MILFORD, Pa. (AP) – A bell tolled the fate of a gunman after a jury on Wednesday condemned him to die for shooting two Pennsylvania troopers at their barracks in a late-night ambush, killing one and leaving a second with devastating injuries.
Eric Frein, 33, was sentenced by a jury to death by lethal injection a week after his conviction on charges including murder of a law enforcement officer and terrorism.
Prosecutors said Frein was hoping to start an uprising against the government when he opened fire with a rifle on the Blooming Grove barracks in the Pocono Mountains in 2014. Cpl. Bryon Dickson II, a Marine veteran and married father of two, was killed in the late-night ambush, and Trooper Alex Douglass was critically wounded.
Frein led police on a 48-day manhunt in the Poconos before U.S. marshals caught him at an abandoned airplane hangar.
He did not take the witness stand in his own defense, nor did he ask the jury to spare his life in the penalty phase. His lawyers had argued for a sentence of life in prison without parole, presenting evidence he’d grown up in a dysfunctional home. His father told the jurors he had failed his son, and his mother said, “I want my son to be saved.”