Only minutes after serial killer Michael Madison was sentenced to death in a Cleveland courtroom, the father of one of his three victims lunged across a table and tried to grab the smirking defendant while deputies jumped in and pulled him off.
The father, Van Terry, whose 18-year-old daughter, Shirellda, was killed in 2013, was speaking at a podium at the front of the courtroom at the sentencing hearing Thursday, saying, "I guess we are supposed to find it in our hearts to forgive this clown .... who's touched our families... who's taken my child," WKYC-TV reports.
As he turned toward the killer, Madison grinned. Terry responded by leaping across the table, grabbing at Madison's face, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Madison maintained a smirk throughout much of the ordeal.
Terry's sister, Sonya Richardson, said afterward that the father was distraught over the death of his daughter.
"The family is there pouring out their hearts ... and he's sitting there smiling ... which caused my brother to launch at him," Richardson said.
"It was horrible ... to be that close ... to have to breathe his air ... to be in the same room with a person who is so horrible ... and he don't care ... he was laughing when she gave him the death penalty," Richardson added.
The sex offender was convicted last month on charges of killing Terry and two other women, Angela Deskins, 38, and Shetisha Sheeley, 28, and stuffing their bodies into trash bags near his apartment in East Cleveland.
In announcing a sentence of death by lethal injection, Judge Nancy McDonnell said it was incomprehensible that a person could commit crimes of such "sheer inhumanity."
People who commit the kind of crimes that you have committed must be punished, and must be punished as severely as the law allows," she said, looking at Madison. "It is absolutely necessary."
Terry told CNN on Friday that he did not know whether he will be charged over the courtroom scuffle.
"I wasn't thinking about charges. If charges come out of it, I will face it when I face it," he said. "I am not going to question or stress about it."
Asked if he supported the death penalty for Madison, Terry said he does, but worried that it could be 10 years and a long appeal process before it is carried out.
"If he was dying today, yeah, I would want that," Terry said. "But it is going to take a while for him to die. He has the right to appeal it. That takes too long."
