LUCASVILLE, Ohio — The triggerman in an Ohio murder-for-hire scheme that killed a 66-year-old woman and critically wounded her son was awaiting execution Tuesday after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his final appeal.
Jason Getsy, 33, was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 10 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Institution in Lucasville.
Getsy fatally shot Ann Serafino in her home in Hubbard, near Youngstown, on July 7, 1995. Her son, Charles Serafino, was the intended victim.
John Santine, who orchestrated the crime, was in a dispute over ownership of a landscaping business with Charles Serafino and offered Getsy $5,000 to kill him and any witnesses to the crime. Santine was convicted of aggravated murder.
Prosecutors said Charles Serafino was lying wounded on the floor when Getsy struck his mother in the head with a revolver, opening a 4-inch gash, and then shot her twice.
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Charles Serafino, who was shot seven times, survived the attack and pressed for Getsy’s execution.
“It’s not going to change my life. But it’s justice for my mother, and that’s what she deserves,” said Serafino, who planned to witness Tuesday’s execution.
Getsy spent Monday night writing letters — he asked for 15 stamped envelopes — making phone calls and reading the Bible. He ate part of his last meal, including rib-eye steak, barbecued buffalo wings and onion rings.
He slept from 2:22 a.m. to 5:32 a.m., got up and took a shower, then began seeing visitors again Tuesday morning, said prisons spokeswoman Julie Walburn.
His visitors included his grandmother, an aunt and uncle, a step-aunt, his spiritual adviser and his two attorneys.
Getsy declined breakfast. He has remained upbeat and positive, Walburn said.
Getsy, who dropped out of school in the 12th grade, never met his father and was raised by his mother and stepfather. In 1992, he was convicted of negligent homicide in the death of a 14-year-old companion who died playing Russian roulette.
The Ohio Parole Board by a 5-2 vote last month recommended clemency for Getsy because other defendants in the slaying, including Santine, appeared just as guilty but weren’t sentenced to die. Gov. Ted Strickland overruled the board last week, saying the sentencing disparity did not by itself justify granting clemency.
Appeals courts previously have questioned Getsy’s sentence. A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his sentence in 2006, saying it was arbitrary. The full 6th Circuit reinstated it in 2007 in an 8-6 ruling.
The Ohio Supreme Court also noted the sentencing differences in a 1998 ruling but said that was not enough to spare Getsy.
The U.S. Supreme Court late Monday denied Getsy’s request for a stay of execution. His lawyers had said they wanted challenge Ohio’s lethal injection system as unconstitutionally cruel.
