Jacob Sullivan was sentenced to death Thursday morning for the rape and murder of his partner’s 14-year-old adopted daughter, Grace Packer, The Morning Call reports. Last month, Sullivan pleaded guilty to plotting the Pennsylvania teen’s rape and murder for months before finally carrying it out on July 8, 2016. Police said previously that the couple beat her and Sullivan raped her, before they forced her to overdose on medications and stuffed her in a closet to die. When that didn’t work, Sullivan strangled her—but he had difficulty carrying it out, and prosecutors said that the murder took about two minutes.
The jury was initially torn between life imprisonment and the death penalty—but after a judge refused to declare a deadlock Wednesday, the group decided to sentence him to death. The judge urged jury members to seek counseling, if necessary. “The butchery in this case was beyond my ability to describe,” she reportedly said. “To live through it vicariously through the photos and the tapes and the recordings... must have taken a toll.” Sullivan will now join 142 other inmates on death row, The Morning Call notes, although no one has been executed in the state since 1999.
Read it at The Morning Call
