Therefore, you unanimously find the sentence of death be imposed upon Austin Myers. It’s only going to cause more pain and suffering for another family. Not me. It won’t hurt me. I won’t feel anything. It’s going to hurt more innocent people. The courtroom in Lebanon, Ohio smells like wood polish and dread. It is October 16th, 2014 and every seat is filled. Reporters line the back wall.

Families crowd the gallery on both sides. At the defense table sits a 19-year-old boy from Clayton, Ohio. Slim, quiet. His face arranged into something that looks like calm but might just be shock. His name is Austin Gregory Myers and today the state of Ohio is going to decide whether he lives or dies. Behind him, his mother is already crying.

She has been crying since the penalty phase began. His younger brother is in that gallery. His father is in that gallery. They have all come today to beg. During the penalty phase, they each took turns standing before the jury and asking for mercy. And Austin himself stood up and said the words that his mother would hear in her sleep for the rest of her life.

“If you choose for me to die, it’s only going to cause more pain and suffering for another family, not me. I won’t feel anything.” His lawyers had spent days building their case for life. They told the jury about the divorce, about the self-harm, about the depression, about the gifted musician who played guitar and earned straight A’s before his parents split in 2009 and something inside him fractured and never healed.

They told the jury he was 19 years old, that his brain was still developing, that the man who actually drove the knife into Justin Back 21 times was sitting in a prison cell right now under a plea deal that gave him life without parole, alive, breathing, with a future, however bleak. Uh they asked the jury how it was possible that the man who planned the murder should die while the man who carried it out should live.

The jury went to deliberate. The courtroom waited. When they came back, the foreperson stood and read the recommendation. Death. Austin Myers’ mother broke down completely, her grief loud and uncontrollable in that silent room. Austin Myers showed no outward emotion, not a flicker. Judge Donald Oda II looked across the courtroom, reviewed the recommendation, and imposed the sentence, death.

And just like that, at 19 years old, Austin Myers became the youngest person on Ohio’s death row. His family’s begging had changed nothing. The tears had changed nothing. He was led away and sent into the abyss, and he is still there today. But before we go any further into what happened to Austin Myers, we have to go back to the beginning because to understand this story, truly understand it, you cannot start with Austin Myers.

You have to start with Justin Back because Justin Back is the reason any of us are here. And Justin Back deserves to be known. Justin Michael Back was born on February 13th, 1995, in the kind of small Ohio town that still operates on handshakes and front porch conversations. Waynesville sits in Warren County, about 30 miles northeast of Cincinnati, a quiet working-class community where people stay for generations, where everyone at the diner knows your order, where Friday night football games are community events, and the same families

show up year after year. Justin Beck grew up in that world. He fit it perfectly. He was not the kind of kid who needed to be the loudest person in the room or the most noticed. He was something rarer than that. He was the kid who noticed other people. His mother, Sandy Cates, would describe him years later to a courtroom that had gathered to talk about his killer, and she used the same words his friends had always used.

Kind, gentle, someone who paid real attention to the people around him, who asked how you were doing and actually meant it, who remembered what you told him the last time you talked. Justin had a particular gift for finding people who were struggling. In middle school, he would scan the cafeteria and walk toward the tables where nobody wanted to sit.

He would just sit down. He would start talking. He would make the kid feel like they belonged somewhere, like they had been seen. One of those kids was Austin Myers. Justin befriended Myers in 7th and 8th grade, pulled him into his circle when Myers was going through a difficult stretch, invited him into a friendship he did not have to offer.

Justin Beck saw something in Austin Myers worth befriending. He was catastrophically wrong about that. But that instinct, that reflex to move toward people instead of away from them, that was not an accident. That was character. That was who Justin Beck had always been. By 2013, Justin had graduated from Waynesville High School and his direction was set.

He had wanted to join the Navy since he was 3 years old. His mother remembered that detail with a kind of clarity that only grief can produce. Three years old and already pointing at military vehicles, already asking questions, already building a dream in his head that he never once abandoned. The summer after graduation, he had worked through every requirement, every physical, every form.

By January 2014, he was 10 days away from shipping out. 10 days from beginning the life he had spent 18 years building toward. His friends describe him in those final weeks as settled and happy in a way that only comes from knowing exactly what you are supposed to be doing next. They would get together and drink Yoo-hoo, that cheap chocolate drink that tastes like every good memory from childhood, and they would sit around and laugh and tell stories and just be young men who had nowhere to be but there.

