WASHINGTON — The man accused of shooting five people, killing three, in a Harford County, Maryland, business last week will first be tried in Delaware, where he is charged with shooting one person, Harford County prosecutors said Monday.
Radee Prince was arrested last Wednesday in Newark, Delaware, Thursday evening, about 10 hours after the shooting in Maryland. He is accused of shooting an acquaintance at a Delaware car dealership several hours before his arrest.
Maryland officials at a news conference Monday said Prince would be tried in Delaware first because he faces harsher penalties there. He could be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for first-degree attempted murder in Delaware, whereas he could be sentenced to life with the possibility of parole in Maryland.
In Delaware, “a life sentence is a life sentence,” said State’s Attorney Joe Cassilly. While Maryland prosecutors could ask for Prince to be denied the chance at parole, Cassilly said, “that’s still a request” that might or might not be granted, and added that “my concern is that the General Assembly … has done everything they can to attack long prison sentences, and I’m not sure that life without parole will still be there as this defendant serves his sentence.”
He said he was frustrated “as a prosecutor to feel that the justice system does not have a proportional penalty” for bigger crime.
At the same news conference, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said, “I think our citizens are going to be disappointed to hear that this individual won’t be tried here first, where the most egregious actions took place.” But he added, “The penalty has the potential to … not meet the severity of the crime.”
Death penalty bill
Maryland Sen. Bob Cassilly said he would introduce what he called “a targeted death penalty bill,” saying that “compassionate leniency toward perpetrators … doesn’t satisfy our moral obligation for justice for the victims or for society.”
He said that Maryland has no further penalty for someone who kills multiple people than for someone who kills one, and called the situation “a license to kill” after the first one.
“Kill your way out of it. Kill your witnesses so you can escape from justice,” he said.
“We’ve seen around the country,” Sen. Cassilly added, referring to the shootings earlier this month in Las Vegas. “… Maryland needs to have an alternative punishment that really deals justice in this kind of case, where somebody kills in cold blood and keeps on killing.”
He also mentioned the murder of two Harford County deputies in Abingdon in February of last year — “a year and a half ago and a mile and a half away.” After the first deputy was killed, Sen. Cassilly said, “it was open season.”
“Maryland took a step in the wrong direction doing away with the death penalty,” Gahler added.
He also mentioned that people who want to help the victims and survivors of Thursday’s shootings can give at EdgewoodDonations.com.
David Ryden, the senior assistant state’s attorney, said he and the others had met with workers and managers at Advanced Granite Solutions, where the Maryland shootings took place, who, he said, were going back to work this week. He called it a “place of unspeakable evil and death that will impact this community for a long time.” Joe Cassilly, the state’s attorney, said he was moved by the sight of workers and managers hugging and consoling each other.
Joe Cassilly, the state’s attorney, said that his sense from Delaware prosecutors was that Prince’s trial there would begin in about six months, and that he would be tried in Maryland no matter the resolution.
Asked whether there was any more information about a motive for the shootings, Joe Cassilly said that after 40 years as a prosecutor “I’ve kind of given up on why people do horrible, horrible things. Even if you knew the answer, does that make sense?” Workers were asking them why.
Gahler concurred, adding, “I don’t think it amounts to more than a perceived feeling that he was not well-liked. I don’t think it goes far beyond that. … It wouldn’t be justified in any situation,” but under these circumstances, “it just goes beyond comprehension.”
Sen. Cassilly’s bill specifies that executions would be carried out with a mix of heroin and fentanyl, saying that he chose that combination because “we see people on the verge of death” from overdoses from such drugs, “… and they turn back around and want to do it again. It’s hard to imagine that that can be such a painful death. … It’s a gross way to do your experimentation, but it’s been done, and it must be an OK way to go, I suppose.”
