A rapist who burned a 15-year-old alive. A man who decapitated his victim. A grocery store massacre on video. Aaron Ford wants to make sure none of them are ever executed.
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford wants to be your next governor. And he just told the Nevada Independent exactly where he stands on capital punishment.
“I've been unequivocal about my position on the death penalty,” Ford said. “I am opposed to it, and I would sign the bill to repeal.”
Unequivocal. His word, not mine.
So before Nevadans cast a vote for governor in November, I think they deserve to know exactly who Aaron Ford would spare from the needle.
Not in the abstract. Not in the language of legal briefs and civil liberties talking points. In plain English – what these men actually did to the real human beings whose lives they snuffed out.
Buckle up. This isn't easy reading. But the victims didn't get a choice, either.
Javier Righetti: He Stalked a 15-Year-Old Girl 80 Stab Wounds from Her Front Door
It was September 2, 2011. The first week of school.
Alyssa Otremba, a 15-year-old freshman at Arbor View High School in northwest Las Vegas, texted her mom that her phone was dying and she was walking home.
She never made it.
Before he ever left the house that night, Javier Righetti had been browsing internet pornography depicting the torture of young girls.
He spotted Alyssa, grabbed a knife, and tracked her through a tunnel less than 100 yards from her front door. He knew she knew he was following her – he told police that himself.
He raped her. Then he stabbed her more than 80 times in the face and body.
He carved the initials “LV” into her flesh because, he told police, it made him feel like “a gangster.”
He went home, searched the internet for “dead body disposal,” then went back, doused her body with gasoline, and set it on fire.
Her burned remains were found the next day in a vacant lot visible from her mother's bedroom window.
At the time he killed Alyssa, Righetti was already wanted in Mexico on a rape warrant for attacking his own cousin.
He had previously served time in a Nevada youth facility for a sexually motivated kidnapping of another girl.
Righetti pleaded guilty. No deal. No remorse. The jury sentenced him to death. He told them himself: “I should just die.”
Aaron Ford thinks the jury got it wrong.
Zane Floyd: He Raped a Woman, Then Shot-Gunned Four Grocery Store Workers Before Sunrise
Before dawn on June 3, 1999, Zane Floyd walked into an Albertsons on West Sahara Avenue dressed in military fatigues, a 12-gauge shotgun hidden under a robe.
Hours earlier, he had kidnapped a woman at gunpoint, raped her, then told her she had 60 seconds to run before he killed her.
Then he walked to the store and shot every person he could find.
Thomas Darnell, 40 – shot in the back, never saw it coming. Chuck Leos, 40. Lucy Tarantino, 60. Dennis “Troy” Sargent, 31. All dead.
A fifth employee, Zachary Emenegger, 21, survived only by playing dead after being shot twice. Every second of it was captured on store video.
Clark County prosecutors called it, at the time, “the worst massacre in the history of Las Vegas.”
Floyd was surrounded in the parking lot, put the shotgun to his own head, and eventually surrendered.
He has sat on death row for 26 years. His appeals are exhausted.
If Aaron Ford is elected governor, that warrant dies with his pen stroke – and Zane Floyd lives out his natural life on your dime.
Jeremiah Bean: Five People Dead in One Weekend. Motive: Drug Money.
Mother's Day weekend, 2013. Fernley, Nevada.
Jeremiah Bean, 25, needed drug money.
He started with Robert Pape, 84, and Dorothy Pape, 84 – broke into their home, shot them both, grabbed their cash and jewelry, and drove off in their pickup truck.
He wasn't done.
Over that same weekend, he killed three more people in two additional incidents. Five strangers in total, across three separate attacks.
He torched one of the homes to destroy the evidence.
The Nevada Supreme Court reviewed his case and upheld the death sentence unanimously. Chief Justice Mark Gibbons wrote:
“Over the course of a single weekend, Bean murdered five strangers in three separate incidents. He engaged the crimes of his own initiative and was not assisted or influenced by anyone else.”
Five people. One weekend. To buy drugs.
Aaron Ford's position: life in prison is punishment enough.
Scott Dozier: He Decapitated One Man, Buried Another in the Desert
Scott Dozier killed two people in the drug trade – one in Phoenix in 2001, one in Las Vegas in 2002. He was convicted of both.
Jeremiah Miller, 22, was Dozier's Las Vegas victim. After killing him, Dozier decapitated the body and dismembered it.
Miller's torso was found stuffed in a suitcase in a dumpster at an apartment complex on West Flamingo Road. His head, hands, and feet were never recovered.
Dozier eventually gave up his appeals and asked Nevada to execute him.
The state tried – twice. Both times, legal challenges over lethal injection drugs derailed the process.
In 2019, after years of delays and court battles, Dozier hanged himself in his cell at Ely State Prison with a bedsheet.
The state couldn't execute a man who was begging to be executed.
If Aaron Ford had been governor, Dozier would have died of old age in a prison cell – and the families of his victims would have gotten nothing.
That's not a hypothetical. That's the policy.
Sterling Atkins and Antonio Doyle: They Raped and Beat a 20-Year-Old Woman to Death in the Desert
January 15, 1994. Ebony Mason, 20, made the mistake of trusting the wrong people.
Sterling Atkins, his brother Shawn, and Anthony Doyle drove Mason out to a remote stretch of desert in Clark County.
