After convicting Quiles of two counts of murder and one count of sexual assault Thursday, the jury was charged to make either a life or death recommendation in Monday’s sentencing hearing.Jurors recommend a life sentence without the possibility of parole even though prosecutors sought the death penalty. Jurors found Quiles guilty of two counts of murder and one count of sexual assault in the death of his niece Iyana Sawyer.
“So are we satisfied? Completely,” Paula Dixson, Iyana’s aunt, said about the recommendation. “His death will do nothing for us. It won’t bring our loved ones back. It’ll never cover what we cost. So he can live the rest of his life knowing that he did not get away with what he did to our family.”A 2023 ruling in Florida now allows a death sentence with only an 8 to 4 recommendation by the jury, rather than requiring a unanimous decision.
While Sawyer was sitting in a car in a back part of the property, Quiles tried to strangle her, but when he couldn’t, he shot her in the chest and then used a carpet to wrap her body and put it in a dumpster that he knew would be emptied that day and taken to a landfill, the witnesses said. In the recording, Quiles described using a 9mm gun, one he said he shot at a gun range the same day Sawyer disappeared and dumped Sawyer and her backpack separately.
Her sister, referred to in court as S.S., testified that she was also sexually abused by Quiles when she was 13 years old.