Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis will be a no-show at a “Women for Trump” rally in Tampa on Thursday because serial killer Gary Ray Bowles is set to be executed on the same day, Politico reported.
However, former Attorney General Pam Bondi — who postponed an execution because she had a fundraiser the same evening — is scheduled to be in attendance at the “An Evening to Empower” event at the Tampa Convention Center, along with White House adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The president is not on the list of those attending.
The first lady is not a member of the executive branch, but, “an execution day is a somber day in Florida and neither the Governor nor the First Lady will attend public events that day,” spokeswoman Helen Ferre told the Orlando Sentinel on Tuesday.
Bowles was sentenced to death for the murder of six men in 1994, including gay men in Daytona Beach and the Jacksonville area. He is the second person scheduled to be executed under Gov. Ron DeSantis, including Bobby Joe Long, who was executed on May 23 for the murders of 10 women in the Tampa Bay area in 1984.
DeSantis and Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nunez had no public events listed on the day of Long’s execution.
Holding a public event on the day of an execution became an issue in 2013, when Bondi asked then-Gov. Rick Scott to postpone the execution of Marshall Lee Gore, scheduled for Sept. 10 that year, because she was holding a “hometown campaign kickoff” at her waterfront home.
“What’s going on down there?” said Phyllis Novick, the Ohio mother of one of the woman murdered by Gore, when told by the Tampa Bay Times why the execution of her daughter’s killer had been delayed,
Gore was ultimately executed on Oct. 1 of that year.
Bondi apologized for the incident and was re-elected attorney general in 2014.
slemongello@orlandosentinel.com
