Michigan Man Executed in Florida
A man who once said he "just liked to kill people" was executed Tuesday morning in Florida's electric chair.
Daniel Remeta, 40, was electrocuted for the 1985 slaying of a 60-year-old convenience store clerk in Ocala. The shooting death of Mehrle "Chet" Reeder was the start of a rampage in which five people died in three states.
Remeta was pronounced dead at 7:12 a.m. EST. Remeta had no last statement and was calm and expressionless when strapped into the chair. Before the hood was lowered, he nodded to someone among the witnesses on the other side of a glass partition.
When the power hit, he jolted back into the chair. His hands closed into fists.
The execution was the fourth at Florida State Prison in north Florida in nine days.
Late Monday, the state Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court refused requests to postpone the electrocution.
After shooting Reeder, Remeta killed Linda Marvin in Arkansas and Larry McFarland, Glenn Moore and John R. "Rick" Schroeder in Kansas. During six days in February 1985, he also shot three other people in Texas and Kansas who survived.
A native of Traverse City, Mich., Remeta left for Florida with a girlfriend and a friend in late January 1985. They turned up at the Ocala store Feb. 8.
Remeta took a package of bubble gum to the counter. As Reeder opened the cash register, Remeta shot him with a .357-caliber pistol.
As Reeder fell, Remeta shot him again, then walked around the counter and shot him twice more before stealing about $52 from the cash register.
Two days later, Remeta was in a convenience store in Waskom, Texas. He forced Camellia Carroll, the 18-year-old cashier, outside and shot her five times. She survived and testified against him in Florida.
On Feb. 11, Remeta was in Mulberry, Ark., where he killed Marvin, a grocery store clerk who was shot 10 times.
During another robbery two days later, Remeta killed McFarland, manager of a Stuckey's restaurant in Grainfield, Kan. Then he kidnapped Moore and Schroeder from a grain elevator and shot them dead on a dirt road near Colby, Kan.
Remeta also shot a county undersheriff, Ben Albright, who tried to stop him before he reached the grain elevator. But Albright survived, as did the manager of the grain elevator.
The violence ended in a gun battle with police in an unoccupied farmhouse in Atwood, Kan. Remeta was sentenced to life for the Kansas murders and to death in Arkansas.
Remeta told The Florida Times-Union for a Monday story that he didn't kill anyone in Florida or Kansas. He also said he wasn't afraid of the electric chair.
"There ain't a death chamber in the world that can actually hurt me," Remeta told the Jacksonville paper.
During the electrocution of Pedro Medina in March 1997, a foot-long flame erupted from his headpiece, stalling executions in Florida for a year.
The state Supreme ourt ruled 4-3 last fall that death in the 75-year-old electric chair was neither cruel nor unusual.
No fire appeared during the executions last week of Gerald Stano or Leo Jones nor during Monday's electrocution of Judy Buenoano, the first woman to die in Florida's electric chair.
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