4-minute read

Mike Purzycki died Tuesday, May 19 at 80. The public record of his life — the Riverfront, the mayoralty, the housing reforms, the man who turned an industrial wasteland into a regional destination — is real and earned. We read it Tuesday morning. We recognize the city Purzycki helped to build.

There is another piece of Purzycki’s life, less public and to us no less important, that the three of us are uniquely positioned to tell. I, Tony Allen, served as the founding chair of the Wilmington HOPE Commission, and Mike served as my co-chair throughout my tenure. With first Provey Powell and then Charles A. Madden as our executive director, and Wolfie Chambers as one of our most important volunteers and advisors — now one of the nation’s leading voices on second chances and gun violence prevention — we built something together that does not appear in the public chronology of Purzycki’s life. The moment of his passing is the right moment to name it.

We come to this tribute from three vantage points: a returning citizen turned national advocate, the executive director who ran the institution day to day, and the co-chair who sat with Purzycki at a round table, grappling with the difficult topics that carried their own advocates and opponents on every side — race, community, crime, brokenness, repair and whole cloth reform — we dealt with it all and then went about the business of trying to do something about it. The relationship the three of us had with Purzycki was an argument we kept choosing to have in the same room. He pushed us. We pushed him. Individually, we all held positions about structural injustice that sometimes made each of us bristle, one to another. Regardless of what side we landed, no one flinched. That is what made the work real, and what makes this tribute possible.

We want to honor Purzycki honestly. He was not a man so certain about Black people that he believed he knew what was best for us. He would have been the first to reject that framing on its facing, noting first that no group of people is a monolith, nor is one group superior in their judgement of another. It was the systems that created the circumstances, a point we all regularly rallied around. Purzycki was our ally — and on some days, our co-conspirator in a fight no one in his world was asking him to take up.

A Florida man convicted of fatally stabbing of his cousin’s girlfriend and the couple’s 4-year-old daughter is set to be executed Thursday evening.

Richard Knight, 47, is scheduled to receive a three-drug injection starting at 6 p.m. at Florida State Prison near Starke. Knight was sentenced to death after being convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in 2006 for the deaths of Odessia Stephens and her four-year-old child, Hanessia Mullings.

This would be Florida’s seventh execution so far this year, following a record 19 executions in 2025. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis oversaw more executions in a single year in 2025 than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The previous record was set in 2014 with eight executions.

According to court records, Knight had been living in Coral Springs, near Fort Lauderdale, with his cousin, his cousin’s girlfriend and their daughter in June 2000. Knight and Stephens frequently argued about Knight living there. One evening while Knight’s cousin was at work, Stephens told Knight that he would need to move out the next morning. Knight became angry and stabbed Stephens multiple times and then attacked the young girl, officials said.

While being held at the Broward County Jail following his arrest, Knight confessed the killings to another inmate, who testified against Knight during his trial.

The Florida Supreme Court denied Knight’s appeals last Friday. The court rejected his claim of newly discovered evidence, pointing out that an unidentified fingerprint found on a knife at the murder scene was known about and addressed during Knight’s original trial. The court also rejected claims based on Florida’s execution protocols and warrant process.

A final appeal was still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

A total of 47 people were executed in the U.S. in 2025. Florida led the way with a flurry of death warrants signed by DeSantis. Alabama, South Carolina and Texas tied for second with five executions each.

An execution was scheduled for Thursday in Tennessee. And another execution is planned in Florida on June 2. Andrew Richard Lukehart, 53, was convicted of fatally beating of his girlfriend’s infant daughter in 1996.

All Florida executions are carried out via lethal injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.