Arizona has executed Leroy McGill for setting 21-year-old Charles Perez and his 24-year-old girlfriend on fire. Perez died the next day and Perez survived with severe burn injuries.
Arizona has executed a death row inmate for setting 2 people on fire more than 20 years ago, killing 1 of them and changing the other's life forever.
The state executed Leroy McGill, 63, by lethal injection on Wednesday, May 20, for the 2002 murder of 21-year-old Charles Perez. McGill set Perez and his girlfriend on fire after they accused him of theft, court records say. Perez died of his injuries the next day while his girlfriend survived with severe burns.
"After more than 2 decades, justice was finally served for Charles Perez and the woman who survived this horrific attack. What Leroy McGill did − pouring gasoline on the victims and setting them on fire − was among the cruelest acts imaginable," Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell said in a statement.
"My thoughts are with the family of Charles Perez and the survivor, who has lived with the physical and emotional scars of that night for nearly 24 years," she said. "May this bring them some measure of peace."
McGill was pronounced dead at 10:26 a.m. PT. "I'm going home soon," he said as part of his brief last words in the death chamber as he lay strapped to the execution chair, according to multiple news media members who witnessed the death.
McGill's was the 13th execution in the U.S. this year and the 1st in 2026 for Arizona. 2 more executions are scheduled this week in Tennessee and Florida.
Here's what you need to know about McGill's crime and his execution.
On July 13, 2002, Leroy Dean McGill walked into an apartment in north Phoenix carrying a cup full of gasoline. McGill doused Charles Perez and Nova Banta with the gasoline and lit them on fire. Perez subsequently died from his burns. Banta was so severely burned that treating physicians had to put her in a medically-induced coma in order to save her life. McGill bragged that he had mixed the gasoline with Styrofoam to form a gel so that it would burn hotter.
What was Leroy McGill convicted of?
On July 13, 2002, Leroy McGill walked into the Phoenix apartment of Charles Perez, 21, and Nova Banta, 24. He then threw a cup of gasoline and set fire to them with a match, court records show. Prosecutors say McGill mixed Styrofoam with the gasoline to create a “napalm-like substance that would stick to his victims and cause them more pain," an allegations his attorneys deny.
McGill attacked Perez and Banta because the couple had accused him of stealing a shotgun. Before he lit the match, McGill told the couple that they shouldn't talk about people behind their backs, court records say.
Perez died of his injuries the day after the attack. Banta survived though she had severe burns covering 75% of her body.
In recent months, McGill had been fighting to have his execution stopped, mostly over what his lawyers said were errors by his trial attorneys at the time. Those efforts failed, and he declined to file a clemency petition with the state.
McGill's is 1 of 3 executions being carried out during a 2-day period this week. On Thursday, May 21, Tennessee is planning to put Tony Carruthers to death for the 1994 killing of 3 people at a cemetery, including a woman who was buried alive. Also Thursday, Florida is scheduled to execute Richard Knight for the 2000 stabbing deaths of a pregnant woman and her 4-year-old daughter.
It's not unusual for multiple executions to be held during the same week or on the same day, with as many as 5 falling during the same week in recent years. Experts agree that the timing of various states and when they schedule executions is coincidental.
So far this year, states have executed 12 inmates. The executions of McGill, Carruthers and Knight will make that 15. Another 9 executions are scheduled for the rest of the year so far but that figure is sure to increase as states can issue death warrants at any time.
Last year, there were 47 executions in the U.S., making it the deadliest year for death row inmates since 2009. Executions this year are running slightly behind the amount conducted during the same time period last year.
McGill becomes the 1st condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Arizona and the 43rd overall since the state resumed capital punishment on April 6, 1992.
McGill becomes the 13th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,667th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.
Source: USA Today, Staff; Rick Halperin, May 20, 2026
‘I’m going home’: Leroy McGill executed for 2002 napalm attack that killed one, burned another
He already looked like a corpse when they opened the curtains. Pale, shaved head, eyes closed, a white sheet up to his neck
Leroy McGill, 63, a convicted murderer, lay on a gurney in the death house at the old Florence Prison.
At exactly 10 a.m., he had climbed onto the gurney, visible on a closed-circuit TV screen, and flashed a quick smile at the men in black hats who strapped him down.
A second team swooped in, five men in white scrubs. McGill closed his eyes as they rolled up the sleeves of his white coveralls, revealing armloads of black tats beneath. They pulled back the collar of the robe to place electrodes over the tats on his chest. Then the catheters that would deliver the death drug from the next room slid easily into both arms.
The whole process took three minutes. The curtains opened. Only then did he turn to the window to look for his people. He found his attorney’s eyes. She waved, clutching a tissue. His friend, Grover “Bubba” Ridgeway, raised a fist and kept it in the air, a pre-arranged signal that McGill’s family was thinking of him. McGill smiled broadly.
