JUST IN: Arizona to Execute Leroy McGill in 1 Day. He Burned a Man Alive Over a Stolen Gun. May 20TH 

JUST IN: Arizona to Execute Leroy McGill in 1 Day. He Burned a Man Alive Over a Stolen Gun. May 20TH 

On May 20th, 2026, at 10:00 in the morning, the state of Arizona will strap Leroy Dean McGill to a gurney inside the execution chamber at Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence and push a lethal dose of pentobarbital into his veins until his heart stops beating. He will be 63 years old. He has been sitting on death row since 2004.

More than two decades of waking up inside the same walls, knowing that somewhere on a calendar, a date already existed with his name on it. That date is now 5 days away. How does it feel to know the exact morning you will leave this earth? To know the hour? Most people spend their entire lives never knowing when the end is coming.

Leroy McGill has known for years. He has sat with that knowledge every single day on Arizona’s death row in a cell at the Polunsky Unit while lawyers filed motions and courts issued rulings, and the calendar kept moving. Every appeal denied brought him one step closer to this morning, and now there are no more appeals. No more motions.

 No more courtrooms. Just the gurney, the needle, and 10:00 on May 20th. But before we talk about the execution, before we talk about the man strapped to that gurney, we need to understand what Leroy McGill did to get there. Because the state of Arizona does not sentence men to death over nothing. To understand why a jury looked at this man and decided he had to die, we have to go back more than 20 years.

Back to the summer of 2002. Back to a neighborhood called Sunnyslope in North Phoenix, Arizona. Back to a cramped one-bedroom apartment in a duplex where too many people were living too close together. Where tensions had been building for weeks and where one stolen shotgun was about to set a chain of events in motion that ended with a man burned alive.

But first, let us talk about Charles Perez. Because Charles Perez is the reason we are here, and he deserves more than a name in a court document. Charles Perez was a young man living a transient, unsteady life in the summer of 2002. He and his girlfriend, Nova Banta, were staying in Jack Yates’ apartment in the Sunny Slope area of North Phoenix.

 It was not a large apartment, one bedroom, a common room that served as kitchen, living area, and sleeping space all at once, and not much else. But Jack Yates was generous with his floor space, and that summer his apartment was packed. Eddie Teeth lived there with his wife, Kim, and their two young daughters. Hardesty’s brother, Jeff Uhl, came and went. Yates kept his own bedroom.

Perez and Banta, along with anyone else who needed a place, shared whatever was left. This was the kind of arrangement people fall into when money is tight and options are limited. Everyone in that apartment was surviving, rather than living. They were pooling resources in the way that people who have very little do, sharing space because none of them had anywhere better to go.

It was not a comfortable arrangement, but it was what they had. And within it, Charles Perez and Nova Banta had each other. That counted for something. They were together in that apartment, sleeping on that common room couch, sharing that impossible space the way two people do when the world outside feels too unstable to navigate alone.

Charles Perez would be dead before the summer was over. He was 20 years old. Now, to understand the man who killed him, we have to go much further back than the summer of 2002. We have to go back to the beginning of Leroy McGill’s life because nothing that happened in that apartment on the night of July 13th, 2002 came out of nowhere.

part2

Every decision McGill made that night, every step he took toward that front door was the product of a life that had been building toward catastrophe since before he was old enough to understand what was happening to him. Leroy Dean McGill was born in the early 1960s. His father was an alcoholic, violent with his mother dangerous in the way that alcoholic men in troubled homes are dangerous, unpredictably, explosively, leaving everyone around them in a permanent state of low-grade dread.

By the time McGill was born, his parents were already falling apart. His mother, Ann, eventually gathered her five children and left California for Arizona trying to put distance between herself and the man who hurt her. McGill’s father followed them to Arizona, took the children back to California. Ann fought to get them back.

She got them back. The children were pulled back and forth between two people who were barely managing their own lives, let alone the lives they were responsible for. Think about what that does to a child. Before you are old enough to understand the concept of stability, you learn that the ground under you can shift at any moment.

