Richard Knight, 47, was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke for the killings of Odessia Stephens and her four-year-old daughter, Hanessia Mullings, in Broward County in June 2000, according to The Associated Press.
At the time of the killings, the apartment in Coral Springs was shared by Knight, his cousin, Stephens, and Mullings. When Stephens informed Knight one evening that he would have to leave by morning, he went to the kitchen for a knife, stabbed Stephens to death, and then turned on the child, according to The Associated Press. According to CBS News, Stephens's body bore 21 stab wounds; the four-year-old had been stabbed repeatedly and also showed indications of strangulation.
CBS News reported that Knight tried to erase evidence of the crimes before officers arrived, at which point he escaped through a window and was caught a short distance away. A confession Knight made to a cellmate during his time at the Broward County Jail later came back to haunt him when that inmate took the stand as a witness at trial, according to The Associated Press. Knight was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in 2006 and sentenced to death in 2007.
The Florida Supreme Court denied Knight's appeals the previous week, rejecting a newly discovered evidence claim and challenges to the state's execution protocols, according to The Associated Press. A final appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court was still pending at the time of the scheduled execution.
With Knight's death, Florida has now carried out seven executions in 2026. That comes on the heels of a historic 2025, when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis presided over 19 executions — a total no Florida governor had matched since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976, according to CBS News. The state's prior single-year high had been eight, recorded in 2014.
No other state came close to Florida's execution count in 2025; Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas were the next busiest, each putting five inmates to death, according to The Associated Press. Florida's next scheduled execution falls on June 2 and involves Andrew Richard Lukehart, 53, who was found guilty of killing his girlfriend's baby girl in 1996 by beating her to death, according to The Associated Press.