After Justin died, those same friends went out and bought a case of Yoo-hoo and drank it in his memory and told stories about him all night long. That detail says more about who Justin Back was than any official record ever could. He was the kind of person whose friends reach for something that reminds them of him and drink it in his honor because that is exactly what he would have wanted.

He was 18 years old, he had 10 days left, and then Austin Myers started planning. Now we need to talk about Austin Myers and who he was before January 28th, 2014. Because this story cannot be understood honestly without sitting with that question. Austin Myers did not emerge from nowhere. He had a life. He had a history. He had, by all accounts, genuine potential.

He was academically gifted, the kind of student teachers remember. He played guitar and took music seriously. He came from a middle-class household in Clayton, Ohio with parents who loved him. And the Ohio Supreme Court would later note, without sympathy but with accuracy, that Myers had advantages most capital defendants never had.

And then 2009 happened. His parents divorced. Myers was 14. By every account available, the divorce shattered something in him. He began self-harming. He fell into depression that was real and documented. He moved schools, lost his social network, lost the stability that teenagers depend on more than they can articulate.

The bright musical kid with the straight A’s started coming apart quietly over several years in the way that struggling teenagers often do, not dramatically, not publicly, but slowly and completely. By the time he was 19, he was essentially homeless. He had no job, no direction. He had been staying at a house in Clayton with Timothy Mosley, a 20-year-old from Dayton who had no prior connection to Justin Back whatsoever and no reason to want him dead.

What turned Austin Myers from the kid who once sat at Justin’s lunch table into the man who would plan his murder? The honest answer is that we do not fully know. Depression does not make killers. Difficult childhoods do not make killers. Plenty of people survive far worse than a parental divorce and never hurt anyone.

Something in Austin Myers went somewhere very dark. And at some point in January 2014, that darkness took a shape. And that shape was a plan. It does not begin with hatred. It does not begin with rage toward Justin Back specifically. It begins, as so many terrible things do, with money. Myers knew that Justin’s stepfather, Mark Cates, kept a safe in the family home on Corwin Road.

Myers had been to that house before, back when he and Justin were friends in middle school. He remembered the safe. He had convinced himself, with no real basis, that it contained as much as $20,000. On the morning of January 27th, 2014, Myers turned to Timothy Mosley and asked if he wanted to make some money.

Mosley said, “Yes.” The two of them sat and discussed their options: rob a drug dealer somewhere, or go out to Waynesville and take the safe from the Cates home. They chose the safe. They drove out to Waynesville and pulled up outside the house and realized Justin was home, so they left. They turned around and drove away.

And if the story had ended there, if they had simply decided the risk was too high and moved on, Justin Back would have shipped out to the Navy 10 days later and the world would never have heard the name Austin Myers. But they did not move on. They drove away and sat in that car and Myers started thinking, “If Justin was home when they came to rob the safe, Justin would know who had taken it. Justin would go to the police.

Justin was the problem. Justin had to be removed from the equation.” And the solution Myers arrived at, sitting in a car in Ohio on a January afternoon, thinking about his childhood friend, was to kill him. That was the next thought. Not hesitation. Not horror at what he was considering. Just kill him.

Make it a clean kill. The two of them went back to Mosley’s house and sat down, and Mosley pulled out a small notebook. A detail so banal it takes your breath away. And they started writing down their plan like it was a grocery list. Wire cable and metal rope cleats to build a garrote, which Mosley would call a choke wire.

Ammonia to destroy DNA evidence. Septic enzymes to douse the body and accelerate decomposition. Rubber gloves. They drove to a Lowe’s and a Dollar General and bought everything on the list. Myers assembled the garrote with his own hands. They went to sleep. Tomorrow they would finish it. January 28th, 2014. It is just after 1:00 in the afternoon.

The sky over Waynesville is the flat, colorless gray of an Ohio winter and the temperature has been below freezing for days. Austin Myers and Timothy Mosley pull up outside the house on Corwin Road and walk toward the front door. Mosley has the garrote inside his jacket. Myers knocks. Inside, Justin Back hears the knock and goes to the door.

He opens it and sees Austin Myers, a face from years ago, a person he has not seen in 6 years, but still associates with the middle school kid he once looked out for. Justin does not hesitate. He opens the door wide and lets them in. Of course he does. That is who he is. They sit in the living room together for a while. They watch movies. They talk.