You learn that the adults who are supposed to protect you are the source of the danger. You learn that nowhere is safe and nothing is permanent. That is not a lesson a child can unlearn. It lodges somewhere deep and it shapes every relationship, every decision, every response to threat or humiliation that follows.

Ann eventually had custody. She worked multiple jobs to support herself and her children, but the emotional resources were simply not there. When Magill was 8 years old, she sent him to an institution for troubled children. 8 years old. Not because he was violent or dangerous at 8. Because she could not manage him or did not want to or both.

 She visited infrequently once he was gone. When Magill was 13 years old, she told a school official that her son had no interests and no talents. When he was 16, she told him he was no longer welcome in her home and sent him away permanently. His stepfather, the man who came into the picture after his father, beat the children.

There was cruelty on both sides of his family tree and nowhere in his childhood that functioned as a refuge. Here’s what a defense psychologist would later discover when reviewing the records of Magill’s entire life. The only times, the only documented periods in which Leroy Magill made any real progress, where his grades improved, where his behavior stabilized, where something that looked like potential emerged, were the years he spent in structured institutions.

In the children’s homes he was placed in, he blossomed. That was the word the psychologist used and it is the right word. Because it captures both the genuine change and the fragility of it. He blossomed under structure. The moment the structure was removed, the moment he was returned to an unmanaged world, he collapsed back into chaos. It happened every single time.

 By his teenage years, he was using drugs and alcohol. By adulthood, it was methamphetamine. Daily. Chronic. The kind of consumption that does not just impair judgment in the moment, but physically rewires the brain over time, degrading the very neural pathways responsible for impulse control, long-term thinking, and consequence processing.

 By the time he was in his 20s, he was committing armed robbery. In 1986, he was convicted of two counts of it. He pleaded guilty, served his sentence, got out, and in the period immediately after prison, something surprisingly close to stability appeared. He reconnected with family. He found work. His prison behavior had been good enough that that evaluators noted he required little supervision and caused no serious disciplinary problems.

There was a window there, a real one. And then Jonah Hardesty walked into his life. McGill’s own family would later use the word evil to describe her. Not difficult, not troubled, not complicated, evil. The defense psychologist who spent years studying McGill’s life explained the dynamic in clinical terms that were no less damning.

 McGill’s entire childhood had been defined by emotional abandonment by a mother who never really wanted him, which left him with a specific and devastating vulnerability. He needed female approval with an intensity that went beyond normal attachment. When a woman stepped into that space and offered what his mother never had, attention, direction, belonging, he was incapable of critically evaluating her.

He could not see her clearly. The methamphetamine made it worse. The drug that had been eating away at his judgment for two decades made him even more susceptible to manipulation, even more dependent on the external structure that Hardesty provided. The defense psychologist put it this way in court documents.

 When Hardesty said jump, McGill jumped. He did not ask questions. He did not weigh consequences. He jumped. By the summer of 2002, the life that McGill had briefly attempted to build after his armed robbery conviction was gone. He had lost his job. He had lost his apartment. He and Hardesty were effectively homeless, moving between whatever floors people were willing to let them sleep on in the Sunny Slope neighborhood.

One of those floors belonged to Sophia Barnhart. Another belonged to Jack Yates. That is how McGill knew the Yates apartment. He had been inside it many times. He knew the layout. He knew which rooms people slept in. He knew exactly where Charles Perez and Nova Banta spent their nights. And then the shotgun went missing.

Jack Yates owned a shotgun. At some point that summer, it disappeared from the apartment. Charles Perez and Nova Banta said it was McGill and Hardesty who had taken it. Whether they had or not is something only they knew. But the accusation was made directly. It was made to Yates, and Yates believed it. He told McGill and Hardesty they were no longer welcome and threw them out.

They had to take whatever they could carry and find somewhere else to sleep. Now, to most people, being kicked out of a shared apartment over an accusation is an embarrassing, painful situation that you eventually put behind you. You move on. You find another floor to sleep on, and you let it go. But Leroy McGill was not most people.