When asked for his last words, he said, “I just want to thank everybody for being so accommodating and nice. I’m going home.”
The making of a killer
As is often the case, there was harsh contrast between the man on the gurney and the man who committed the acts that put him there.
In 2002, McGill, then 39 and high on methamphetamine, threw a homemade napalm-like substance on two people and set them on fire. One died. The other was horribly burned.
Two-and-a-half years later, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury only had to deliberate for an hour to find him guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder, arson and endangerment. McGill had already done time for armed robbery. The jury found the murder to be especially cruel and especially heinous or depraved and determined that McGill had caused grave danger to others. They sentenced him to death.
The cruelty and depravity had started four decades earlier.
McGill was born in 1963 to a battered woman who had just divorced her husband, a California cop, and she moved to Phoenix with her children when Leroy was four months old. But the father came to Arizona looking for them, assaulted the mother and kidnapped his own kids. When the mother got them back, she bounced from Arizona to New Mexico to Texas, where she remarried another abusive man.
Leroy spent much of his youth in foster care and living in state “boystown” facilities where he was beaten and sexually assaulted by both adults and other children, according to court documents. He was drinking and smoking marijuana by age 15, and at a low point, was living in an abandoned car.
In the hour preceding the execution, Ridgeway confirmed the details, describing his own experience in the same orphanage. Ridgeway admitted that he had caused his own troubles after he left the institution, but straightened himself out to become an example for others.
McGill was not so lucky. In April 1986, he robbed two fast food restaurants by pretending to have a gun and was sentenced to a decade in prison. But he sobered up while there and earned a GED. After he finished parole in 1994, he got work in construction framing luxury homes.
At about that time, he was introduced via mail to Jonna Hardesty, who was in prison, a cellmate of his brother’s girlfriend. When Hardesty was paroled in 1996, they became a couple.
Hardesty claimed to have been institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia, according to court filings, and she sometimes behaved in a bizarre manner — chasing McGill down the street while naked and in a rage, and personally castrating her cat. She and McGill regularly smoked marijuana and did meth. After McGill lost his job in 2002, they were homeless.
They flopped around the druggie community, staying for a while in a one-bedroom apartment in north Phoenix with five other people, including a couple with two daughters, and the eventual victims, Charles Perez and his girlfriend, Nova Banta.
Hardesty and Banta didn’t get along. And when the apartment owner’s shotgun disappeared, Banta blamed McGill and Hardesty, and they were asked to leave the apartment.
They moved into another friend’s house nearby with three other people. McGill plotted revenge, stoking his anger with more meth.
At 3:30 on the morning of July 13, 2002, McGill showed up at the apartment where Perez and Banta were staying. He warned the other residents that they had better leave, and he threatened to get even if they told on him.
Though it was inconclusively debated on appeal, he allegedly brought with him a cup of gasoline in which he had dissolved Styrofoam. When melted with a solvent like gasoline, Styrofoam turns into a clear gel that sticks to a surface and burns like napalm.
Perez and Banta were sitting on a couch in the apartment’s main room. McGill told them that they shouldn’t “talk behind people’s back,” Then he lit them on fire. Both ran screaming from the apartment in flames. The blaze gutted that apartment and one next door
Perez died the next day; Banta was severely burned, but she recovered and testified against McGill.
McGill went to death row.
No undoing it
It’s a common theme on death row: A troubled young nobody from a horrible background takes comfort in meth, which turns him into a monster. He wakes up in a jail cell the day after, wanting to undo what he did. He never admits to it in court. He never admits it to his family.
But there is no undoing. The evidence is clear. The law supposedly reserves the death penalty for the worst of the worst crimes, and setting two people on fire certainly qualifies.
So, he spends the next 20 or so years in prison becoming a nice guy, a friend to others, the person who looks after a colony of feral cats on the prison grounds — a different person from the one who committed the horrible crime. No matter.
By the time the death warrant comes down, he’s over it. He doesn’t want to talk to a reporter, doesn’t want to respond to an email. He’s too busy dealing with knowing the exact day and hour of his impending death. Then he takes that final car ride to Housing Unit 9 on the grounds of the otherwise abandoned Florence Prison complex.
Going home
As the warden read the death warrant, a Catholic priest appeared in the death chamber. He placed a hand on McGill’s forehead and intoned the first words of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepard, I shall not want.” Then he read the last rites. McGill’s lips moved in prayer.
At 10:10, the executioner started to push the drugs, saline from a black syringe, pentobarbital from two green syringes, then another of saline: time elapsed, 90 seconds.
McGill kept his eyes closed. The priest, now sitting by McGill’s head, kept praying.
After three minutes, McGill coughed once, twice, a deep cough that shook his chest. Then he stopped moving.
At 10:26, the warden said it was over.
McGill had gone home, wherever that is.
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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