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Florida Executes Askari Abdullah Muhammad, Formerly Thomas Knight, Who Killed a Miami Couple and a Prison Guard

The execution was for the 1980 killing of a corrections officer at Florida State Prison. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his final appeals.

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Illustration of a fenced prison compound under a pink winter dusk sky, with razor wire in the foreground. Not the actual prison.

Askari Abdullah Muhammad, once known as Thomas Knight, killed a Miami couple in 1974 and a prison guard while on death row in 1980. On January 7, 2014, Florida executed him.

Muhammad, 62, was pronounced dead at 6:45 p.m. after a lethal injection at Florida State Prison, the governor's office said. The sentence carried out that night was the one for the 1980 killing of corrections officer Richard Burke. He declined to make a statement. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his final appeals, though Justice Stephen Breyer said he would have granted a stay. "I am at peace knowing I don't have to wait any longer," said Burke's daughter, one of several family members who watched him die.

On July 17, 1974, Muhammad ambushed Sydney Gans, his employer at a paper bag company, in the business parking lot, made him drive home to pick up his wife, Lillian, and then forced him to withdraw $50,000 from a bank, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Gans told the bank president that the couple were being held hostage. Police followed the car toward the outskirts of Miami, lost sight of it for four or five minutes, and in that time Muhammad killed them both. He was caught about four hours later.

In September 1974 he escaped with 10 other inmates, setting off a nationwide manhunt and earning a place on the FBI's list of top fugitives before he was captured that December. A jury convicted him of the Gans murders in 1975 and he was sentenced to death. In 1980 he stabbed Burke because he had been denied permission to see a visitor. A federal appeals court later vacated his original death sentence, and in 1996 a Florida court sentenced him to death again for the Gans murders.

The Eleventh Circuit named the slain officer as James Burke, while the Associated Press identified him as Richard Burke.

Sources