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Prosecutors To Seek Death Penalty In Deltona Slayings

Indictment Provides Gruesome Details Of Attack

POSTED: Monday, August 23, 2004
UPDATED: 8:11 am EDT August 24, 2004

A grand jury on Monday formally charged four suspects with massacring six people in a house, supposedly over an X-box and some clothes earlier this month.

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The 15-count indictment provided gruesome details of the attack, including that the body of one of the female victims was sexually assaulted with a bat and that each of the victims were stabbed and cut after they were dead.

The 27-year-old suspected ringleader, Troy Victorino, 27, and codefendants, Robert Cannon, Michael Salas and Jerone Hunter, all 18, each were charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, abuse of a dead human body with a weapon and armed burglary. They also were charged with cruelty to animals for killing a small dog that was also in the house.

State Attorney John Tanner said he will seek the death penalties for all four defendants.

"I feel for the families involved -- all of us keep them in our prayers," Tanner said. "They've been through a parent's worst nightmare."

Victorino, Cannon and Salas were given access to public defenders after their first appearance hearing earlier this month. No one at the Public Defender's Office in DeLand on Monday afternoon answered the phone.

Nobody answered the phone at the office of Grady Irvin, an attorney representing Hunter.

Police said the killings were the brutal culmination of an argument between Victorino and one of the victims, Erin Belanger, 22. Authorities say the source of the dispute was an Xbox video game system and clothes owned by Victorino. Belanger's grandparents own a Florida winter home that was supposed to be vacant this summer, but police said Victorino and other squatters used it in July as a party spot.

The squatters were kicked out, but they left behind the X-box and clothes. Belanger took the items back to the three-bedroom rental home she shared with friends.

Investigators said Victorino organized the attack to retrieve the items.

Also killed were Anthony Vega, 34; Roberto "Tito" Gonzalez, 28; Belanger's boyfriend, Francisco Ayo Roman, 30; and Jonathan Gleason, 18.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

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