The Kite Flyer

In March 1991 Mark Dean Schwab left a Florida prison after forty-two months of an eight-year sentence for the sexual assault of a 13-year-old boy. Weeks later, Florida Today ran a photograph of 11-year-old Junny Rios-Martinez Jr., winner of a Brevard County kite-flying contest. Schwab telephoned the family posing as a Florida Today photographer, then kept calling, offering to help the boy get a surfing sponsorship.

For about a month he worked his way into the family’s trust. On April 18, 1991, a man saying he was Junny’s father phoned Clearlake Middle School and left word that the boy should meet him at a ball field instead of riding the bus. A classmate watched Junny climb the fence, and another saw him get into a rented U-Haul truck. Schwab took him to a motel, assaulted him, and killed him, then hid his body in a K-Mart footlocker in woods outside town.

Schwab drove to Ohio and called his aunt. Police traced the call and arrested him at a pay phone on April 21. He led officers to the footlocker two days later, and his fingerprint was found on tape inside it. A judge convicted him in May 1992 and sentenced him to death that July. He was executed by lethal injection on July 1, 2008. Florida’s Junny Rios-Martinez Jr. Act of 1992 ended basic gain-time for sexual battery convictions.