A Florida man is looking for a second chance after being found guilty of an extremely heinous crime.
John Jonchuck says “voices” guided him to drop his 5-year-old daughter off a Tampa Bay bridge 62 feet down to her death.
It was back in January of 2015 when Jonchuck, then 25, pulled his PT Cruiser over along the Dick Misener Bridge, not far from the Sunshine Skyway. With a St. Petersburg police officer just out of reach, Jonchuck grabbed 5-year-old Phoebe from the car and threw her over the side of the span.
While Jonchuck maintained that he had a history of mental problems and may have had a psychotic break, prosecutors argued that Phoebe’s murder was premeditated. And after four weeks of testimony and seven hours of deliberation, a jury found Jonchuck guilty of first-degree murder. The verdict carries an automatic life sentence.
Jonchuck alleges that he was hearing voices, and according to public records, “I was hearing voices saying that if me and Phoebe didn’t die, everybody was going to go to hell.” Since his arrest, he’s received treatment in a mental hospital, but he revealed these details to a psychiatrist during a two-day evaluation in October 2017 and May 2018. The psychiatrist asked who was going to die, with Jonchuck responding, “Everybody in the world.”
Jonchuck also said to the psychiatrist, “I think about her every night, in the mornings when I wake up,” and that he still has “bad dreams” in which Phoebe is “laying there” and he “can’t get her to wake up.” Why? “Because I was a really good father and she loved me so much and I always promised her that I’m not going to let anything happen, and I did.”
Jessica Manuele, Jonchuck’s public defender, told the jury that her client loved his daughter and that delusions and archangel Michael led him to believe that Phoebe was possessed. Manuele also claimed that Jonchuck poured salt outside his daughter’s window to keep the spirits away and “he thought he was protecting his daughter.”
Despite these details, prosecutors claimed he was motivated by anger. Jonchuck feared that Phoebe’s mother would take his daughter away from him.
Prosecutors also allege that he was jealous of his daughter, as she received affection from his own mother that he, himself, never had. Assistant State Attorney, Paul Bolan, said, “It was rage that drove him to it on top of that bridge. Did he know what he was doing, and did he know it was wrong? The answer is clearly yes.”
According to his mother, Michele Jonchuck, “I want to tell him I love him because he’s my son. But when it comes to what he’s done, I hate him. He took my sunshine away.”
His attorneys did not dispute the crime; instead, they argued that he believed he had to murder his daughter to save the world.
“At that moment, he thought he was protecting his daughter,” assistant public defender Jessica Manuele told jurors during closing arguments. “It will never make sense because it’s insanity.”
Prosecutors, though, suggested that Jonchuck knew what he was doing that night and killed Phoebe to inflict pain on those who had hurt him, including Phoebe’s mother and his own mother, who doted on the brown-haired girl with the big smile.
Now he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
Watch the video below for more details:
Source: AWM