Florida has executed a Vietnam combat veteran who killed a police officer 40 years ago.
The state put William Reaves Jr. to death by lethal injection on Tuesday, Oct. 20, four decades after he fatally shot 29-year-old Cpl. Richard Raczkowski of the Indian River County Sheriff's Office. Reaves, 77, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. ET.
The execution marks the 32nd in the U.S. this year and the 18th in Florida, which continues to carry out far more executions than any other state in the nation. The execution is also the third to be successfully carried out in the three weeks since the state of Tennessee botched Christa Pike's execution.
While Tennessee's botch involved the popular execution drug pentobarbital, Florida uses three different drugs.
Florida
executed Reaves over strong objections from a group of more than 100 military veterans who tried unsuccessfully to convince Gov. Ron DeSantis that Reaves deserved mercy because of the trauma he endured in the Vietnam War.
Reaves was an infantry machine gunner for the Army and lived through ambushes and sniper fire. A friend died in his arms the first week he arrived in country, according to Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
"Although his body returned home intact, part of him remained at war," the military members wrote in a letter to DeSantis on Oct. 19. "Mr. Reaves could never fully shake the feeling that he was under attack, still fighting for his life half a world away."
DeSantis' office has not responded to USA TODAY's request for comment.
The state of Florida argued in court this month that Reaves' execution was long overdue, as was the justice his victim's family has sought for decades. It would be "a perverse view of justice and fairness to allow Reaves a stay of his 34-year-old sentence," they said.
Here's what you need to know about Reaves, his war service and his crime.
Who did William Reaves kill? How did Cpl. Richard Raczkoski die?
Raczkoski, known affectionally as "Raz," was responding to a mystery 911 call from a phone booth at a Zippy Mart convenience store in Vero Beach around 3 a.m. on Sept. 23, 1986. No one spoke during the call. When Raczkowski arrived to investigate, Reaves was by the phone booth, according to archived news reports.
The officer called in a warrant check on Reeves, according to court documents. After being informed by a dispatcher that there were no warrants pending, Raczkowski tried to arrange for a cab to come pick Reaves up, archives show.
That's when a gun tumbled out of Reaves' waistband.
Raczkoski quickly put his knee on the gun, prosecutors said. But Reaves was able to grab the gun and pointed it at the deputy, who started to draw his own weapon before backing up and starting to run away. Reaves then shot seven times, hitting Raczkoski four times.
Reaves fled and told a friend: “I done [redacted] up. I just shot a cop, I just shot a police.” The friend testified that Reaves quoted the deputy as saying, “Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me. Don’t kill me,” before Reaves opened fire.
“One of us got to go," Reaves told Raczkoski, the friend testified. "One of us got to go, me or you.”
Reaves was arrested in Georgia two days later. During initial interviews with sheriff's deputies, Reaves admitted to emptying the clip of his .38 pistol at the deputy and said he was "wired on cocaine" at the time, court records show. Reaves, who had been in and out of prison since the early 1970s, also said he didn't want to go behind bars again.
Prosecutors pointed out that the .38 was not automatic and Reaves had to pull the trigger each time.
The jury convicted Reaves of premeditated first-degree murder and recommended death.
Raczkoski, known by his friends and family as "Raz," was posthumously awarded the Medal of Valor by the International Police Association. A section of State Road 60 in Vero Beach is named the Richard Raczkoski Memorial Highway in his honor.
More about Williams Reaves and service during Vietnam
There were two stories when it comes to Reaves' life, wrote his former attorney, Chance Meyer, in an op-ed for Slate this month.
"In the prevailing narrative, he’s a monster who shot a good cop as the man begged for his life. In the untold story, he’s a victim of circumstance − a sweet kid from a small town who was sent to war, trained to kill in the service of his country, and returned home a psychological ruin," Meyer wrote. "Both stories are true. Only the first has been given moral weight in popular memory."
Meyer said the world needed to hear more about "the war hero" and how what happened to him during Vietnam explained his crime.
"While still a teenager, William was taken from his community and sent to Vietnam," Meyer wrote. "He went on search-and-destroy missions, spending day after day under the ever-present threat of stumbling into a firefight. ... William’s body learned to stay locked in a state of hypervigilance that eventually would not switch off. Older soldiers in Charlie Platoon − men William looked up to − trained him to use heroin and opium-laced marijuana to numb the unrelenting terror."
