March 14, 2008

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Killer smiles, families weep as jury recommends death

WHO: Derrick McFarland, Morva
WHERE: ABINGDON, Virginia
WHEN: Thu March 13, 2008
WHAT: A jury recommended the death penalty Thursday for a man who murdered a hospital security guard and a sheriff's deputy after escaping from custody.
WHY: Families of his victims and his own mother wept as the verdicts were read, but William Morva smiled slightly and snapped his fingers. He nodded to jurors and patted his attorney after he learned his fate. "He seemed to be acting like he won the lottery," said Harold McFarland, whose son Derrick was one of Morva's victims. It took about three hours for the Washington County jury to agree that Morva, 26, should be executed rather than face life in prison without parole. That's slightly less than it took the panel Tuesday to convict him of capital murder in the August 2006 killings.
HOW: Morva was a jail inmate who had been taken to a Blacksburg hospital for treatment of an injury when he overpowered a Montgomery County sheriff's deputy there. He used the deputy's pistol to shoot security guard Derrick McFarland, 32, who was unarmed. A day later in the manhunt that followed, Morva shot 40-year-old sheriff's Cpl. Eric Sutphin, who was searching for the fugitive on a walking trail near the Virginia Tech campus.