STARKE, FL – Florida took the rare step of executing two men within five hours of each other on Tuesday, one of whom was former Putnam resident Dominick Occhicone Jr., an 80-year-old and only the second octogenarian put to death in the United States in the last 50 years.
Occhicone Jr. and the second man to die by lethal injection, 68-year-old James Duckett, had both been convicted of murder decades ago.
The men died at Florida State Prison in north-central Florida after the State Supreme Court declined to halt their executions.
The executions were the 11th and 12th in Florida this year and came as the Trump administration has encouraged states to pursue the death penalty more aggressively.
As previously reported by Mid-Hudson News, Occhicone Jr. lived in Carmel in the 1960’s and failed to report for military service for the Vietnam War and spent two years in military prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
In the 1970s, the family relocated to Florida where Occhicone Jr. became involved in a violent relationship with Anita Gerrety. When Gerrety finally ended the relationship, he became violent and on June 10, 1986, the 40-year-old went to Gerrety’s parents’ home in the middle of the night and began knocking on his ex-girlfriend’s window. She warned him to leave, and he did, only to return before dawn, armed with a gun, shooting and killing her mother and father.
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