Justin is comfortable. He is relaxed. He has no idea that the wire inside Mosley’s jacket exists. He has no idea that the person sitting across from him has spent the last 24 hours planning the details of his murder. At some point, Justin gets up and moves to the kitchen. He walks to the refrigerator and in that moment, Mosley moves.

He comes up quickly behind Justin and brings the garrote up and over his head. But the wire catches wrong. It lands across Justin’s chin instead of around his throat. Justin Back is not small and he is suddenly fighting for his life with everything he has. All three of them go to the floor. The kitchen becomes chaos. The wire biting into Justin’s jaw, everyone struggling.

Justin’s hands trying to find the wire, trying to pull it away, trying to understand what is happening to him. He is fighting hard. And then Justin Back does something that no human being should ever have to do. He turns his face toward Austin Myers, the boy who once protected him in the cafeteria. And the friend he opened his door to without a second thought.

And he says the words that would be repeated in courtrooms for years afterward. Help me, Austin. He asks his murderer for help. He begs the person who designed his death to save him. Austin Myers looks back at him and he says, “It will all be over soon.” Then Myers tightens the garrote around Justin’s throat and Timothy Mosley reaches into his jacket and pulls out a pocket knife that Myers would later claim he did not know Mosley had brought.

Mosley drives it into Justin’s back, then into his chest over and over 21 times. The medical examiner will later count 21 separate stab wounds. Justin Back dies on the kitchen floor of his family home with his childhood friends hands around his throat and a stranger’s knife in his chest like 10 days before he was supposed to begin his life in the Navy.

When it is over, the two of them stand in a kitchen that looks like something out of a nightmare and they go to work. They pour ammonia across the floor and the counters. They tear up the kitchen rugs, the ones soaked with Justin’s blood. They find plastic and wrap Justin’s body in a blanket.

They drag him to the trunk of Mosley’s car. They move through the house methodically, taking the safe from the closet. It is locked, so Myers cannot open it on the spot. Taking jewelry, credit cards, electronics, bags of Justin’s clothing. The idea is to make it look like Justin packed up and ran away. They load everything into the car and leave around 2:00 in the afternoon.

Mosley gets paranoid on the drive, convinced they are being followed, so he starts taking back roads and pulling over to check the outside of the car for blood. They stop at Mosley’s house and drag the safe up the stairs and change their clothes. Then they drive south into Preble County, out to a remote field near a creek crossing that locals have always called Crybaby Bridge.

They carry Justin’s body out to a fallen log in the field and lay him on the ground. Myers takes the pistol he stole from the Kates’ home and fires two shots into Justin’s body. The gun jams on the third. He clears the jam mechanically, ejects the casing into the dirt, where police will find it later. Then he opens the containers of septic enzymes and pours them over Justin.

They walk back to the car. On the drive away from Crybaby Bridge, Myers suggests they should also kill Justin’s stepfather, Mark Kates. Tie up the loose end or eliminate the witness who would notice the safe was gone. Mosley says no. That is the only no either of them said across two full days of planning and execution.

The safe, when they finally got it open, contained $70. $70 and a document. That is what Justin Back’s life was worth in the mathematics of Austin Myers’ plan. $70 he could not even access until after the murder. The Navy would have paid Justin Back more than that in his first week of service. Justin’s stepfather, Mark Kates, came home from work that afternoon and felt immediately that something was wrong.

Things had been moved. The kitchen rugs were gone. Justin’s phone was lying on the floor. Justin was nowhere. By the time Kates and Sandy had searched the house and called for help, it was clear to anyone who walked through the door that something catastrophic had happened there. Neighbors confirmed they had seen a car outside the house earlier that day with two young men inside.

Police began pulling threads. They checked Justin’s call records, his social media, his contacts. Mark Kates told them about the missing safe. Investigators worked through the night and into the next day, interviewing everyone connected to Justin, building a picture of who had been in that house. Myers and Mosley had been staying together at a house in Clayton, and it did not take investigators long to arrive at their door.

Both men were brought in. Both gave statements. Both admitted to being present. And then their stories diverged in ways that would shape the next decade of legal proceedings. Mosley saw what was coming and made a calculation. He went to prosecutors early, before any formal plea arrangement, and began providing information.

He told investigators where the body was. He led them to Cry Baby Bridge in Preble County, where Justin’s body was recovered, still clothed, still partially wrapped in the blanket. The septic enzyme residue on the ground beside him. He gave prosecutors a detailed account of what happened in that kitchen. Who planned what, who said what, who held the wire while Mosley panicked and reached for his knife.

