A guilty verdict has been handed down to a former cop and firefighter in Fort Pierce. <\/p>\n
Otto Lenke was convicted today of first degree murder and first degree arson. <\/p>\n
During closing arguments, prosecutor Brandon White showed jurors surveillance video of a man in a helmet at Richard Benson’s Fort Pierce motorcycle shop, shooting him three times and then setting fire to his body.<\/p>\n
“When you look at this killing, you can tell that this is designed to cause as much fear and pain into Richard Benson as possible.”<\/p>\n
But Defense Attorney Valerie Masters told jurors the video proved nothing.<\/p>\n
“The state wants you to believe that they got the right guy. Not only is Otto presumed not guilty, he is in fact not guilty.”<\/p>\n
In the end, the jury believed the state after deliberating for nearly three hours.<\/p>\n
Jurors will be back in court next Monday, May 18th for the sentencing phase. The state is recommending the death penalty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A guilty verdict has been handed down to a former cop and firefighter in Fort Pierce. Otto Lenke…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[85000,23311,23307,84998,84996,115,171,173,172,84997,807,84999,729,221],"class_list":["post-263914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-port-st-lucie","tag-clear-channel-miami","tag-coast-to-coast","tag-glenn-beck","tag-hannity","tag-jimmy-cefalo","tag-news","tag-port-st-lucie","tag-port-st-lucie-headlines","tag-port-st-lucie-news","tag-schnitt","tag-south-florida","tag-the-weather-channel-wall-street-journal","tag-traffic","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}