By Eileen Kelley
The Florida Times-Union
DUVAL COUNTY, Fla. — His arms are marked with symbols of hate: Near his left elbow is a swastika. The words White Power are inked on his arm, as are the letters SWP — initials standing for Supreme White Power.
Mark James Asay was 23 when a now veteran prosecutor in Duval County successfully persuaded a jury that the killings of Robert Lee Booker, 34, and Robert McDowell, a 26-year-old white transvestite who Asay mistook for a light-skinned black woman, were racially motivated. The killings were just minutes apart in the Springfield neighborhood of Jacksonville after a night of heavy drinking 30 years ago.
Witnesses said Asay boasted to a friend that night: “You’ve got to show n——— who’s boss.”
While awaiting trial in a Duval County jail, he apparently continued to boast.
Now Asay is scheduled to die.
If he doesn’t get a last-minute stay and is put to death by the state Thursday, it will be the first time the state has executed a man since the death penalty was allowed to resume in Florida after an abrupt halt last year. If carried out, it will be the state’s 279th execution since the Florida Department of Corrections took over from counties the task of killing inmates in 1924.
Despite the long history, it would be the first time the state executed a white man for killing a black man.
“Justice was supposed to be blind,” said Vittorio Robinson, Booker’s 45-year-old son. “That’s the way I was brought up. You are right or you are wrong. There is no in between.”
Robinson was 15 when he learned his father died as he tried to seek shelter near a house in Springfield after being shot once in the gut. Booker, it turns out, was friends with Asay’s brother. Asay, investigators at the time said, wanted no part of that.
“I was in shock. I was in disbelief. I just couldn’t believe it,” Robinson said.
As a young child Robinson heard the stories of the South’s terrible treatment of black men and women from the days after Reconstruction into the 1960s era of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But this, the death of his father and McDowell in 1987, apparently over race, was hard for him to understand.
“And then it dawned on me, there are actually still people out there that thought that way,” he said.
The march by masses of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 11 and 12 hammered home to Robinson and his uncle Frank Booker that America really hasn’t come that far from vitriol and violence during the civil rights movement.
Had Robert Booker not been killed, today he’d be 64 years old.
Frank Booker, his older brother at 69, last week recalled the hardships the family faced growing up in the segregated South.
Sitting on a chair in front of his house on Ionia Street in Springfield, Booker’s eyes grew sad as he spoke about a society that apparently hasn’t changed much at all. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
If given the chance, Booker said he would ask Asay one question: Why?
“What was the reason? Was it because of the color of my brother’s skin? That should not have been any reason for him to do that,” he said. “Not any reason at all.”
The jury in 1988 believed prosecutors who said the killings were racially motivated. Jurors voted 9 to 3 to condemn Asay to death, a vote that is no longer enough for death because the state was forced to adopt new laws that said jury decisions must be unanimous in death penalty cases.
The prosecutor in Asay’s case was Bernie de la Rionda. The trial was his first death penalty-eligible case. He has since tried 40 more.
Times-Union stories from 1988 say de la Rionda told the jury Asay’s actions were cold and carried out by an intelligent individual who quite simply decided one night to kill black people.
The assistant state attorney intends to be at Florida State Prison in Raiford on Thursday for Asay’s scheduled execution.
“In all those cases, I told the victim’s family that I’d be there with them when it takes place whether I am still working or not,” de la Rionda said in a statement Friday. “I have a responsibility to be there for them.”
It would be de la Rionda’s first successful death sentence carried out by the state.
Last week the Florida Supreme Court refused to block the execution. In doing so, the court rejected arguments about new lethal injection drug procedures. Correction officials plan to use a sedative, etomidate, which has never been used before in lethal injections.
Asay’s lawyer Marty McClain is still fighting to save his client’s life at the federal level.
“There’s still a number of things to do,” McClain said when reached by phone last week.
Should Asay be put to death Thursday, his execution will add to Jacksonville’s history of murderers receiving a life for a life.
In 1924 the first death row inmate to die in Florida’s electric chair was from Jacksonville. More followed. Four of the first five to die in the chair were from Jacksonville. A total of 43 inmates from Duval County have been executed. That’s more than any other county in the state.
The last man from Jacksonville to be executed by the the state was Allen Lee “Tiny” Davis in 1999. It was the last time the state used the electric chair. In 2002 Florida switched to lethal injections though those condemned to death may still request the electric chair.
As the days wind down to the planned execution, Asay’s sister Gloria Asay Dean of Middleburg said she struggles more than her younger brother. She said she helped raise him when it became clear their mother had no interest in another child after Mark Asay was born. There were eight children in the family.
Asay Dean maintains her brother, 53, is innocent.
“Mark is doing the best he can,” she said. “With the faith he’s got, he amazes. I can’t hold up that well. He keeps telling me it will be all right. Well it may be all right with him, but it is not all right with me.”
Asay has already been moved to the Death Watch cell at Raiford, a larger cell than the one he spent decades in on death row at the Union Correctional Institution.
His sister said she plans to spend time each day this week with her brother, including portions of Thursday when he is expected to have his last meal. Although he has not ordered yet, he told his sister he’d like an assortment of pork products. Florida executes inmates at 6 p.m.
Asay Dean is not giving up hope that perhaps her brother’s life will be spared again.
Asay’s original March 17, 2016, execution date was halted last year. Asay was one of two death row inmates to have his execution put on hold by the Florida Supreme Court last year after the U.S. Supreme Court said the state’s death penalty sentencing system was unconstitutional. The sentencing system has since been revamped.
“He feels like God is watching over him. They were supposed to execute him last year and they didn’t,” she said. “By the grace of God, he is still here.”
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©2017 The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Fla.)