ORLANDO, Fla. _ The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday overturned the conviction and death sentence of Clemente Javier Aguirre, a prep chef at a Heathrow restaurant who was given the death penalty after being convicted of murdering his wheelchair-bound neighbor and her adult daughter in 2004.
The women lived in the trailer next door.
Their bodies were found inside. Carol Bareis, 68, had toppled from her wheelchair. Her daughter, Cheryl A. Williams, was found in a different room with 129 knife wounds.
The decision was a victory for the Innocence Project, which had joined the campaign to free Aguirre, and the office of Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, the public defenders who represent Florida death row inmates.
On appeal, defense lawyers had suggested that the real killer was a family member, the granddaughter of the woman in the wheelchair. Her name is Samantha Lee Williams, and she also lived in the trailer. She says she is innocent.
After Aguirre was sent to death row, experts identified eight drops of her blood in the trailer. Immediately after the homicides, she told Seminole County deputies that she had argued with her mother the evening before and had stormed out and spent the night with her boyfriend.
Her mother and grandmother were alive when she left, she told deputies.
Aguirre, 36, told deputies that he wandered into the murder scene before dawn that day, June 17, 2004, and discovered the bodies, checked them for signs of life then left.
Their blood was found on his shorts and shoes.
The chef's knife that authorities say was used to kill both was found on the ground in Aguirre's yard.
He told jurors that when he was inside, he saw it, picked it up and carried it outside.
His bloody clothes were found in a plastic bag on top of a nearby shed.
Aguirre, a native of Honduras who was in the country illegally, was convicted by a Seminole County jury on Feb. 28, 2006, two days after he had testified that he was innocent.
The jury recommended that he be put to death for both slayings. The panel voted 7-5 for death in Williams' homicide and 9-3 in Bareis'. Circuit Judge O.H. Eaton Jr. imposed the death penalty in both cases.