Meyer wrote that Reaves "killed to survive as friends died around him" and though he made it back home, "the constant panic and the conditioning to use drugs against it came with him."
A Veterans Affairs hospital denied Reaves help, Meyer wrote. Reaves used drugs to self-medicate and began carrying a gun for protection, according to Meyer.
The night of the murder, Meyer wrote that Reaves "thought he was fighting for his life." And, he said, jurors deciding Reaves' fate never heard about his PTSD or the contention that he was reliving Vietnam when he committed the murder.
The military veterans who wrote to DeSantis appealed to the governor's own service in the U.S. Navy.
"As veterans, we know that service carries obligations in both directions," they wrote. "We ask service members to risk their lives for this country; in return, our country assumes a solemn duty not to abandon them when they come home carrying wounds we cannot see."
Richard Raczkowski's loved ones see execution as justice
Raczkowski's friends and family have told reporters over the years that Reaves deserved to be executed for what he did, though it's unclear whether anyone asked them about his experience in Vietnam.
At the time Raczkowski was murdered, he was planning to marry his longtime girlfriend and the two were going to celebrate her birthday the day he was killed, according to an archived story in Florida Today, part of the USA TODAY Network. Raczkowski's only son, Matthew, was born after his death.
Raczkowski's dad, Rudolph Raczkowski, told the Palm Beach Post that he always told his son to be careful while out on the job. He had already lost one son in a deer-hunting accident years earlier and he worried about Richard.
"He said, 'I am (careful), Dad. I watch myself wherever I go," Rudolph Raczkowski told the Post, part of the USA TODAY Network.
He expressed frustration in 1991, when the Florida Supreme Court tossed out Reaves' 1987 murder conviction because the prosecuting attorney at trial had previously worked as a public defender and had represented Reaves in 1973. (Reaves was convicted and sentenced to die a second time in 1992.)
"It's cut and dried," Raczkowski told the Indian River Press Journal at the time. "He admitted it. ... Why do these people at the top say he didn't receive a fair trial?"
Richard Raczkowski's brother, Marc Raczkowski, told WPTV last month that his parents were so distraught after the death of a second son that nothing was ever the same again.
"No more Christmas trees in the house," he said. "Mom didn't decorate."
He said that over the past 40 years, he's often felt like everyone forgot about his brother and that he was looking to the execution for closure. He told the station: "It's finally over."
Some of Richard Raczkowski's colleagues told Treasure Coast Newspapers − part of the USA TODAY Network − that they were planning to attend the execution.
Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers said he wanted to make sure the last thing Reaves sees before he dies is an Indian River County sheriff's uniform: "I want to make sure he knows we never forget."
Florida on pace to break 2025 record of executions
DeSantis has dramatically ramped up death warrants, issuing a record 19 in 2025, nearly 2½ times as many as the former record of eight and comprising nearly half of all executions in the U.S. that year. Amnesty International singled out Florida and DeSantis in its annual report on the surge in executions around the world.
In the years before 2025, DeSantis had issued only six death warrants.
"If you think about it, some of these crimes were committed in the '80s, and they wait, and there's appeal, and this and that, and it's like, you know, there's a saying, 'Justice delayed is justice denied'," he said at a November news conference. "I felt that I owed it to [victims' families] to make sure that this ran very smoothly and promptly."
When is the next execution?
Three states are all set to carry out an execution on Nov. 5: Indiana, Alabama and Florida.
Indiana is set to execute Jeffrey Weisheit for the 2010 murders of his girlfriend's two children, 8-year-old Alyssa Lynch and her 5-year-old brother, Caleb. The children were burned alive in their home. Weisheit's attorneys are asking Gov. Mike Braun to pause his and all other executions in the state because of the Christa Pike botch in Tennessee.
Alabama is set to execute Michael Shannon Taylor for the 1991 beating deaths of an elderly couple. Taylor repeatedly used an iron bar to hit 83-year-old Ivan Moore and 79-year-old Lucille Moore before stealing their wallets and car and going on a shopping spree.
Florida is set to execute Jesse Guardado for the 2004 stabbing and beating death of a 75-year-old community activist named Jackie Malone.
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat
C. A. Bridges is a journalist for the USA TODAY Network-Florida's service journalism Connect team. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'It's finally over': Vietnam vet who killed Florida cop is executed
