(This story has been updated with new information.)
The man accused in a Bike Week double murder in 2022 will spend the rest of his life in jail after pleading no contest to two counts of first-degree murder with a weapon, Wednesday, May 7.
Judge Elizabeth A. Blackburn sentenced Jean Macean, 35, of Orlando, to life in prison without parole at the S. James Foxman Justice Center.
Macean was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder with a weapon while acting with premeditation in the killings of Terry Aultman, 48, and Brenda Aultman, 55, according to the indictment.
The Aultmans were stabbed repeatedly while riding their bicycles home in the early morning of March 6, 2022, after attending Bike Week festivities on Main Street in Daytona Beach, police said. Their bodies were found at the corner of Riverview Boulevard and North Wild Olive Avenue.
Aultmans’ family speaks out in court, remembers loved ones
Sam Pendleton, Brenda Aultman’s brother, was at Wednesday’s hearing to make his statement, during which he recounted some family memories with his sister, other siblings and parents in the countryside.
“We were all active campers,” Pendleton said, adding that such trips were a tradition every Thanksgiving in their youth and that now, with their children grown-up, they had plans to restart the tradition again soon. “(We would) kayak, bicycle, go fishing, sightseeing.”
“Those good future memories were stolen from us,” Pendleton said.
He said his sister was “funny, never took herself too seriously” and “always joined in the fun.”
He also took a moment to pay tribute to Terry Aultman, whom he called “a great guy,” who “made my sister very happy.”
“He was very excited about our future camping trips,” he added.
Pendleton closed by saying he “really (misses) Brenda and Terry.”
“They had just found a house they wanted. They were a stage in their life where we could all do stuff together, and now it’s gone.”
Brenda Aultman’s daughter, Sara Turner, appeared virtually at the hearing.
“I’m at a loss for words,” she began. “It’s something that I think about every day.
“My best friend, my creator, my mother, the one person in the world who had unconditional love for me, was ripped away from me, and nothing will ever fix it.”
She said the family has “suffered so much” since the incident three years ago.
“I just wish that we can all start healing, because this has been really tough.”
Macean’s attorney reads client’s statement
In a statement read by one of his attorneys, Macean said he was “very sorry for killing the Aultmans.”
“I have suffered from mental illness for a long time,” Macean’s statement continued. “I offer this information not as an excuse, but as a reason.”
He acknowledged he “did a bad thing, but that is not who I normally am.”
“I know that your family will be hurting forever – I’m truly sorry. They did nothing that night to deserve to die.”
He also apologized to his own family for his actions and thanked them for their support.
Macean had been scheduled to go on trial Oct. 29. Prosecutors were seeking the death penalty but the Public Defenders’ Office planned to argue Macean was intellectually disabled. If the defense won that argument, prosecutors would have been barred from seeking the death penalty.
In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people who are determined to be intellectually disabled cannot be subject to the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
(This story was updated to correct a typo.)
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Daytona Beach Bike Week killer pleads no contest, sentenced to life in prison
Reporting by Frank Fernandez and Brenno Carillo, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
