EXECUTION

The evidence against Garrett was powerful, and any mitigating factors would be an “insubstantial” defense for what he’d done, O’brien said.

Family members and friends of Garrett, including his godmother and high school football coach, testified that Garrett’s life was plagued by childhood trauma and mental health issues.

His grandmother told jurors that Garrett was bounced from one foster home to another in the first two years of his life. She said Garrett’s mother “chose her men over her children” more often than not, resulting in years of neglect.

Everyone who testified for the defense said that learning Garrett had committed such a crime was devastating and unthinkable.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Garrett’s aunt, Samantha Loveless, said Tuesday. “He was a lover, he was a protector, he was always that person.”

The defense also included the testimony of James Reardon, a Columbus-based psychologist who said that Garrett’s mental illness affected his mind during the slayings.

Garrett gave a short, 30-second apology to the Duckson family.

Before jurors could deliberate, Garrett defense attorney Mark Hunt reminded jurors one last time: “You can take away his life without taking his life.”

But in the end, the jury agreed with the state.

Outside the courtroom, a tearful Loveless said she thinks the sentence was unfair given her nephew’s past.

Nicole’s father and Kristina’s grandfather Cliff Duckson said he feels empty, even though Garrett received the sentence he thought he Law enforcement provided heavy security Wednesday as Kristofer Garrett received the jury’s sentencing recommendation.

should.

“What happened in that courtroom today was justice, not revenge,” Cliff said. “But nobody wins.”

“It’s not going to bring our loved ones back no matter what happens,” said Darshan Duckson, Nicole’s older brother.

Cliff Duckson still lives in the East Side home he O’brien

shared with his daughter and granddaughter, who were murdered outside in the yard last January. Waking up every day for the past 19 months has been hard, he said, but he does it for them.

Nicole was the glue that held their family together, he said, and Kristina was a ball of energy, the love of everyone’s lives.

Now, Cliff wears his girls forever on his arm, their names tattooed

on scrolls with praying hands and red roses.

Judge Chris Brown will formally sentence Garrett at a later date. A status meeting is scheduled for next Thursday, at which time Brown and counsel for both sides will discuss an additional mental health examination, per a recommendation by the defense, and how to proceed with a felonious assault charge against Garrett.

The last death sentences imposed by a jury in Franklin County were in 2003, when two men were sent to death row: James T. Conway III, who received a rare double death sentence for two unrelated killings in 2001 and 2002, and Robert Bethel, who shot and killed an 18-year-old man and his 14-year-old girlfriend during a gang dispute in 1996. They remain on death row. And in 2012, a threejudge panel sentenced Caron Montgomery, who murdered his girlfriend and her two children, to death.

Until Brown decides Garrett’s fate — and even for a long time after that — the Ducksons will try to heal.

“I don’t know what it looks like to move forward. How am I supposed to respond?” he said. “I got what I wanted, but I still have a hole.”