The US JUST EXECUTED 80-Year-Old Dominick Occhicone After 40 Years on Death Row | Last Meal & Words

On July 28th, 2026, 80-year-old Dominic Ackquay was executed at Florida State Prison. He had spent nearly 40 years on death row, costing Florida taxpayers an estimated $850,000 before the state finally carried out his sentence. And that doesn’t even include the cost of his appeals. But the reason he ended up there? A broken engagement, a secret abortion, and a man who told bartenders, friends, and anyone who would listen exactly who he was going to kill and how he was going to do it for weeks.

 And nobody called the police. Not once. It was just after 3:00 in the morning on June 10th, 1986, in a quiet subdivision in Holiday, Florida. Anita Garrity was asleep in her bedroom at her parents’ house. She lived there with her two children and her parents, Raymond and Martha Artsner. A knock on the sliding glass door woke her up.

It was Dominic, her ex-fiancé. He wanted to talk, wanted to work things out. But she told him there was nothing left to discuss and warned him she would call the sheriff if he didn’t leave. He left. He got in his car and drove home. But that night didn’t come out of nowhere. In September of 1985, Anita Garrity broke off her engagement to Dominic Ackquay.

 She later testified that the reason was his temper. She described an incident where she locked herself in a bedroom and Dominic kicked the door down holding a knife. There had been other moments, too, she said, both verbal and physical, directed at her and at her children. They had been together since 1982. They had lived together for about 6 months, blending her two kids with his 5-year-old son.

They had even set a wedding date for November 30th, but Anita had seen enough. Then, a month after the breakup, something happened that should have changed everything. Anita was at Dominic’s house when she tried to leave. He pulled a pistol, pointed it at her, and fired a round into the doorjamb right next to her head.

Then, he tried to hand her the gun and begged her to shoot him. She refused. After that, Dominic didn’t go away. He sent flowers to her workplace every single day. He called constantly. He showed up at her parents’ house in the middle of the night and knocked on her bedroom window roughly 20 separate times over the following months.

And in a twist that makes this whole story harder to untangle, Anita sometimes let him in. She visited his house, too, more than once. The relationship that was supposed to be over kept pulling them both back. Dominic had been a heavy drinker for more than a decade. Bartenders at Shooter’s Liquor Lounge in Elfers described his routine, and it paints a pretty clear picture of where his life had gone.

He would walk through the door right when it opened at 7:00 in the morning, drink 10 to 15 vodka cocktails before the lunch shift started, go home, sleep it off, and sometimes come back for more. 7 days a week. He also drank at three other bars on rotation. And all of this was before the breakup. After it, the drinking got even heavier, and so did everything else.

Then, in the middle of May, 1986, 3 weeks before the murders, Anita came to see him. She told him she had had an abortion, and she would not tell him whether it was his child. Around the same time, she mentioned she had met someone new. Whatever was keeping Dominic together stopped keeping him together. He told a bartender he was going to hire a lawyer and sue Anita for having the abortion.

He told another bartender he couldn’t stand to look at children anymore because it reminded him of the one that never existed. A friend named Joanne Carrico stopped by his house one day and found him on the floor crying, shaking, and vomiting. He told her he had nothing left to live for. Over the phone in the days before the murders, he kept telling Joanne he was going to himself.

She described him as out of his mind and totally upset. But Dominic wasn’t just talking about hurting himself. A bartender named Deborah Newell testified that during this same stretch, Dominic told her he felt like shooting Anita and her kids and then shooting himself. But then he said he wouldn’t do it because of his young son.

He could think clearly enough to protect his own child from losing a father, just not clearly enough to stop what came next. Because after that, the threats got worse and they got specific. He told people at the bar he wanted to shoot Anita’s father, her mother, and her kids and force Anita to watch all of it. He said he would save her for last.

Anita herself later testified that Dominic had told her on more than one occasion that he planned to shoot her family starting at the kneecaps and working his way up with her forced to witness every single shot. He said it to her face in bars, to friends, over and over for weeks. The Sunday before the murders, the owner of Shooters, a man named William Anderson, spotted a gun tucked into Dominic’s waistband and told him to take it outside.

Dominic had already told William, referring to Anita’s parents, “Maybe I should just blow them away.” William told him to knock off the crazy talk and that was it. The bar owner told him to knock it off. Nobody picked up a phone. Nobody drove to the Artsners’ house and warned a 63-year-old man and his 60-year-old wife that someone had been describing their murders in public for weeks.

The threats just floated in the air of those Pasco County bars while the man making them kept drinking and kept carrying a gun. On the night of June 10th, 1986, Dominic was at Shooter’s until 2:30 in the morning. He asked the bartender whether he should go over to Anita’s place. And when he left, it seemed like he had decided against it. He hadn’t.

He drove to the Artsner house and knocked on Anita’s sliding glass door at 3:00 a.m. She sent him away. He drove home, but a few minutes later, the phone rang. It was Anita. According to what Dominic later told psychiatrists, she said, “You [ __ ] [ __ ] What did you come over here for?” And she hung up. Dominic sat in that house for nearly an hour.

He had been drinking all night and all day before that and every day for the past decade. But during that hour, he didn’t pass out and he didn’t go to sleep. He picked up a loaded gun, got back in his 1975 Corvette, and drove back to the Artsner house. When he got there, he went to the side of the building where the telephone junction box was mounted to the wall.

