(Updated: 11:10 a.m. Nov 7) Before a local judge sentenced Calvin Neyland Jr. to Ohio's death row, the 44-year-old trucker gave a rambling and disjointed statement that his attorneys later said is reflective of his deteriorating mental state.
Wood County Common Pleas Court Judge Robert Pollex on Thursday followed the jury's recommendation and ordered Neyland be put to death for murdering two co-workers at a Perrysburg Township trucking facility.
Neyland was being fired from his truck driving job at Liberty Transportation when he killed Thomas Lazar and Douglas Smith on a hot summer afternoon on Aug. 8, 2007. Lazar, 58, a retired Pennsylvania state police officer and the company's safety director, was shot five times in the back outside of the business. Neyland then went inside, walked into the manager's office and shot Smith in the face as he pleaded for help while on the phone with 911 dispatchers.
The death sentence was welcomed by the victims' families, gathered inside the courthouse.
For three weeks they've endured a trial that's been both emotionally and physically draining. Most live hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania. They've been staying here in Ohio since late October.
For them, the man responsible for so much pain was finally being held accountable for his crime.
"This is what I and the whole family was hoping for," said Don Smith, whose only son died at Neyland's hands.

"Does it help?" he said. "No. Doug Smith and Tom Lazar are gone, forever. The man who did that will have his day. The unfortunate thing is the system takes too long."
Tom Lazar, the 23-year-old son of victim Thomas Lazar, was satisfied with the jury's recommendation and the judge's ultimate sentence.
"With my dad being in law enforcement, we've never objected to (the death penalty) but we never wished it on anybody," Lazar said. "But I feel very pleased with what they came out with."
Inside the courtroom, before the judge made his final ruling on sentencing, several of the victims' family members told the court how last year's murders have changed their lives forever.
Lazar's son, his daughter Larissa, and wife Shirley described a man who was active in his community back in Belle Vernon, Pa. Heavily involved with local youth sports programs, the retired state trooper also enjoyed skiing and flying and called high school football games on the radio.
"My dad did more and accomplished more in his life than most people can in three," Larissa Lazar told the judge through tears.
Cindy Collins was engaged to be married to Douglas Smith. They were getting ready to buy a house and make a life together when he was murdered. At times sobbing, she told the judge that Smith "was my rock, and now he's gone."
Charlene Smith, the victim's mother, said Neyland's actions on that summer day last year have been a nightmare for the family marked by stress, insomnia, and a gnawing disbelief that her only son is gone. She said she's forever haunted by his pleas for help on the 911 phone recording, and the sound of Neyland taunting him before shooting him in the face.
"Many times we think this is just a dream that can't be true," she told the judge.
While one after another of the victims' family members addressed the judge, Neyland sat in the courtroom with his attorneys. He appeared to listen attentively while never displaying any outward emotion.
When permitted to address the court, he stood and launched into a roughly 15-minute speech. It ranged from memories of his childhood growing up in Toledo, to a conversation he said he had with his father about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, to his own military service which he said was inaccurately documented by the county's adult probation department. He blamed that on a misunderstanding by department officials.
"I don't know why every time I say something, people get mixed up or confused," Neyland said.
At one point during his statement to the court, he questioned why the name "Liberty" on one of the company trucks had been crossed out, and then wondered aloud if it had something to do with the Liberty bell in Philadelphia, which is also located in Pennsylvania just like the corporate headquarters for Liberty Transportation.
The only seemingly clear reference to the murders came when he told the court, and the victims' families, that they were "not aware of the total ... realm of what happened" on the day of the murders. He said the victims, Smith and Lazar, "are not here to take responsibility" for what occurred, and later added that he himself wasn't completely sure what happened that day.
But Neyland, who grew up in Toledo as the third oldest of 10 children, also said he ultimately decides his own fate. "I always make my own decisions. This is how my dad raised me."
While the jury recommended death for long-haul trucker, the final decision rested with Pollex. The judge reviewed a pre-sentence investigation prepared on Neyland by the probation department, and said the aggravating factors of the case, among them that Neyland was found guilty of planning the murders, outweighed the mitigating factors, including his lack of any violent criminal history.
