chicago Cubs baseball cap.
And the details of exactly what was said have been described differently in different accounts, but what matters is the effect it had. Kendrick took it as a slight. He took it personally. And the combination of alcohol, drugs, PTSD, and a hair trigger sense of threat that had been installed in him over years of violence turned a passing comment into something that felt inside his mind like a confrontation.
He went back to his table and told his friends what had happened. Then he walked back over to Glenn, Anthony, and London. But this time his tone was different. He leaned in and told them he was going to chop them up. In the language of the streets, that meant exactly one thing. He was going to shoot them with an automatic weapon.
It was a direct, unambiguous death threat. A few moments later, apparently trying to reset, Kendrick walked up to Glenn, specifically extended his hand, and said, “We cool.” Glenn did not believe him. and Glenn made a decision that under any other circumstances might have just ended a tense moment without bloodshed.
He hit Kendrick in the mouth, knocking him to the floor. Kendrick got up. He went back to his table. He told Jonathan and Latango he wanted to leave. The three men walked out of the club and ended up at a 7-Eleven on Northwest 23rd Street talking to girls they had met outside. And then another car pulled into the lot.
It was a Chevy Monte Carlo. Inside it were Glenn Palmer, a Anthony Jones, and London Johnson. Kendrick recognized Glenn immediately, the man who had hit him at Fritzies just a short while earlier. Jonathan told him to let it go, to chill. Kendrick was not going to let it go. When Glenn’s car pulled out of the lot and merged onto Interstate 44, Kendrick told Jonathan to follow.
As they drove behind the Monte Carlo on the highway, Kendrick turned to Latango in the back seat and told him to hand over the AK-47. Latango hesitated. Uh, he did not want to do it, but Kendrick made it clear that if he had to reach back there and get it himself, there would be consequences. Latango handed it over. Glenn exited the interstate and turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue.
Jonathan followed close behind, pulling into the left lane until the two cars were side by side. Glenn was behind the wheel. Anthony sat in the front passenger seat. London was in the back. Kendrick pointed the assault rifle out the window or he fired approximately 20 rounds in rapid succession.
London in the back seat heard the shots and immediately dropped to the floor. He did not see the shooter. He felt the car lurch. heard the impact of bullets tearing through metal. Felt the vehicle jump the curb and collide with an electric pole and a fence before coming to a dead stop. Glenn had been shot in the chest. Anthony had been struck in the side of his head and torso.
Both men were still in the car. I and London, physically unharmed, was in the back seat trying to do something, trying to help, trying to give CPR in the confined space of a car to two young men who were dying in front of him. Glenn was still conscious for a few moments. He knew he had been shot. He was afraid the shooters were going to come back.
London held on to his best friends and watched them go. He flagged down a passing car and begged the driver to get help. But by the time paramedics arrived, La Glenn Palmer and Anthony Jones were already gone. They died on Pennsylvania Avenue in Oklahoma City on the street where Kendrick Simpson had put them.
Two young men in their first year of adult life dead because of a comment in a bar about a baseball cap. In the Monte Carlo driving away, Kendrick said, “I’m a monster. I just shot the car up.” Then he added, “They shouldn’t play with me like that.” The group drove to Jonathan’s house in Midwest City. They dropped off the rifle.
I switched vehicles and went to meet the girls from the parking lot as though nothing had happened. As though two people were not lying dead on a street behind them. Police identified Kendrick as the shooter quickly. Jonathan Dalton and Lango Robertson were both arrested as accessories. Both eventually pleaded guilty. Both were sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Both served 6 years and were released. Kendrick Simpson was not going to get that kind of ending. At his trial in 2007, prosecutors made their position absolutely clear from the start. They were seeking death. There would be no deals, no negotiated outcomes, no path that did not lead to a lethal injection gurnie.
But before the jury heard the details of the night at Fritzies, they heard something that changed the complexion of everything. Before the highway shooting, before the club, before Glenn Palmer and Anthony Jones, Kendrick Simpson had already pointed a gun at someone, a man named Hung Fam. A Kendrick and two other men had forced their way into Hung’s home, held him at gunpoint, beaten him with a gun, and demanded money.
When Hung said there was nothing left to give, Kendrick raised the weapon, and shot him in the head at point blank range. Then they walked out, leaving Hung on the floor of his own bathroom, unconscious and bleeding. Against every medical probability, Hung Fom survived. Kendrick was convicted for that crime and sentenced to 7 and 1/2 years in prison.
