A man convicted of killing a 6-year-old girl who was abducted from her bedroom in 1979 was executed Thursday night in Florida’s record 16th execution of the year.
Bryan Frederick Jennings, 66, was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. after a three-drug injection at the Florida State Penitentiary near Starke. Jennings imposed the death penalty for the murder of Rebecca Kunash, who was raped and drowned in a canal.
When asked if he had a final statement, Jennings loudly said “No”. When the drugs were then administered, his chest rose and his arms twitched for several minutes. Then he lay there with his mouth open.
No family members of the victim spoke to the media after the execution, and Department of Corrections spokesman Jordan Kirkland said the procedure went as planned.
“The execution took place without incident,” he said. “There were no complications.”
The ex-Marine’s execution was one of three planned this week in the US, although Oklahoma’s governor spared the man’s life just before Thursday’s scheduled lethal injection. On Friday, inmate Stephen Bryant is scheduled to be executed by firing squad in South Carolina for a five-day killing spree decades ago.
Court records show Jennings was a 20-year-old on leave from the Marine Corps on May 11, 1979, when he removed the curtain from the girl’s bedroom window while her parents were in another room.
Jennings kidnapped the girl, drove her to a canal in his car and raped her, court testimony showed. He then “threw her to the ground by her feet with such force that she fractured her skull,” according to court records. The girl was then drowned in a canal where her body was found later that day.
Jennings was arrested hours later on a traffic warrant and matched the description of a man seen near the Kunash home when the girl disappeared. Shoe prints found in the house matched those worn by Jennings, his fingerprints were found on the girl’s windowsill and his clothes and hair were wet, the court heard.
Jennings was twice convicted and sentenced to death for murder in 1979 in Brevard County, both of which were overturned on appeal. A final trial in 1986 resulted in a third death sentence. He also handed down life sentences for the kidnapping, sexual assault and burglary convictions.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican who signed the death sentence, ordered more executions in a single year than any Florida governor since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The previous state record was set in 2014 with eight executions.
Addition. Florida’s executions are scheduled for Nov. 20 for Richard Barry Randolph and Dec. 9 for Mark Allen Geralds, which, if carried out, would bring the total to 18 this year.
DeSantis explained the unprecedented number of executions by saying that his goal is to bring justice to the families of victims who have waited decades for death sentences to be carried out.
“Some of these crimes were committed in the 1980s,” the governor said at a recent news conference. “Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make it go very smoothly. If I honestly thought someone was innocent, I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger.”
Executions in Florida are all carried out by lethal injection using sedatives, paralytic drugs and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state Department of Corrections.
Jennings has filed numerous appeals in state and federal courts, most recently claiming he spent months without a lawyer before DeSantis signed the death warrant, which he called a violation of his right to counsel.
With Jennings’ death, a total of 42 people have been ordered executed in the U.S. this year, and at least 16 others — including Bryant — were scheduled to be executed in the rest of 2025 and throughout 2026, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
The South Carolina Supreme Court recently refused to halt plans for Bryant’s firing squad execution, which is scheduled for Friday night. Bryant was convicted of killing three people more than 20 years ago when he left taunting messages to police in the blood of one of his victims.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted Tremane Wood’s sentence to life in prison Thursday, moments before Woods was scheduled to be sentenced to death for his role in the 2002 killing of farmer Ronnie Wipf during an attempted robbery.
Wood’s lawyers did not deny their client’s involvement in the robbery, but argued that his brother Zjaiton – who died in prison in 2019 while serving a life sentence without parole – actually stabbed Wipf.
