Infamous killers who served time at supermax prison
Nearly a decade since the death penalty was abolished in Connecticut, the state’s supermax prison that has housed these inmates will close in July.
The inmates on death row at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers had their sentences commuted to life in prison without the opportunity for parole.
State Department of Correction Commissioner Angel Quiros cited the declining number of inmates in Connecticut prisons and his “obligation to the taxpayers of Connecticut” as the primary factors to closing the facility, the CT Mirror reported.
There are two possibilities for Northern's inmates: Move to another prison under the same conditions or lawmakers would have to revise the amendment to the state statute that repealed the death penalty.
The bill created “special circumstances” to ensure harsher conditions for men who had been on death row than inmates in the general population.
These are some of the infamous convicted killers who served time at Northern Correctional Institution:
Michael Ross
Michael Ross was the last death row inmate to be executed in Connecticut, in 2005. Ross was convicted of six counts of capital felony murder in the deaths of four Connecticut women, some as young as 14 years old, according to court documents.
Ross encountered the women walking on the roadside or in a secluded area, mostly in southeastern Connecticut, and then either lured or overpowered them to bring them to a location where he raped and strangled them, court documents said.
Eduardo Santiago
Eduardo Santiago, a former Torrington resident, was sentenced to death after being convicted in a 2000 murder-for-hire plot.
Santiago and two others shot a man while he was sleeping in his West Hartford apartment, court documents said. Santiago had been promised a snowmobile in exchange for the killing, according to the documents.
Santiago was the first death row inmate to challenge the constitutionality of the state keeping inmates on death row after the punishment was repealed in 2012.
The state Supreme Court agreed with Santiago in 2015.
Since the 2015 ruling, all of the death row cases have been converted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky
Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky were perhaps the state’s highestprofile inmates on death row before the death punishment was repealed in 2012.
The pair broke into the Cheshire home of the Petit family in the early morning hours of July 23, 2007. Dr. William Petit, a well-respected endocrinologist, was beaten by the pair and then tied up in the basement as Hayes and Komisarjevsky held his family hostage upstairs for hours, court documents state.
Hayes forced Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, to go to the bank to withdraw money from the family’s accounts before raping and strangling the woman, according to court documents.
The couple’s daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17, were tied to their beds and died after Hayes and Komisarjevsky set the home on fire, court documents said.
Petit was able to free himself and escape the blaze.
Hayes and Komisarjevsky were each convicted and sentenced to death. They are serving their time in a Pennsylvania federal prison.
Russell Peeler
Russell Peeler was convicted of ordering the Bridgeport killings of 8year-old B.J. Brown and his mother, Karen Clarke, in January 2009.
The child was a witness to a drive-by shooting that Peeler committed in May 2018, court documents said.
Peeler later killed the driver, Rudolph Snead, because the man went to police about the shooting, court documents said. He then asked associates, including his brother, Adrian Peeler, to kill the boy and his mother as a way of eliminating any witnesses to the drive-by shooting, which could connect him with Snead’s death, court documents said.
Richard Roszkowski
Richard Roszkowski was the last man sentenced to death in 2012 for the 2006 killings of a Bridgeport mother, her 9-year-old daughter and a man who came to their aid.