And he was released early. And it was in the months after that release, after that conviction after shooting a man in the head in his own bathroom, that Kendrick Simpson went to Fritz and killed Glenn Palmer and Anthony Jones on a public highway. When Hung took the stand during Kendrick’s sentencing phase and described what had been done to him in his own home, the jury heard it in the context of everything else.
This was not a man who had made a single catastrophic mistake. This was a pattern, a documented, convicted, escalating pattern of extreme violence. The prosecution also called a jailhouse informant named Roy Collins, who testified that while awaiting trial, Kendrick had tried to hire him to kill London Johnson, the sole survivor of the highway shooting, and to assault two pregnant women who were set to testify for the state.
Collins testified that Kendrick would smile and laugh when discussing the murders and that he had expressed the belief that his victims deserved what happened to them because of the lives they lived. The defense tried to give the jury the full picture of Kendrick Simpson’s life. the poverty, the childhood violence, the shooting at 16, the 16 surgeries, the PTSD diagnosis, the trauma that had followed him across state lines, and turned every perceived slight into an existential threat.
They were not asking the jury to excuse what he had done, or they were asking them to understand the context in which it happened. The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder for both Glenn Palmer and Anthony Jones and guilty of discharging a firearm with intent to kill London Johnson. They identified four aggravating factors. Prior violent felony conviction, knowingly creating a great risk of death to multiple people, the especially heinous and atrocious nature of the crimes, and the high probability of future acts of violence. They voted
unanimously to recommend the death penalty. The judge agreed. Kendrick Antonio Simpson was sentenced to die. For the next 18 years, Kendrick Simpson sat on Oklahoma’s death row at the state penitentiary in Mallister. And during that time, according to everyone who knew him and observed him, something shifted. He earned his GED.
He took college courses through programs available to death row inmates. He began writing poetry. He won awards for it. He stayed close to his sons who maintained that despite everything, their father had remained a presence in their lives, even from behind the walls of a maximum security prison.
He was by all accounts a model inmate. Whether any of that changes what happened on Pennsylvania Avenue in January of 2006 is a question that different people will answer very differently. In January 2026, Kendrick was brought before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board via video conference from death row. He sat in front of the screen and addressed the board directly.
He said he was ashamed. Ashamed of his actions. ashamed of the destruction he had caused, ashamed of being a murderer. He also said, “I’m not the worst of the worst. I’m not a monster.” That phrase, “I’m not a monster,” is worth pausing on because 18 years earlier, sitting in a car on a highway in Oklahoma City, moments after firing 20 rounds into a vehicle carrying three people, Kendrick Simpson had said something different.
Uh, he had said, “I’m a monster. Now standing before a board that held his life in their hands, he said the opposite. The families of Glenn Palmer and Anthony Jones were also at that hearing. They had lived with the consequences of what Kendrick did for 18 years. They had buried their sons, their brothers, their friends.
They had raised families and built lives with the permanent absence of two people who should still have been in them. Crystal Allison, Glenn’s sister. I spoke about who her brother was before he died and what his loss had meant. She said Kendrick had walked into that club looking for someone’s life to take. London Johnson, the one who survived, the one who had held his dying friends in the backseat of a car on a highway, also addressed the board.
He said that part of him had died in that car with Glenn and Anthony, that those men were his brothers, that he still carried the images of what he had witnessed. The board voted 3 to2 to deny clemency. Governor Kevin Stit upheld the decision. What do you think? After 18 years of documented change out after the poetry, the education, the expressions of genuine remorse, did Kendrick Simpson deserve a second chance? Or was the death penalty the only just outcome for a man who had already been given second chances and used them to kill? Leave
your thoughts in the comments. February 12th, 2026, Kendrick’s last day for his final meal. Ake requested a bacon cheeseburger, large onion rings, and a strawberry milkshake. Simple choices from a man who had spent nearly two decades eating prison food. Just before 10:00 in the morning, he was brought into the execution chamber and strapped to the gurnie.
The IV line was placed in his arm. When the warden asked if he had any final words, Kendrick looked at the people gathered on the other side of the glass, the people who had come to support him, not the families of his victims, and he said, “Love y’all. Thanks for being here to support me. That’s it.” He did not say anything about Glenn Palmer.