Doyle raped her. When she resisted further, the men beat and kicked her until she was dead. Her nude body was found face-down in the sand, 25 feet from the road.
Both Atkins and Doyle were sentenced to death.
Shawn, who cooperated with prosecutors, got life with the possibility of parole – and walked out of prison in 2010.
Ebony Mason's family has waited 32 years for justice that Aaron Ford would permanently take off the table.
Donald Sherman: He Beat a Sleeping Doctor to Death with a Hammer — On Parole for Murder
Donald Sherman had already killed once.
He was on parole for that killing in 1994 when he broke into the Sun City Las Vegas home of a retired doctor, walked to the man's bedroom, and beat him to death with a hammer while he slept.
A retired doctor. Asleep in his own home. Beaten to death by a man the system had already released once for the same kind of crime.
Sherman is now 62 years old and has been on death row for over 30 years.
Under an Aaron Ford governorship, there will be no execution. Sherman will die in a warm bed surrounded by prison staff.
Joseph Weldon Smith: He Murdered His Wife and Two Stepdaughters, Including a 12-Year-Old
October 1990. A gated Green Valley neighborhood in Henderson.
Joseph Weldon Smith beat his wife, Judith, 47, and his two stepdaughters – Wendy Cox, 20, and Kristy Cox, 12 – with a hammer and strangled them all to death.
Three members of his own family. In their home.
He left a note at the scene fabricating an elaborate cover story blaming mystery creditors for the “triple murder.” He was also convicted of attempting to murder his landlord.
Smith has filed appeal after appeal for more than 30 years. He remains on death row for the murder of Wendy Cox, also serving life without parole for Judith's murder.
Twelve-year-old Kristy Cox deserved better than 35 years of watching her killer's lawyers file paperwork.
Under Aaron Ford, that's all she'd ever get.
Ammar Harris: He Turned the Las Vegas Strip into a Fireball and Killed Three People
February 21, 2013. 3 a.m. Near the Bellagio, Caesars, and Flamingo.
A self-described pimp named Ammar Harris pulled up alongside a Maserati in his Range Rover and opened fire.
The driver, aspiring rapper Kenneth Wayne Cherry Jr., 27, was shot and killed.
His out-of-control car slammed into a taxi. The taxi exploded in a fireball in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip.
Cab driver Michael Boldon and his passenger, Sandra Sutton-Wasmund, burned to death.
Three dead. On one of the most-watched streets in the world.
A jury convicted Harris of three counts of first-degree murder and found ten aggravating factors – and zero mitigating circumstances.
Not one. Zero.
Aaron Ford would still rather he never face a lethal injection.
Manuel Lopez: He Tortured and Killed His 4-Year-Old Stepdaughter
Jessica Cevallos was four years old.
Her stepfather, Manuel Lopez, beat her. Burned her with scalding water. Hung her by her hair from a hook.
She died January 11, 1985, of a ruptured stress ulcer – the result of months of sustained, deliberate torture by the man who was supposed to protect her.
Her mother testified at trial she was too afraid to report the abuse.
Lopez sat on Nevada's death row for 36 years. He died in prison in 2021 – never executed, never made to face the full weight of what he did to a little girl who never had a chance.
His case is not a cautionary tale. It is the preview of Aaron Ford's policy, applied to every killer on this list.
Four years old. Hung by her hair. And the most that ever happened to Manuel Lopez was a comfortable death in a state prison.
The Juries Said Death – Ford Says No
Aaron Ford is not some naive law professor who’s never seen a crime scene.
He is the Attorney General of the State of Nevada. He knows these names. He knows these files. He has access to every autopsy report, every crime scene photo, every piece of trial testimony.
And after all of that, he looked into a camera and said – unequivocally – that he would sign the bill to make sure none of these men are ever executed.
Javier Righetti stabbed a 15-year-old girl more than 80 times and burned her body.
Zane Floyd shot-gunned four grocery store workers before sunrise, on video, in front of witnesses.
Jeremiah Bean killed five people in one weekend to buy drugs.
Scott Dozier decapitated a man and stuffed the torso in a dumpster.
A jury of their peers – in every single case – looked at the evidence and said: death.
Aaron Ford says those juries were wrong.
The Contrast Nevadans Deserve to Know
Governor Joe Lombardo doesn't agree.
When outgoing Democrat Governor Steve Sisolak tried to commute all death sentences on his way out the door in December 2022, Lombardo had already made clear he intended to “reverse Sisolak's soft-on-crime policies.”
When the Democrat-controlled Legislature sent Lombardo a bill in 2025 that would have extended the window for carrying out execution orders – making it harder to execute convicted killers – Lombardo vetoed it.
The choice in November is clear: a governor who thinks juries have the right to impose the ultimate penalty for the most monstrous crimes, or a governor who thinks he knows better than the juries, the victims' families, and the facts of the cases themselves.
Alyssa Otremba's mother deserves better. Ebony Mason's family deserves better. The four employees Zane Floyd murdered at 5 a.m. at an Albertsons on West Sahara – they deserved better, too.
Aaron Ford would make sure they never get it.
Joe Lombardo supports the death penalty. Aaron Ford supports murderers.
Voters in November will get to choose which one sits in the governor’s office for the next four years.
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Nevada News & Views. Digital technology was used in the research, writing, and production of this article. Please verify information and consult additional sources as needed.
