Florida has executed an inmate 35 years after he shot a police officer more than a dozen times during a traffic stop.
Billy Leon Kearse was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday, March 3, for the 1991 murder of Danny Parrish, a 29-year-old Army sergeant and officer with Fort Pierce Police Department who dreamed of becoming a dad. Kearse was pronounced dead at 6:24 p.m. ET.
The execution is the fifth in the U.S. this year and the third in Florida, which continues an aggressive push to chip away at its death row population of about 250 inmates.
Kearse's attorneys recently have been arguing that he was too mentally incapacitated to be legally executed and that he didn't get a fair trial. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected those arguments on Tuesday just a few hours before the execution.
Parrish's wife, Mirtha Busbin, told USA TODAY this week that it has been a long 35 years waiting for justice for her husband and that she was planning to witness the execution.
"It's been a long time coming," Busbin said. "I can't see keeping him alive 35-plus years while Danny had just a few seconds. It's just not right."
What was Billy Leon Kearse convicted of?
On Jan. 18, 1991, 29-year-old Fort Pierce Officer Danny Parrish pulled over a driver who was going the wrong way on a one-way street. The driver, 18-year-old Billy Leon Kearse, already was a career criminal with at least 12 arrests.
Fearful of having to return to jail because of a parole violation, Kearse repeatedly gave Parrish incorrect names, and the officer eventually decided to arrest him for driving without a license, according to court records.
Kearse said in an interview with detectives that he had his hands on top of his car when Parrish accidentally hit him near his eye with handcuffs. Kearse told detectives that he turned around, pushed Parrish and asked, “What’s wrong man?” He said Parrish then reached for his gun.
But Kearse got to it first, telling detectives: “It was him or me,” according to TC Palm, part of the USA TODAY Network.
In all, Kearse shot Parrish more than a dozen times, including some rounds that hit the officer’s bulletproof vest. Kearse admitted to detectives that Parrish had begged for his life, saying: “Come on, man, don’t do it, don’t do it.”
At sentencing, Kearse’s attorney argued that he didn’t deserve the death penalty, saying the murder was only considered aggravated because of the number of times he shot Parrish.
“Billy Kearse did not seek out a law enforcement officer as his victim,” attorney Robert Udell said, according to an archived story in the Indian River Press Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network. “It was two ships passing in the night. Unfortunately, they collided.”
At a news conference last month, Florida State Attorney Tom Bakkedahl rejected that portrayal, saying: “Danny came upon a wolf.”
“His life oozing from his body, Kearse stood over him with Danny’s firearm as Danny laid on the ground begging for his life. He fired 13 more rounds into him,” Bakkedahl said. “Billy Leon Kearse in cold blood premeditatedly and calculatedly executed a law enforcement officer.”
Parrish’s murder stunned his local community and beyond. Florida’s governor at the time, Lawton Chiles, flew to Fort Pierce to visit with his family and presented Busbin with an American flag. Today, a life-sized statue of Parrish stands in front of the Fort Pierce police station and a nearby park is named for him.
Who was Danny Parrish?
Originally from Indiana, Danny Parrish and his family eventually moved to Fort Pierce in Florida. Parrish was an Eagle Scout and later became an Army mechanic specializing in low-boy rigs.
In 1984, Fort Pierce hired Parrish as a mechanic to work on police cars. But in 1987 when two Fort Pierce officers - Jimmy Wouters and Capt. Grover Cooper III - were killed in an ambush by drug suspects, Parrish decided to become a police officer, Busbin told USA TODAY.
At the time of his death, Parrish had only been a full-time officer for a couple years and was about to be deployed to Operation Desert Storm, Busbin said.
“He loved helping people and he wanted to make a difference,” said Busbin, who is now a victim advocate for the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department. “I’m not so sure he wouldn’t be the Fort Pierce police chief if he was still around. He had that in him.”
Busbin said she was 17 and Parrish was 21 when they met in the early 1980s. Because her parents were very traditional Cubans, Parrish had to ask their permission to take her out and one of her four brothers chaperoned their first date. Six months later, they were married. They were trying to get pregnant about a decade later when Parrish was murdered.
“We never got a chance to really explore life,” Busbin said. “It’s so unfair.”
Parrish’s sister, Grace Blanton, told TC Palm that her brother’s death was so traumatic for her and their parents that they moved out of state not long afterward.
“It destroyed my parents,” she told the newspaper. “He never got to be a dad.”
Busbin, who has since remarried twice and is a mother to two daughters with her second husband, said that not only has Kearse never apologized for killing her husband but appeared to have been rubbing it in at his sentencing in 1991.
“He turned around and he looked at me, and he winked and smiled at me,” she said. “So I made it my mission to see this to the end.”
When is the next execution?
March is set to be a busy month for executions in the U.S., with five scheduled. Next week, Texas is set to execute Cedric Ricks by lethal injection on March 11, and Alabama is set to execute Charles Burton by nitrogen gas on March 12.
Ricks is being executed for the 2013 stabbing death of his 30-year-old girlfriend, Roxann Sanchez, and her 8-year-old son. Burton is being executed for the death of Doug Battle, a customer killed by Burton's accomplice during a robbery of an auto parts store in 1991.
Meanwhile Florida is set to execute two more inmates this month. Michael King is set to be executed on March 17 for the 2008 rape and murder of a 21-year-old mother of two named Denise Amber Lee. James Duckett, a former police officer, is set to be executed on March 31 for the 1987 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl named Teresa Mae McAbee.
Florida set an aggressive execution pace beginning last year. The state executed 19 inmates in 2025, by far a state record. Previously the most executions carried out in a single year in the state was eight, set in 1984 and 2014.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said that he's trying to bring closure to families who've been waiting sometimes decades for their loved one's killer to be executed. "There are so some crimes that are just so horrific, the only appropriate punishment is the death penalty," he said in May.
Contributing: Will Greenlee, TC Palm
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers breaking news, cold cases, and executions for USA TODAY.