He was a man whose entire life had been organized around humiliation and powerlessness and the desperate need to not be dismissed, not be sent away, not be told he did not belong. Being called a thief in front of people he knew, being thrown out of a place he depended on, and knowing that it was Charles Perez, the man who had sold the marijuana just days earlier, who had said those things behind his back, was not something McGill could process and release. It sat in him. It festered.

 And over the days that followed, it turned into something else entirely. On the evening of July 12th, 2002, McGill, Hardesty, Barnhart, and Justin Johnson spent the hours together at Barnhart’s house. They smoked marijuana purchased from Perez. Think about that for a moment. The man McGill was now consumed with rage over had supplied the drugs they were smoking that very night.

 The hours passed. The neighborhood went quiet. The city outside the windows settled into the kind of stillness that only exists in the deep middle of the night. And at some point during those hours, Leroy McGill made a decision. He later said, in his own words captured in court documents, that he was going back to that apartment to teach Perez and Yates a lesson, that nobody gets away with talking about him and Hardesty the way they had.

That is the framing he used. A lesson, not rage, not revenge, a lesson. As though what he was about to do was pedagogical, as though he was the one with something to teach. He prepared. He filled a cup with gasoline. And then, according to multiple witnesses who would later testify under oath, he did something that went far beyond the act of a man acting on impulse or rage.

 He broke pieces of a Styrofoam cup and mixed them into the gasoline. If you’ve never heard of this, let me explain what it means. Styrofoam dissolved in gasoline produces a thick, viscous, paste-like substance. It behaves the way napalm behaves. It does not splash and run off a surface. It adheres.

 It clings to whatever it contacts, fabric, skin, and it keeps burning long after plain gasoline would have burned away or been extinguished. It is extraordinarily difficult to remove from skin once ignited. The damage it causes is deeper and more sustained. His defense lawyers would later dispute whether McGill actually did this. The state’s witnesses said he did.

 And they said he bragged about it afterward. Prosecutors would later stand in front of a jury and argue that this detail, this specific preparation, was proof that Leroy McGill did not simply want to hurt Charles Perez. He wanted to make sure the hurt was as bad as it could possibly be. He wanted it to stick. Literally.

At approximately 3:30 in the morning on July 13th, 2002, Leroy McGill walked from Barnhart’s house to the Yates duplex. It was a short walk through a neighborhood he knew. He carried the cup. When he arrived outside the apartment, something happened that would later become one of the most chilling moments in the entire trial.

Eddie Teeth and Jeff Wool were outside the apartment when McGill arrived. Teeth lived in that duplex with his wife Kim and their two young daughters. He came out to talk to McGill. And McGill, standing there in the early morning hours of July 13th, told him directly that he was going to teach Perez and Yates a lesson, that nobody gets away with talking about him and Hardesty the way they had.

 Teeth pleaded with him, tried to get McGill to walk away. And McGill responded to that pleading by making a concession. He told Keith that Yates would be spared, that it was too late for Perez, but Yates could live. And then he said something else. He told Keith that he was the only one who knew what was about to happen. Top and that if anybody said anything about it, McGill would know who had talked.

And then he looked at Teeth, and he said that Teeth had pretty little girls. Let that land for a moment. Standing outside a building he was about to set on fire in the middle of the night, Leroy McGill looked at a father and reminded him that his daughters were pretty. It was a threat wrapped in the most indirect possible language.

 It was the language of a man who understood exactly what he was doing and wanted everyone around him to understand the consequences of speaking about it. Teeth took his wife and his daughters and he fled. All that McGill into the apartment. Inside the common room was quiet. Jack Yates was either lying on another couch or in his bedroom.

Charles Perez and Nova Banta were sitting together on the couch next to the front door. Not asleep, just sitting there when the door opened. McGill looked at them. Banta would later testify to what he said in that moment. He told them that Perez should not talk behind other people’s backs.

