RICHMOND, Va. (AP) – William Morva showed signs of mental illness long before he killed two men during an escape from custody in 2006, friends and family say. In the years leading up to the killings, Morva began sleeping in the woods, showed up barefoot at his father’s funeral and was banned from a school campus after being found half naked on a bathroom floor.
Now Morva is days from being executed in Virginia for crimes his attorneys say were spawned by delusions that made him fear for his life. The case of the inmate, now 35, has pushed to the forefront the debate over whether people with mental illness should be shielded from the death penalty.
“He has never understood completely exactly what he did, the ramifications of what he did, the lives he has upset,” Morva’s mother said in a video, urging Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe to halt the planned lethal injection Thursday and commute his sentence to life without parole.
Jailed in 2005 on accusations that he tried to rob a convenience store, Morva was then taken to a hospital to treat an injury. There, he attacked a sheriff’s deputy with a metal toilet paper holder, stole the deputy’s gun, and shot an unarmed security guard, Derrick McFarland, before fleeing.
Morva’s escape set off a police manhunt that shut down Virginia Tech’s campus the first day of the school year. A day later, Morva fatally shot another deputy, Eric Sutphin, before Morva was found in a ditch with the deputy’s gun nearby.