 He ripped it off and pulled the wires out. Then he started pounding on Anita’s glass door again. When she didn’t respond, he moved to her daughter’s window. Meanwhile, Anita woke her father. 63-year-old Raymond Artsner went to the kitchen phone and picked it up to call the sheriff. But the line was dead. So Raymond did what fathers do.

He walked into the garage, raised the overhead door, and went out to handle it himself. Anita followed him onto the driveway. She could see Dominic coming toward them in the dark. He was staggering. She could smell the alcohol from where she stood. Raymond was furious. He grabbed a broomstick, stood his ground, and screamed at Dominic to get off his property.

Dominic didn’t argue back. He just kept repeating, “Can we talk about this?” to Anita, as if the gun in his hand wasn’t there. A neighbor, woken up by the noise, heard a man yelling, “Get the hell out of here, and don’t ever come back here.” And then he heard a gunshot. Anita watched Dominic raise his right hand toward her father’s face.

 She didn’t even realize he was holding a gun until she saw the muzzle flash. Raymond collapsed onto the driveway. Anita turned and ran back through the garage. She locked the door that led into the house, but Dominic was right behind her. He smashed the glass with his fist and reached through to turn the lock. Anita could hear him coming through as she scrambled down the hallway.

She grabbed her daughter, made it through the front door, and ran across the lawn to a neighbor’s house. Her mother, Martha, did not make it out. As Anita ran, she heard more gunshots coming from inside the house. When Pasco County deputies arrived around 4:00 a.m., Raymond was lying on the driveway with a single gunshot wound to the chest.

He was still alive. He looked up at the deputy and said, “Dom shot me.” Those were among his last words. He died at the hospital shortly after. Inside the house, deputies found Martha’s body just past the door that led from the garage into the kitchen hallway. She had not made it more than a few steps. She had been shot four times.

Three of those bullets went into her chest, and one of them hit her heart. The medical examiner would later describe that wound as rapidly fatal. Dominic’s Corvette was found five houses away with smoke rising from under the hood. A tracking dog picked up his scent and followed it 3/4 of a mile along a set of railroad tracks where deputies found him in the dark with his hair a mess and his clothes disheveled, looking half asleep.

At trial in September 1987, Dominick’s lawyers did not argue that he hadn’t done it. They argued that he hadn’t planned it. They brought in psychiatrists who described his actions as hot-blooded, deranged, and psychotic rather than calculated and diagnosed a major depression so severe it qualified as an extreme mental disturbance.

 But the state psychiatrist saw it differently. He testified that Dominick was not psychotic that night and that his judgment had not been substantially impaired. As for Dominick himself, he told the doctors that shooting Raymond was an impulsive reaction to being struck with the broomstick. And Martha? He said shooting her was a reaction to her screaming when he came through the door.

So, here is what the jury had to weigh. A man who named a specific family, who described the exact way he would kill them, who carried a loaded gun for days, who drove to their house in the middle of the night, who ripped the phone line off the wall so nobody could call for help, and who then walked up the driveway with that gun in his hand.

The defense called that a spontaneous breakdown, but the jury did not agree. They convicted him on both counts of first-degree murder. When it came time for sentencing, they recommended death by a vote of seven to five. Five jurors voted to spare his life, but the judge followed the majority. For Martha’s murder, the sentence was death, and for Raymond’s life in prison.

And Dominick spent the next four decades on death row fighting that sentence. He filed direct appeals, habeas petitions, and a claim that his own lawyers had failed him. Every single one of those claims worked its way through the courts, and every single one was rejected. His lawyers’ final argument was that executing an 80-year-old man constituted cruel and unusual punishment, that the state of Florida should not put a man that old on a gurney and inject him with lethal chemicals.

But the Florida Supreme Court rejected that, too. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco put it more directly. “He wasn’t too old or too frail when he murdered two people, and he killed them in cold blood,” the sheriff said. “If the issue is he’s too old, then maybe the issue is it took too long to execute him.” On July 28th, 2026, Governor DeSantis’s 12th death warrant of the year was carried out.

On his final day, Dominic woke up at 4:45 in the morning. He had no visitors and spent his remaining hours with a spiritual adviser. For his last meal, he requested eggplant parmesan, salad, cornbread, and a soda. In the afternoon, he was escorted to the execution chamber at Florida State Prison. At 6:00 p.m.

, the window shade inside the execution chamber rose. Dominic was strapped to a gurney. 27 witnesses watched from behind the glass. A spiritual adviser stood at his side, clutching a rosary, praying quietly. Dominic apologized to the victims for the hurt he had caused them. He thanked his attorneys. “I love their friendship,” he said.

And then, his final words, “I know it don’t mean much, but I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant to do what I did.” He closed his eyes within a minute. The warden stepped forward, shook him, and shouted his name, but there was no response. It took 10 minutes. He was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. Afterward, as rain began to pour and thunder rolled outside the prison, officials read a statement from the Arsnar family.

They spoke of 40 years of sleepless nights, missed birthdays, and conversations they never got to have. The execution, they wrote, “doesn’t erase the pain, but it closes a chapter.” Dominic Arcikone was 80 years old. He became the oldest person executed in the state of Florida in modern history. He was the second man executed at Florida State Prison that day.

6 hours earlier at noon, the state had executed James Duckett for the murder of an 11-year-old girl. If you want to see that video, it’s on screen right now. This was the first time Florida had carried out two executions on the same day since 1964.