 He said it the way a person says something they have been rehearsing in their head. Measured. Certain. And then he poured the gasoline. He lit the match and threw it. Perez and Banta ignited. They were on fire and they ran. Both of them ran from that apartment in the early morning hours on fire into the street screaming. The couch caught. The walls caught.

 The fire moved through the apartment and into the adjacent unit of the duplex. A neighbor named Mary Near woke to the smell of smoke, dressed quickly and ran before the flames reached her. By the time firefighters arrived, the apartment was fully engulfed. The duplex and everything inside it was burning. At the hospital, Charles Perez was conscious. He was screaming.

 Over and over he said the same words, “Help me. Help me. Get the pain away.” Burns covered 80% of his body. The medical team fought for him through the night and into the following day. He died on July 14th, 2002. He was 20 years old. His sister would one day stand in a courtroom and read a letter to the jury about what losing him had done to their family.

About what it meant to get a call telling you your brother had been burned alive over a stolen shotgun. Nova Banta survived. The burns covering three-quarters of her body were so severe that doctors placed her in a medically induced coma just to give her body any chance of managing the trauma. She survived that coma.

 She came out of it. And one of the first things she did was tell investigators who had done this to her. She had looked into his face. She said his name. Back at Barnhart’s house, the phone rang. It was McGill. He had just set two people on fire and walked away, and he called the house and asked Hardesty a question. He asked if it smelled like burning flesh.

Then he turned his attention to Justin Johnson, the man who had been with them that evening, and asked through Hardesty or Barnhart, accounts differ, whether Johnson was going to talk. And then someone in that house made it clear to Johnson what would happen to him if he did. The same man who had just told Eddie Keith his daughters were pretty was now reaching out to manage the witnesses before anyone had even called the fire a murder.

He did not run. He did not leave Phoenix. He called to ask about the smell. Investigators had what they needed. They had a survivor who had identified her attacker by name before she was even out of emergency care. They had Eddie Cheever who had stood outside that apartment and heard McGill explain exactly what he was about to do and why.

They had Justin Johnson who had been threatened into silence and who had heard the phone call afterward. They had Jeff Uhl, who had let McGill through the door. The investigation pointed in one direction from the very beginning. And that direction had Leroy McGill at the end of it. He was arrested and charged.

On March 11th, 2003, 8 months after the fire, a Maricopa County Grand Jury formally indicted McGill. The charges were substantial. First-degree premeditated murder for the death of Charles Perez, attempted first-degree murder for the attack on Novabanta, two counts of arson for the fire set in both units of the duplex, three counts of endangerment covering Jack Yates, Jeff Uhl, and Mary Near, all of whom had been inside or adjacent to the burning building.

Shortly after the indictment, the state put McGill on notice. They were seeking the death penalty. And they had three aggravating factors to support that decision. First, McGill’s prior criminal record. In 1986, he had been convicted of two counts of armed robbery, both classified as serious offenses under Arizona law.

Second, the grave risk of death he had knowingly created for people other than Perez. Keith and his family had fled. All and Yates had been inside. Mary Near had barely escaped the adjacent unit as it caught fire. McGill had put all of them in the path of that fire, and the state was going to argue he had done so consciously.

Third, and most powerfully, the manner of the crime itself. The prosecution was going to stand in front of a jury and argue that what McGill had done to Charles Perez was especially cruel and especially heinous and depraved, and that no reasonable person looking at the facts could conclude otherwise. The trial opened in October 2004 in Maricopa County Superior Court.

 The guilt phase was not a close contest. The state’s case was built on the testimony of people who had been there, who had seen McGill’s face, who had heard his words, who had watched him walk through that door. Nova Bonita took the stand. She showed the jury her burns. She told them what McGill had said before he poured the gasoline.

 She identified him in court. Her testimony was direct, specific, and unshakable. Eddie Teeth testified about what happened outside the apartment, about the conversation, about the threat, about McGill telling him his daughters were pretty. Justin Johnson testified about the phone call afterward, about McGill asking if it smelled like burning flesh, about the threat that followed.

