Dallas (AP) — A former FedEx driver was sentenced to death on Tuesday after he pleaded guilty to killing a 7-year-old girl he took from her Texas home whereas delivering a Christmas reward.
Jurors in a Fort Worth courtroom selected Tanner Horner’s punishment after listening to a couple of month of testimony and proof that included audio of Athena Strand’s final moments from inside his delivery van. Horner, 34, pleaded responsible to capital homicide final month within the 2022 killing simply as his trial started. Athena’s body was found two days after she was reported lacking from her home within the rural city of Paradise, close to Fort Worth.
Horner didn’t visibly react when the decide learn the sentence, in accordance to a livestream of the courtroom proceedings.
Jurors discovered there was a chance Horner would commit legal violence and be a seamless risk to society. They mentioned there was nothing within the fee of the crime or in Horner’s background to warrant life with out parole as a substitute of death.
Prosecutor James Stainton instructed jurors in opening statements that Horner had instructed, “lie upon lie upon lie upon lie” within the case, together with telling authorities that he unintentionally struck Athena along with his van whereas making the delivery after which killed her in a match of panic.
Several jurors cried as they had been proven video and heard audio from contained in the van after Athena was taken. He might be seen lifting her into the van, after which driving away, telling her not to scream or he’d damage her.
Horner then lined the digicam, however the audio continued recording. Horner asks Athena questions, together with how previous she is and the place she goes to faculty, earlier than stopping the van and telling her they’re going to “hang out.” Horner tells her to take off her shirt and she or he begins crying, asking what he’s doing and whether or not he’s a kidnapper. She cries no and asks for her mom and to go home.
She asks him: “Why are you doing this?” He replies, “Because you are pretty.”
“My mom says I can’t do that to somebody,” she tells him. “And you can’t do that to me either.”
As the recording, which lasts over an hour, continues, Athena’s screams will be heard in addition to choking and slamming noises.
At one level he tells her: “If you don’t shut up, I will hurt you worse.”
A health worker testified that Athena died of blunt pressure accidents with smothering and strangulation.
While acknowledging throughout opening statements that the proof in opposition to Horner was “overwhelming” and “terrible,” Horner’s lawyer, Steven Goble, instructed jurors that Horner’s mom drank whereas she was pregnant, that he has autism and suffered from “various mental illnesses throughout his life” as well as to being uncovered to a “massive amount of lead.”
Goble had requested jurors to sentence Horner to life in jail.
Athena’s household has mentioned that the package deal Horner had dropped off was a Christmas current for her — a field of “You Can Be Anything” Barbies.
The trial was moved from rural Wise County to Fort Worth after Horner’s attorneys argued that he wouldn’t have obtained a good trial.