He did not say anything about Anthony Jones. He did not address their families who were also present in that room watching. Whatever he had said in the hearing about being ashamed and remorseful, in his final moment with his final words, “Those families heard nothing.” His spiritual adviser began reading from the Bible. Kendrick closed his eyes.
Then he opened them one last time, looked at his supporters through the glass, smiled at them, and gave them a thumbs up. The three drug protocol began. a sedative first, then a drug to stop his breathing, then a drug to stop his heart. By 10:12, he was unconscious. Two tears fell from the corner of his left eye, rolling slowly down over the two teardrop tattoos already inked on his cheek.
At 10:19 in the morning, Kendrick Antonio Simpson was pronounced dead. He was 45 years old. Glenn Palmer was 20. Anthony Jones was 19. They have been dead since January 16th, 2006. They will always be 20 and 19. The last execution of February 2026 took place 12 days after Kendrick Simpson was put to death. On February 24th, 2026, the state of Florida executed a man named Melvin Troder by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. He was 65 years old.
He had spent nearly 40 years on death row. And the reason he was there, the reason a 70-year-old woman named Vie Langford lost her life, comes down to $100. A little over $100 in cash and a handful of food stamps that Melvin Schroeder decided were worth more than a human being. He walked into her store in the middle of the afternoon.
He left her dying on the floor. He took the money from the register and walked out. And then he went to a friend’s house and spent the rest of the afternoon getting high and watching television. What he did not know, what he could not have anticipated was that Vie Langford was still conscious when he left her. that despite seven stab wounds and injuries that should have been immediately fatal, she was alive long enough to tell the police exactly who had done this to her.
She described her attacker in detail. She described the name badge he was wearing when he walked through her door, his own name right there on his chest the entire time. That badge is where this story ends and where we have to begin. Before we talk about Melvin Schroeder, we need to talk about Vie Langford.
Vie was 70 years old in the summer of 1986. But she was not a woman who sat still. She had owned and operated Langford’s grocery store in Palmetto, Florida for years. The store was not just a business to her. It was her life’s work. It was the kind of neighborhood shop that people relied on. The kind of place where the owner knows the regulars by name and the regulars know to come in because Vie will be there.
She had built something. In an era when chain stores were already beginning to swallow up small businesses in towns across America, Vie Langford was still showing up, still unlocking the door, still standing behind the counter and running a store that served her community the way she believed a store should be run. She was known as a warm person, a giving person, the kind of woman whose presence in a neighborhood made the neighborhood better.
On the afternoon of June 16th, 1986, Vie was alone in the store. The last customer of the day had come and gone. The shop was quiet. She was probably closing up, tidying the counter, doing the small tasks that come at the end of a workday. She had no reason to expect what was about to happen, but someone had been watching.
Someone had been waiting outside, watching the customers leave. So watching for the moment, the store would be empty except for the woman behind the register. Melvin was 25 years old on the day he walked into Langford’s grocery. His life up to that point had not been easy. And it is worth understanding what shaped him.
Not to excuse what he did, but because the story of how a person becomes capable of doing something like this matters. Melvin never knew his father. His mother was an alcoholic who was physically abusive and emotionally absent. Then when he was 9 years old, the state of Florida intervened and removed him from her care, placing him in the foster care system.
But foster care did not bring stability either. His foster father was eventually sent to prison for aggravated battery, leaving Melvin to be raised solely by his foster mother. The one relationship in his childhood that brought him something like warmth was with his sister. She was the one person who felt like family and the one anchor in a life that had very little stability or love.
And then when Melvin was in his late teenage years, his sister was shot and killed. Whatever small foothold he had on something resembling a normal life was gone. He had already accumulated a prior criminal record by the time he was in his early 20s. A burglary and robbery conviction that had sent him to prison once before. But rather than serving that sentence fully, uh, the courts had placed him on community control, a form of intensive supervised release.
He was being monitored. He was supposed to be getting back on his feet. He had even managed to get a job. He was working for Tropicana, the kind of entry-level work that someone rebuilding their life might pick up. And with the job came a standard employee badge, a laminated card with his employer’s name and his own name printed on it.
Melvin Troder right there in plain text. And he was wearing that badge on the afternoon of June 16th, 1986 when he stood outside Langford’s grocery and waited for the last customer to leave. He was broke. He was addicted to cocaine. He needed money and he needed it quickly. and the woman alone in the store at the end of the day, the woman with a register full of cash, she was the answer he had decided on.