And because Jeff Uhl had died before the trial, Detective Colesa took the stand and read the jury Uhl’s statement from a December 2002 interview, in which Uhl had identified McGill as the man who set Perez and Bonita on fire and provided details that were corroborated in every significant way by the other witnesses.

The defense put on one witness during the guilt phase, Sophia Barnhart, who claimed McGill was not involved. The jury had heard from a survivor who identified her attacker from her hospital bed. They had heard from a man who stood outside that apartment at 3:30 in the morning while McGill explained what he was about to do.

They had heard from a witness who received a phone call asking about the smell of burning flesh. And they had Barnhart saying it had nothing to do with McGill. The jury deliberated for less than 1 hour. Guilty on every count, every single one. The aggravation phase followed immediately.

 The jury unanimously found that all three of the state’s aggravating factors had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Prior serious offenses, grave risk of death to others, especially cruel and especially heinous and depraved manner of commission. Three boxes checked. The case moved to the penalty phase, and this is where it gets complicated in ways that courts would spend the next 20 years arguing about.

 McGill’s defense team had four days to make their case for his life. Four days to take everything that had happened in that apartment and put it in context. The mitigation presentation was extensive. The defense started at the beginning, the alcoholic father, the violent home, the mother who could not or would not hold her family together, the multiple moves between California and Arizona, the institutional placements starting at age eight, the step father who beat the children.

They brought in mitigation specialist Mary Ann Brewer, who had spent months pulling together every record she could find on McGill’s life. School records, foster care documents, records from the children’s homes, prison evaluations, employment history. She laid out the arc of a life shaped by neglect and instability and repeated abandonment before McGill was old enough to make any real choices about his own direction.

They brought in neuropsychologist Dr. Richard Lanyon, who had conducted extensive testing on McGill and reviewed the records of his childhood. Dr. Lanyon’s findings were significant. McGill showed slight impairments in language and symbolic skills consistent with the kind of cognitive deficits that result from early neglect and chronic substance abuse.

 More importantly, the psychologist found that McGill’s emotionally distant mother had created in him a specific vulnerability to manipulation by women. That his need for female approval and direction was so acute that he was functionally incapable of critically evaluating the behavior of a woman who positioned herself as his anchor.

 When Hardesty said jump, the doctor testified, McGill jumped. He did not possess the psychological equipment to do otherwise. The methamphetamine the decades of daily chronic use had further degraded whatever judgment might have developed in better circumstances. The defense had also wanted a domestic violence expert and an addictionologist.

The addictionologist they retained, Dr. Mace Bexan, felt he could not offer useful testimony unless McGill accepted responsibility for his actions. McGill refused to accept responsibility. The addictionologist did not testify. The domestic violence expert was denied by the supervising public defender. The jury heard from one expert witness instead of three, covering a fraction of the mitigating territory the defense had intended to occupy.

Then the state presented its rebuttal. And what the prosecution put in front of that jury in the penalty phase did something nothing else in the trial had quite managed to do. While sitting in jail awaiting trial, Leroy McGill had reached out and attempted to arrange the murder of a potential witness against him.

A man named Lips had received a note from McGill. The note contained a description of Jeff Wool, the same Jeff Wool who had let McGill into the apartment that night, who had given a statement to investigators, and who had since died before he could testify. The note described Wool by his physical appearance, including a teardrop tattoo beneath his right eye and a deformed eye.

It matched. The note bore McGill’s fingerprints and handwriting. The evidence that McGill had attempted to have a witness killed from inside a jail cell was presented to the jury in the middle of a hearing about whether to spare his life. Then the prosecution read the jury a letter from the sister of Charles Perez about what it meant to lose her brother.

About what that fire had taken from her family and what they had been left to carry in the years since. The jury did not find McGill’s mitigation sufficient. They returned a death sentence. McGill appealed. That is his right and he exercised it. The case went to the Arizona Supreme Court, which affirmed the conviction and sentence in 2006.

