Arizona to execute Richard Djerf for 1993 quadruple murder of Phoenix family

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Arizona has carried out most executions with lethal injection since 1992, but with a litany of changing protocols and problems, which ultimately halted executions in the state for eight years. Photo courtesy Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry
Richard Kenneth Djerf, who murdered four members of a west Phoenix family in 1993, will be the next Death Row prisoner put to death in Arizona.
The Arizona Attorney General's Office filed notice in the Arizona Supreme Court Thursday to begin the process for obtaining a death warrant. If all goes according to schedule, the execution should take place in late August or early September.
'The people of this state still support the death penalty, as far as we know,' Attorney General Kris Mayes told the Arizona Mirror. 'And so my job is to carry it out.'
It's become a mantra of sorts for Mayes: Execution is the law of the land in Arizona. She said it in March after the execution of Aaron Gunches, the first of her administration, and she said it again several times during a recent interview with the Mirror.
Usually, it's Republicans who embrace execution as a tenet of their law-and-order credo. Nonetheless, Mayes, a Democrat, has promised to carry out the law in her administration, though she won't give hints as to who will go after Djerf. There are 22 other men on Arizona Death Row who have exhausted their appeals, and Mayes intends to cull the worst of them.
Djerf was hardly a surprise candidate.
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Defense attorneys had speculated for months that Djerf would be at the top of the list. And in late April, Maricopa County Attorney Rachell Mitchell blurted his name out at a press conference, even though executions fall outside of her jurisdiction. Consequently, journalists in the room rushed to figure out who Djerf was.
While Mitchell was speculating, Mayes was analyzing.
'We have prepared a series of criteria by which I will be choosing the next people who are executed,' she said. The criteria 'includes things like blameworthiness, whether a child was killed, whether multiple people were killed, whether the crime was particularly heinous or cruel and the amount of time that the victims have been waiting. And I don't believe that's ever been done by any AG in the past. We did it.'
In 1976, a U.S. Supreme Court opinion dictated that the death penalty be reserved for the worst of the worst crimes, defined by a set of aggravating factors. Arizona law follows the same theory, and Djerf's crimes fit the description: In September 1993, he took a family hostage in their home, killing the mother, father and a their 5-year-old son, and raping their teenage daughter before killing her, too.
It was the work of a monster, or so it seemed. But it's never that simple.
Djerf is now a 55-year-old man with a bald and bullet-shaped head and a leering smile. There's not a single item on his prison disciplinary record. According to one of his former defense attorneys, he sits in his cell drawing professional-quality, self-satirizing cartoons
After a courthouse interview in December 1993, Bill Hermann my former colleague at The Arizona Republic, described the then-23-year-old Djerf as an enigma.
'Djerf appears to be a pleasant, retiring, gentle young man of medium height and stocky build, with wavy brown hair,' he wrote. 'He speaks softly and politely, and smiles often, in a friendly, if shy, manner.'
It was a shocking portrait in light of what he had done. And though Djerf expressed his remorse in trial, it was too little, too late.
Djerf had attended Independence High in Glendale. He was an unpopular kid, not anyone who drew attention. But he was not a complete stranger to police, having been arrested once for shoplifting and twice for extorting money from fellow students at the school. The Glendale apartment he rented after high school was decorated in nerd style, with auto racing posters, a Freddy Krueger doll and a street sign that said Elm St.
Some time after high school, he took a job at a Safeway supermarket in west Phoenix, where he worked with Albert Luna Jr.
But apparently they were not friends: Luna burglarized Djerf's apartment, taking electronic equipment and an AK-47. And though Djerf reported the theft to police, they did nothing. So, several months later, Djerf decided to get his own revenge.
There were no surviving eyewitnesses to what happened next. But there is a detailed narrative in the court record, nonetheless, describing events down to the minute, presumably put together by prosecutors from his eventual confession and from what he told his girlfriend and other friends afterward.
On the afternoon of Sept. 14, 1993, Djerf went to the 7200 block of West Monte Vista Road and knocked at the front door of the Luna house, brandishing a bouquet of artificial flowers. When Luna's mother, Patricia, 40, opened the door, Djerf pulled out a 9 mm handgun. He made her load belongings from the house into the family car and then taped her and her 5-year-old son, Damien, to kitchen chairs. He asked her where Albert Jr. was and taunted her by asking whether he should kill her or her son first, forcing the other to watch.
Albert Jr.'s sister, Rochelle, 18, came home at 3 p.m. Djerf took her to her bedroom, taped her to the bed and raped her before stabbing her repeatedly and slitting her throat. He went back to the kitchen to let Patricia know he had killed her.
An hour later, Albert Sr., 46, came home. Djerf forced him to crawl to another bedroom, and bashed his head with an aluminum baseball bat, leaving him for dead. Then he returned to the kitchen to tell Patricia. He tried to snap Damien's neck using a technique he'd seen in a movie, and when that didn't work, he tried to electrocute him with a frayed lamp cord.
Albert Sr., who was not yet dead after all, leapt into the kitchen at that moment and stabbed Djerf with a pocket knife. The two men fought, but Djerf shot Albert Sr. to death. Then, after more taunts, he shot Patricia and Damien in the head, doused the room with gasoline, turned on the stove burners and left in the Luna family car to meet up with his girlfriend.
