TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) – A man convicted of raping and fatally assaulting a former manager at a Florida convenience store is scheduled to be executed in November under a death warrant signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday, setting a record pace of executions.
Richard Barry Randolph, 63, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on November 20 in a Florida prison. Randolph will be the 17th person to be executed in Florida in 2025, making DeSantis oversee more executions in a year than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The previous record was set in 2014 with eight executions.
Mr. DeSantis signed the death warrant one week before Norman Marr Grimm Jr.’s scheduled execution on October 28th. Another convicted murderer, Brian Fredrick Jennings, is scheduled to die on November 13th.
Randolph was convicted of murder, armed robbery, sexual assault, and grand larceny and sentenced to death in 1989.
According to court records, in August 1988, Randolph tried to break into a safe at the Handyway convenience store in Patatka, where he previously worked. Randolph was discovered by the store manager, Minnie Ruth McCollum, and the two began to tussle. Randolph then beat, strangled, stabbed and raped McCallum before leaving the store and stealing the woman’s car.
Three women saw Randolph come out of the store and called the sheriff’s office when they saw the chaos inside. Deputies responded and found McCollum still alive. She was taken to hospital in a coma and died six days later from severe brain damage, doctors said.
Randolph was arrested shortly after the attack at a Jacksonville grocery store after he borrowed money to cash out lottery tickets he had stolen from a convenience store, deputies said. Investigators said Randolph admitted to the assault and directed investigators to his bloody clothing, which he had discarded.
Randolph’s lawyers plan to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2025, 39 people have been executed in the United States so far. Florida leads the way in the flurry of death warrants signed by DeSantis. The state’s most recent execution was on October 14, when Samuel Lee Smithers was sentenced to death by lethal injection for murdering two women and leaving their bodies in a rural pond.