He walked in. The moment Melvin Troder stepped through the door of Vie Langford’s store, the robbery was already underway in his mind. He grabbed Vie by the neck immediately. 70 years old, alone, caught completely offguard. She had no way to fight him off. He forced her toward the back of the store, away from the windows, away from any chance of being seen from outside.
He reached for a butcher knife, not a weapon he had brought with him, a knife from the store itself, from the place that Vie had spent years building and maintaining when a knife that belonged to her establishment became the instrument used against her. He stabbed her seven times. Seven. The blade cut deep into her abdomen on multiple strikes causing catastrophic internal damage.
The medical language is clinical and terrible. Wounds cutting 8 in into her body, disembowing her. Uh the clinical language does not come close to capturing what it actually means to do something like that to a 70-year-old woman who was simply closing up her store at the end of a Monday. But Vie Langford was still alive when Melvin walked away from her, still conscious, still on the floor of her own store, bleeding from wounds that should have already killed her, but not yet gone.
Melvin walked to the front of the store, opened the register, took what was inside, and left. A little over $100, a bundle of food stamps. That was everything. He went directly to the home of a woman named Elellaner Oats. He asked her where to buy cocaine. She went with him and they bought it together, then went back to his mother’s house and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening getting high and watching television.
Ellaner later recalled that Melvin had money and food stamps wrapped in a red bandana. When she asked where he had gotten them, he told her he had been paid for doing a job. Meanwhile, at Langford’s grocery, a truck driver stopped in and found Vie Langford lying on the floor. He called for help. Paramedics arrived.
She was rushed into emergency surgery. And despite everything, despite seven stab wounds, despite the catastrophic damage inside her body, despite blood loss that should have taken her long before any of this, Vie Langford was conscious long enough to tell the police what had happened. She described her attacker clearly and specifically.
She described the employee badge he was wearing when he came through the door, a Tropicana badge with the name Melvin on it. Investigators had a name before the night was over. Vie Langford did not survive. Hours after emergency surgery, her body gave out. She died of cardiac arrest. She was 70 years old. She had run her store for years, served her community.
I built something that mattered. And she died on the floor of the place she had given her working life to because a 25-year-old man needed drug money. The investigation moved quickly because Vie had done the investigator’s most important work for them. The Tropicana badge with the name Melvin led police directly to Melvin Troder.
A search of his home turned up a t-shirt stained with blood that matched Vie’s type and forensic technicians lifted a handprint from the store’s meat cooler that matched Melvin’s exactly. He was charged with firstdegree murder, robbery with a deadly weapon and burglary. At trial in May of 1987, the defense laid out everything. the absent father, the alcoholic and abusive mother, the foster care, the imprisonment of his foster father, the murder of his sister, the IQ score of 72 that placed him in the range of a slow learner, the mental age of a child
assessed by one expert as being the equivalent of 12 years old at the time of the crime. The psychiatrist who evaluated him concluded that Melvin had poor impulse control and a diminished ability to understand the long-term consequences of his actions and that his drug use had further distorted his already fragile grasp on reality.
The jury heard all of it. They acknowledged it. The trial court found multiple mitigating factors including his below average intelligence, his developmental history, and evidence of extreme emotional disturbance. And then they recommended death by a vote of 9 to3. Anyway, the judge agreed, citing four aggravating circumstances. Melvin was on community control supervised release at the time of the murder.
He had a prior violent felony conviction. The murder was committed in the course of a robbery, and the crime itself was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel. Community control that supervised release the courts had given him as a second chance the opportunity to rebuild, to stay out of prison, to show he could live differently, had become one of the four reasons a jury could sentence him to death. The system had tried to help him.
He had used that help to find a 70-year-old woman alone in a store. The road from that 1987 death sentence to the February 2026 execution was one of the longest and most legally complicated in Florida death row history. The Florida Supreme Court on appeal ruled in Melvin’s favor on a technical point. Community control was not legally equivalent to imprisonment under the specific language of the statute and therefore one of the four aggravating factors that had been used to justify his death sentence should not have been
applied. They vacated the sentence and ordered a new sentencing hearing. It looked like Melvin might have found a path to life in prison. And then something almost unprecedented happened. Before the new sentencing hearing could even be scheduled, the Florida legislature passed a law specifically redefining community control to include it as an aggravating factor in capital cases.