Outside the courtroom afterward, Neyland's two veteran criminal defense attorneys, Adrian Cimerman and Scott Hicks, said their client remains mentally ill and predicted it will worsen in prison. Both attorneys have had regular contact with their client since his arrest more than a year ago. Both say their client has gone downhill.
"I think from what we saw today, he's deteriorating," Cimerman said.
"He's losing more and more touch with reality. He goes down to death row (in Lucasville prison), he's going to be held in isolation and that's only going to compound his problems," he said. "If and when the time comes to execute him, we believe he's going to be full-blown insane."
Both he and Hicks earlier this year had asked Pollex to declare their client incompetent to stand trial. Neyland protested the attempt, rejecting any suggestion that he was anything but sane. Hicks and Cimerman told the court their client was unable to help in his own defense. They also cited a psychological evaluation conducted after Neyland's arrest diagosing him as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. He also was diagnosised with mental illness in the late 90s.
But several other mental health professionals who monitored Neyland during additional evaluations after his arrest determined he did not suffer from a mental illness, but a "personality disorder." One doctor said he may be difficult to work with, but that did not mean he was incompetent.
Pollex ultimately found Neyland competent to stand trial, over defense objections, earlier this year.
Cimerman after Thursday's sentencing said his client has never been able to help with his own defense.
"Initially, the issue on competency was his ability to assist in his defense, which he's never been able to do," he said. "But now, with this trial going on, it's becoming more and more apparent É he doesn't seem understand the (trial) process, the nature of what's going on."
Cimerman suggested the death sentence will be overturned on appeal because Ohio law prohibits executing the mentally ill.
"We're going through an expensive, time consuming process," he said, "that ultimately is not going to be successful (in putting Neyland to death)."
Cimerman had asked the jury this week to give Neyland life in prison without the possibility of parole rather than death, or even lesser sentences of life with the possibility of parole after 25 or 30 years.
Wood County assistant criminal prosecutors Gwen Howe-Gebers and Heather Baker, who successfully prosecuted the case against Neyland, said they're confident the former truck driver knew exactly what he was doing on the day he shot and killed Lazar and Smith, a murder they've argued that Neyland had been thinking about for weeks before the crime.
"He makes choices and he has the ability to make choices," Howe-Gebers said. "Yes, he has some personality disorders. But just because an individual has a personality disorder, that does not make them mentally ill."
Baker said Neyland even admitted he knows what he's doing during his statement to the court on Thursday. "(He said) that was the way he was raised by his father, to make choices, and that everything he does is a choice that he makes."
Lazar's son doesn't believe Neyland is mentally ill.
"No, not at all," he said. "I listened to the psychologists and psychiatrists (during trial), and they made very good points. And they believe he wasn't crazy, and neither do we. You always have that odd ball in your group of friends who everyone says is crazy, but that doesn't mean they are. I don't believe that he was crazy at all. He definitely knew what he was doing."
Many people from the families of both victims cried in relief outside the courtroom after the close of the weeks-long trial. Family members thanked Perrysburg Township police detectives and county prosecutors who have been involved with the case for more than year now.
During Thursday's sentencing, when Smith and Lazar's family members were tearfully describing the pain the murders had caused the two families, both of the assistant prosecutors were dabbing away tears as well.
Howe-Gebers said it's been an emotional case.
"For the last three weeks ... we've lived with these victims' families," she said.
Standing outside the courtroom, Cindy Collins wondered of the life she could have had with Douglas Smith. In her hands she clutched a small stuffed animal, sewn together from pieces of some of Smith's favorite shirts. A family friend made several similar stuffed keepsakes for other family members. Several carried them during the trial.
"The grey shirt was the one he always cut wood in," Collins said, clutching the small stuffed bear.
"He was such a wonderful man," she said of her late fiance. Their wedding was supposed to occur in July last year, less than two weeks before the murders. It had been pushed back so that more family could attend.
"We just had our life together mapped out," Collins said, tears in her eyes. "And we didn't make it."