In exchange, prosecutors offered to remove the death penalty from Mosley’s sentencing. He would plead guilty to aggravated murder. He would testify against Myers at trial. He would go to prison for life without parole, and Myers would face a jury alone. The trial of Austin Myers in Warren County in the fall of 2014 turned on one of the most uncomfortable questions that American criminal law has to grapple with.

What does it mean to be the most culpable person in a murder when you are not the one who inflicted the fatal wound? Mosley took the stand for the prosecution and testified in precise and damning detail. He described the conversations, the shopping trips, the notebook, the garrote being assembled. He described Myers proposing the killing.

He described Myers holding Justin from the front while Mosley attacked from behind. He described Myers tightening the wire around Justin’s throat and saying, “It will all be over soon.” The prosecution’s argument, delivered by Warren County Prosecutor David Fornshell, with obvious conviction, was airtight in its logic. Mosley did not know Justin Back before Austin Myers brought him into this situation.

Mosley did not choose the victim. Mosley did not build the murder weapon. Mosley did not know enough about the Kates household to have targeted it on his own. Without Austin Myers, Justin Back is alive. Every element of this crime, the selection of the target, the construction of the weapon, the planning, the direction of events in that kitchen, traced back to one person.

Fornshell told the jury directly, “Austin Myers is a serial killer who got caught after the first time he wanted to kill. And there was evidence to support that assessment beyond the kitchen alone. Myers had reportedly suggested poisoning Justin before they settled on the garrote. After the murder, he suggested killing Mark Kates.

He shot Justin’s body twice after death. He doused it with decomposition chemicals. This was not a person who lost control in a moment of passion. This was a person who had decided with considerable deliberation that killing people was an acceptable solution to a logistical problem. The defense countered with everything available to them.

Myers was 19 years old, barely past the age at which the Supreme Court had already ruled juvenile offenders could not be executed. He had no prior criminal record. He had a documented history of mental illness and self-harm. The divorce, the depression, the self-mutilation, all of it was laid before the jury as context, as mitigation, as reasons to pull back from the ultimate punishment.

And most critically, the defense hammered the sentencing disparity. And the man who stabbed Justin back 21 times, who drove a pocket knife into a human being’s body over and over until he stopped breathing, was going to spend his life in a prison cell. While their client, who never once touched the knife, who by his own account did not know the knife existed until it appeared, was the one being asked to die.

The jury deliberated and came back with a guilty verdict on all counts. Then came the penalty phase, and Austin Myers stood up and spoke directly to the people who would decide his fate. He said if they chose death for him, the pain would not fall on him. It would fall on his family. His mother cried, his brother begged, his father sat in silence and watched his son try to stay alive.

The jury went back and deliberated again. They came back, death. Judge Donald Oda the second accepted their recommendation and imposed the sentence. October 16th, 2014. Austin Myers, age 19 years, 9 months and 12 days, became Ohio’s youngest death row inmate. I want to stop here for a moment and step outside the facts of this case.

Because this is the part of the story where I think most people, if they are being honest with themselves, feel something complicated. And complicated feelings deserve to be examined honestly rather than rushed past. Austin Myers planned a murder. He built the weapon. He chose the victim specifically, deliberately chose chose a person who had once been kind to him, a person who opened his door without hesitation because he trusted the boy standing on his porch.

He held that person down while he died and told him it would all be over soon. None of that is in dispute. None of that has ever been in dispute, but Timothy Mosley stabbed Justin back 21 times. Mosley is the one whose hands drove the knife. Mosley is the one who delivered every single one of those wounds.

And Mosley is alive in a prison cell in Chillicothe, Ohio today with the possibility of parole hearings in his future. While the man who never touched the knife sits on death row. The Ohio courts looked at this situation and said the law is clear. You can be more culpable for a murder than the person who carries it out.

The mastermind can bear more guilt than the instrument and legally, that is a defensible position. But here is the question that does not have a legal answer. Is it right? When you strip away the statutes and the precedents and the appellate decisions, when you just look at two human beings and what they did and what happened to them afterward, does the outcome feel like justice? Or does it feel like something else? The Ohio Supreme Court reviewed Austin Myers’ conviction and death sentence and issued their ruling on May 17th, 2018.

