4 life terms given in 2005 Ill. rampage

A man who killed three adults and an infant after breaking the window of a basement apartment and opening fire with a shotgun was ordered Monday to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Jason Smith, 31, ignored a request by St. Clair County Judge Milton Wharton to say something to the victims' families and friends, who crowded into the courthouse to watch the sentencing.

Wharton said he had no legal alternative but to impose four simultaneous life terms without the chance of parole in the 2005 killings, which prosecutors called a "slaughter." The sentence mirrored the recommendation of jurors, who rejected prosecutors' requests to impose the death penalty.

As Smith was led away in shackles, Wharton pressed him again to say something to convince the victims' families he wasn't "a hard, evil person."

"I know it has been weighing heavily on your mind because I've been observing you," Wharton told Smith, who began to cry. "I, as a court, am asking you now to say something to mitigate the degree of suffering" by the survivors.

But Smith walked out, sheriff's deputies in tow, before the judge was done talking. Many onlookers appeared stunned.

"It almost left me speechless," said Rhonda Lovell, mother of one of the victims. Smith's courtroom tears, she suspects, were for his family and his fate, not for those he killed.

"The pain he's going to suffer now nowhere compares to the pain he has caused," she said.

Wharton denied a request on Smith's behalf for a new trial.

Jurors deliberated less than two hours in February before deciding Smith deserved life in prison instead of death by lethal injection. A defense attorney, John O'Gara, had asked that jurors be merciful and "lock him in a cell and let him die there at God's will."

The same jury had convicted Smith of four first-degree murder counts in the deaths of former girlfriend Nicole Willyard, her 2-week-old son — also named Jason Smith — and two Willyard acquaintances, Brandon Lovell, 23, and Mary Cawvey, 19.

Prosecutors had described Smith as a man on a mission of destruction on Oct. 5, 2005, when he broke out the apartment window in this city about 25 miles east of St. Louis. Attorneys said Smith knew well before the shootings that the baby boy was not his, though prosecutors said the motive for the killings remained unclear.

Each victim was shot once in the head, authorities said. The women were hit twice, Lovell three times. The baby was still in his car seat. Smith fired at least eight shots, apparently reloading three times, authorities said.

He was arrested at another ex-girlfriend's house in nearby Red Bud.