McGill then sought post-conviction relief in state court in 2010, arguing among other things that his trial counsel had been ineffective at the penalty phase, that the mitigation presented had not come close to capturing the full scope of what his life had been, and that a properly equipped defense team would have done more.

The state court denied relief. McGill then entered the federal system, filing a petition for habeas corpus in 2013. He argued ineffective assistance of counsel, the confrontation clause, and an extraordinary legal argument rooted in a 2002 Supreme Court decision called Ring v. Arizona, which had briefly invalidated Arizona’s death penalty statute because it allowed a judge, rather than a jury, to find the aggravating factors required for a death sentence.

Perez’s murder fell within the narrow window between that Supreme Court ruling and Arizona’s correction of the statute. McGill argued his death sentence was therefore unconstitutional. The federal district court denied his petition in 2019. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed the case and affirmed the denial in October 2021.

McGill petitioned the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court declined to hear it. By 2022, every door in both the state and federal court systems had been closed. But the legal battle was not entirely finished. In the weeks before the Arizona Attorney General formally moved for an execution warrant, McGill’s federal public defenders filed one final petition raising something that had been sitting in the record for 20 years without ever being properly litigated.

During the penalty phase of McGill’s trial, the jury had been given incorrect information. They were told repeatedly by the judge, by the defense attorney, by the prosecution, that if they chose life in prison over death, Leroy McGill would eventually become eligible for parole. That somewhere down the road, there was a possibility he could be released.

But Arizona had abolished parole as a sentencing option before McGill’s trial even began. It no longer existed. The concept the jury was weighing, the fear that a life sentence might not be permanent, was based on information that was simply not true. His attorney Jennifer Garcia wrote in her petition that the jury was erroneously informed by everyone in that courtroom, and that had they known a life sentence meant McGill would die in prison with no possibility of release, they may well have chosen life over death. Were it not for these errors, she

wrote, her client would not have been sentenced to die. The Maricopa Superior Court denied the petition. McGill chose not to appeal further. He also formally waived his right to a clemency hearing. He stopped fighting. On March 26th, 2026, the Arizona Supreme Court issued the warrant of execution. May 20th, 2026.

Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. 10:00 in the morning, lethal injection using pentobarbital, the drug the state had already tested and confirmed was within proper concentration range. Leroy McGill has been on Arizona’s death row since November 2004. He arrived at 39 years old. He will leave at 63.

 His attorney Jennifer Garcia said publicly in the weeks before the execution warrant was issued that despite everything, McGill had spent his years in prison building something. That he had grown. That he had found meaning and purpose inside the walls in ways that had been impossible for him on the outside. Whether that matters to you likely depends on what you believe the purpose of execution actually is.

 Whether it is about the man on the gurney or the man who died on July 14th, 2002 screaming in a hospital bed. Charles Perez was 20 years old. He died with burns covering 80% of his body pleading for someone to take the pain away. His sister stood in a courtroom two years later and read a letter about what losing him had meant.

Nova Bontha survived. She carried those burns and that memory into every courtroom she was asked to enter. Identified the man who set her on fire and told the jury word for word what he had said before he struck the match. On May 20th, 2026 at 10:00 in the morning, the state of Arizona will administer that sentence.

 Insert last meal here. After execution on May 20th. Insert last words here after execution on May 20th. After spending more than 20 years on death row, Leroy Dean McGill was executed by lethal injection at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence on May 20th, 2026. He was 63 years old. The question this case leaves behind is not a comfortable one.

The jury sentenced him to death while believing the alternative was a man who might one day walk free. He never would have. The parole they feared no longer existed when they voted. Does a death sentence built on misinformation still represent justice? Or does it simply represent the final chapter of a story that started the night a 20-year-old man sat on a couch in a North Phoenix apartment and a door opened? Leave that answer in the comments.

 I will be reading every single one.