Associated Press

Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 at 4:45 pm
DOYLESTOWN, Pa. — A drunken-driving suspect who fatally shot a police officer and wounded two other people in a hospital emergency room was sentenced to death today.

Robert Flor had pleaded guilty to fatally shooting Newtown police officer Brian Gregg at St. Mary Medical Center, where he had been taken for tests after a drunken-driving arrest in September 2005. He pleaded no contest to firing the bullets that wounded another officer and a hospital employee.

Flor, 39, of Bedminster Township, showed little emotion as the jury announced its verdict, but he lashed out at Bucks County District Attorney Diane Gibbons as he was being led out of the courtroom.

“Why don’t you give me the needle?” he shouted, adding an expletive.

A jury spent two weeks hearing testimony to determine whether Flor should be sentenced to death or life in prison. Flor’s courtroom outburst supported the jury’s verdict, Gibbons said.

“That was just a slice and a sliver of what’s in this man’s soul,” she said.

The shootings happened after Flor had been taken to the hospital for routine blood and urine tests on Sept. 29, 2005. He was apprehended at gunpoint when witnesses, including an off-duty police officer, said they saw him driving erratically and smashing his girlfriend’s head on the dashboard.

Once at the hospital, Flor grabbed officer James Warunek’s gun and started firing, killing Gregg and wounding Warunek and a hospital technician, Joseph Epp.

In deciding on the death penalty, the jurors rejected all of the mitigating circumstances that had been laid out by public defender Bradley Bastedo.

Bastedo had pushed for a life sentence, arguing that a history of sexual abuse as a child, brain damage, a low IQ and mental health problems left Flor unable to deal with the stress of losing his 3-year-old daughter to protective services.

Bastedo said he was surprised that “not one juror found one mitigating circumstance.”

“I just find that amazing,” he said.




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Serves him right. Have fun in hell, low life!