The decision was unanimous, 7 to 0. Justice Patrick DeWine wrote the majority opinion and went through each of Myers’ 18 arguments with methodical thoroughness and rejected all of them. On the question of proportionality, whether Myers deserved death when Mosley received life, DeWine was direct.

He cited the extensive evidence of Myers’ planning and his active role in the killing. He noted that Myers conceived the plot, selected the victim, constructed the murder weapon, and participated in holding Justin down while the attack occurred. He observed that Mosley had cooperated with investigators from an early stage, had taken responsibility, and had provided testimony that helped bring the case to resolution.

Myers, by contrast, had maintained a posture of deflection and blame throughout. DeWine also addressed Myers’ youth. He acknowledged that 19 was young. He acknowledged the depression, the difficult home circumstances, the lack of prior criminal history. But he found that the mitigating factors were outweighed by the aggravating circumstances and that Ohio courts had previously imposed death sentences on other 19-year-old defendants.

He wrote that he found little in Myers’ history, character, and background that was genuinely mitigating given the advantages the young man had access to. A loving family, a middle-class upbringing, high academic talent, and genuine opportunity that most capital defendants could never claim. The decision concluded, “We affirm the judgments of conviction and the sentence of death.

” The US Supreme Court declined to take Myers’ case in January 2019. In 2021, an appeals court ruled that the trial court had not adequately considered psychological evidence related to adolescent brain development and sent the case back for a hearing on that specific question, giving Myers’ attorneys a new avenue to pursue.

A 2022 execution date of July 20th was issued by the Ohio Supreme Court, but pushed back by the ongoing appeal proceedings. And then there is the broader Ohio death row situation that has made everything even more uncertain for every condemned person in the state. Ohio has not executed a single person since July 2018.

Governor Mike DeWine, who took office in 2019, declared that the state would not carry out any executions until it had developed a new execution protocol that could withstand legal challenge. The lethal injection drugs Ohio had relied upon had become impossible to obtain. Pharmaceutical companies had stopped supplying them for executions, and the methods available were being challenged in court as potentially constituting cruel and unusual punishment.

The governor stopped short of formally halting all executions, and Ohio has continued to issue execution warrants. There are warrants scheduled through 2029, but not one of them has been carried out. Austin Myers has an execution warrant. It exists on paper. But paper warrants and actual executions are very different things in Ohio right now, and nobody can say with certainty when or whether that will change.

Myers sits today at Ross Correctional Institution, still pursuing appeals, still fighting the sentence that was handed down when he was 19 years old. He is now 30 years old. He has spent more than a decade on death row. The two prisons housing Myers and Mosley, Ross Correctional and London Correctional, sit across the street from one another in the same town in Chillicothe, Ohio.

The man who planned the murder and the man who carried it out can look out at essentially the same sky every morning. That is not a metaphor. That is a geographic fact. Justin Back’s mother, Sandy Cates, has never stopped. She lobbied the Ohio State Legislature and saw a law passed in her son’s name, Justin’s Law, that increased penalties for murder.

She created a non-profit foundation called Justin Back’s Be a Hero. She organizes a 5K run every year at Waynesville Middle School, the school where her son once sat beside lonely kids and made them feel like they were worth knowing. She told reporters that every time a new court filing comes through, every time Myers’ legal team makes another move, she is pulled instantly back to the worst day of her life.

“When these things come up,” she said, “it puts you right back to where you were on that day.” And that day never fully ends for her. It has been going on for 11 years. Justin Back asked his killer for help and his killer told him it would all be over soon. Sandy Cates has been waiting for it to be over ever since and it is not over.

So, let me leave you with the question that has been sitting underneath this entire story from the beginning. The man who never touched the knife is on death row and the man who stabbed Justin Back 21 times is in a prison cell across the street with a life sentence. The Ohio courts up to and including the state Supreme Court in a unanimous decision said that is justice.

That the architect of a killing can be more guilty than the one who carries it out. That planning, selecting, manipulating, directing that these things carry more moral weight than the physical act itself. But, I want to hear what you think because justice is not only a legal question. It is a human one. If you had sat on that jury in Warren County in 2014 knowing everything you know now, knowing that Timothy Mosley drove a knife into a person 21 times and will eventually have parole hearings while Austin Myers faces execution for

planning a murder he did not physically commit. Would you have voted for death? And if your answer is yes, I want you to also tell me this. Does it matter to you that the man who never touched the knife might be executed while the man who did all the stabbing grows old in prison? Is that justice or is that just the law? Drop your answer in the comments.