The girlfriend drove Djerf to St. Joseph's Hospital; he said he'd been stabbed by two men who tied to rob him. But over the next few days, he told the girlfriend what he had done and bragged to other friends, as well. He was arrested on Sept. 18 and charged with burglary, multiple counts of kidnapping and aggravated assault, sexual assault, attempted arson, misconduct with weapons and four counts of murder.
Djerf eventually confessed. Rather than face a jury, he pleaded guilty to all four murders and prosecutors agreed to drop the other charges. He fired his attorneys and represented himself through his sentencing, but after finding aggravators of pecuniary gain (murder for money), multiple murders, a victim younger than 15, and the heinous, cruel and depraved manner of the killings, the judge sentenced him to death four times.
The last of his appeals failed in 2019.
When Gov. Katie Hobbs took office in 2023, she declared a moratorium on executions, citing a litany of problems in carrying them out over the preceding decade.
The prior attorney general, Mark Brnovich, had carried out three executions in the last months of his tenure, and he had obtained a warrant for a fourth. But Hobbs and Mayes let that warrant lapse as they awaited an analysis of the state's procedures for execution by lethal injection for which they commissioned a retired federal judge magistrate.
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When that commissioner stated in a preliminary report that lethal injection, as practiced in Arizona, was fatally flawed, he was fired. His study was supplanted by a separate analysis conducted by Ryan Thornell, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.
Meanwhile, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell was pressuring the state to seek a new warrant for Death Row prisoner Aaron Gunches, whose earlier warrant had lapsed. She petitioned the Arizona Supreme Court to let her file for a warrant herself, and when the court agreed to hear her argument, Hobbs and Mayes decided to seek a warrant after all.
'We objected to what we thought was a very inappropriate filing by her in the Supreme Court,' Mayes said. 'We made it clear to the Supreme Court that this was the purview of the attorney general — whether it's me or whoever follows me. It is the purview of the attorney general to make these decisions. And it would be utter and complete chaos if we had 15 county attorneys who could go directly to the Supreme Court and file for a death warrant. That's insane, and it's not going to happen in the State of Arizona under my watch. Nor should any county attorney be lobbying the attorney general about who should go next. And, again, it's only been one county attorney.'
But Mitchell stepped in again, positing during an April press conference that Djerf was a likely execution candidate.
'Rachel and I agree on a lot of things, but on this she was way off base,' Mayes said. 'I expressed that to her.'
'One of the reasons you don't do that is it very much violates the rights of the victims in these cases,' she said.
Mayes had already made the decision to execute Djerf but was not ready to announce it. She had already informed the surviving victims of the Luna family, and she was relieved that they would not be hearing it from the media.
'In everything I do in regard to the death penalty, I try to be serious, not headline driven, and victim-focused,' she said. 'So, I think that is what disturbed me about that.'
'Hopefully, that won't happen again, but we'll see.'
In the months before the Gunches execution, attorneys and activists filed motions to stop it, arguing that the state's supply of pentobarbital, the execution drug, had possibly expired.
Others argued that the drug's use constituted cruel and unusual punishment because, in 84% of cases, according to experts, it causes flash pulmonary edema, a chemical reaction in the lungs that causes the decedent to literally drown in his own body fluids, while unresponsive, but not necessarily insensate. Experts have compared it to the painful and terrifying sensation of water-boarding torture.
In fact, autopsies of nine Arizona death row prisoners executed since 2011 showed clear signs of pulmonary edema.
The Gunches execution went forward anyway, without a hitch, and his autopsy showed that he was one of the 16% who do not experience pulmonary edema.
'I think it was the result of extensive preparations by Ryan Thornell, and the fact that the state took the amount of time that we needed to take to get it right,' Mayes said. 'And there are obviously differing opinions on the death penalty, but it is the law of Arizona — and I'm the attorney general, and it's my job to uphold the law of Arizona.'
Mayes scoffed at the suggestion that there may have been some luck involved in the Gunches execution happening without issue.
And so she and Thornell are going forward in Djerf's execution with the same protocol.
As she explained: 'What I think about when I'm making these decisions is, No. 1: Can the state do this constitutionally and competently, and we can. No. 2: I'm the top law enforcement officer in the state and it's my job to uphold the law. And No. 3: I think about what the victims went through. And what the victims went through in every single one of these cases is far greater than what the perpetrator deals with in those final moments. And that is certainly the case in every single case that I have looked at in terms of those folks who are on death row. They put their victims through pure hell, and that needs to be front and center.'
'I try to put myself in the shoes of someone who has had a loved one murdered,' she said. 'It's unimaginable, and therefore it's important for us to consider how they're feeling and what they think closure is for them. And no one can make that decision for them. Nobody. Not you, as a reporter who's covered these cases, not me, as an AG who's doing her second execution. Nobody but the victim knows what it's like to walk that path. And it's a horrible, horrible path. And it goes on for a long time because these cases take decades to do. That's where I put my focus.'
Is execution closure for victims? Can anyone get over the trauma of having a family extinguished?
'It's the end of a chapter in a book that goes on forever,' Mayes said.
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