The exact factor the Supreme Court had just ruled could not be used against Melvin. The legislature in essence changed the rules in response to the ruling that had temporarily saved his life. At the resentencing, members of Virgil Langford’s family testified about who she was and what her loss had meant to the people who loved her.
The new jury recommended death by a vote of 11 to1, one more vote than the first time. Melbourne’s attorneys went back to the courts, arguing that applying the new law retroactively to his case violated his constitutional rights. And the Florida Supreme Court did something courts almost never do. They reversed their own earlier ruling, the one that had temporarily spared him and declared that the original trial had been error-free.
The decision that had saved his life was taken back. The death sentence was reinstated. Over the next several decades, Melvin remained on Florida’s death row. In all of that time and nearly four decades, he received a single disciplinary infraction. One, a verbal threat in 1995. There after that, nothing. He became one of the quietest, most unproatic inmates on the row. He learned to paint.
He made friends. By every observable measure, the man who walked into Langford’s Grocery in 1986 was not recognizable in the man who had been living inside that prison for nearly 40 years. Whether that transformation changes what happened on June 16th, 1986 is the kind of question the death penalty forces us to ask and that different people will answer differently until the end of time.
On January 23rd, 2026, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Melvin’s death warrant. His attorneys filed emergency appeals. They challenged Florida’s lethal injection protocol, pointing to documented evidence that the state had used expired drugs in multiple executions throughout 2025, had prepared incorrect dosages it and had administered drugs outside its own written protocols.
They argued that executing a 65-year-old man was cruel and unusual punishment, noting that Florida law provides enhanced legal protections for people over 65 in nearly every other context. The Florida Supreme Court rejected both arguments. Justice Sonia Stoayor of the US Supreme Court in denying the final stay of execution.
Knight issued a statement acknowledging the serious concerns about Florida’s injection protocol, noting that state records did reflect at least the possibility of expired drugs, incorrect doses, and recordkeeping failures. But she concluded that Melvin’s claims remained speculative without confirmed proof of specific errors in his case.
The stay was denied. February 24th, 2026. Melvin Troder woke up at 3:20 in the morning. He had one visitor that day. He did not request a spiritual adviser. And for his final meal, he asked for fish, rice, cornbread, and omelette, cake, and a soda. A full meal, the last real choice of his life. Outside the walls of Florida State Prison, approximately 50 people gathered for a vigil organized by opponents of the death penalty.
They held candles and signs. One attendee carried artwork. They rang a bell as the execution hour approached. One activist stood among them and said, “Poison is currently being injected into another human being.” At 6:00 in the evening, the curtain to the execution chamber was raised. Melvin Troder was already strapped to the gurnie, arms out, the IV line in place.
The warden asked if he had any final words. Melvin said nothing. He declined to give a statement. No apology to Virgil Langford’s family. No explanation, no farewell. Just silence and then the administration of the drugs. Within minutes, his breathing became labored. His body moved slightly and then went still on the warden walked to the gurnie and checked his condition.
A medic was called in at 6:14 in the evening. At 6:15 p.m., Melvin Troder was pronounced dead. He was 65 years old. Vie Langford was 70 when he walked through her door. She had lived 70 years and built something real and spent her life serving her community. She died on the floor of her own store for $100 and some food stamps tied up in a red bandana.
That is the last execution of February 2026. Three men, three executions. A three completely different stories that all end in the same place. A gurnie, a needle, a curtain going up. Ronald Palmer Heath, who killed for the first time at 16 and never fully stopped. Michael Sheridan trusted him in a bar and paid for it with everything he had.
Kendrick Antonio Simpson, who survived being shot five times as a teenager, carried the trauma of that across state lines and then used an AK-47 to take the lives of two young men who had their whole futures ahead of them. or and Melvin Schroeder, whose childhood was a collection of failures by his parents, by the foster system, by every structure that was supposed to catch him, who then became the failure of Vie Langford’s life by walking into her store with a kitchen knife.
None of these stories are simple. None of them offer easy answers about justice, punishment, redemption, or what we owe each other as a society. But every one of them is real. Well, every one of the people in them, the ones who died at the hands of these men, the ones who watched their loved ones taken, the ones who waited decades for something that felt like closure, every one of them was a real person whose story deserves to be told and remembered.
That is what we do here on True Crime Matter. If this video reached you, if it made you think, if it made you feel something, please drop a comment below. Let us know where you are watching from. Let us know what you think. And if you want to go deeper into any one of these cases, tell us that too. We will see you in the next one.
