Killer to be executed Friday

Tony Baughman

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

William Ernest (Junior) Downs Jr.

William Ernest (Junior) Downs Jr. has entered his final days.

Downs, who pleaded guilty to the April 1999 murder of a 6-year-old North Augusta boy, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection this Friday at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. The execution is planned for 6 p.m.

Officials at the S.C. Department of Corrections said Monday that Friday’s execution would be witnessed by “a couple of law enforcement representatives and a couple of victim representatives,” but would not say whether the witnesses would include family members of the victim, Keenan O’Mailia.

Last week, North Augusta Department of Public Safety investigator Joe Count, who led the massive effort to bring Downs to justice, said he would be among the witnesses.

Since June 2002, Downs has been on death row for the kidnapping, rape and strangulation death of O’Mailia. The child was reported missing on Saturday, April 17, 1999, while riding his bicycle near the North Augusta Greeneway. Following an extensive search, the child’s body was found the next afternoon in a wooded area near Hammonds Ferry Road in North Augusta, about 500 yards from the Georgetown Villa home he shared with his mother, Nina O’Mailia.

Nine days after the killing, a tip from family members led authorities to Downs, a drifter who lived in Augusta at the time of the murder. He was arrested in Warner Robins, Ga., and brought back to South Carolina, where he confessed.

Under questioning by North Augusta authorities, Downs also pleaded guilty to killing 10-year-old James Porter of Augusta. Porter’s body was found in the Savannah River two months after he disappeared in March 1991.

Three years later, on the eve of a procedural hearing in Columbia before his planned trial, Downs pleaded guilty to snatching O’Mailia from his bicycle, strangling him and sexually assaulting the corpse twice.

Downs waived his right to a jury trial, clearing the way under state law for Judge Casey Manning to hand down the death penalty in June 2002. Because of Downs’ guilty plea, Manning had the option of sentencing him to life in prison without parole but instead concurred with Solicitor Barbara Morgan that Downs should be put to death.

Downs will become the second Aiken County case to end in execution in the last eight months. Last November, Hastings Wise was executed for killing four people during a shooting spree at the R.E. Phelon plant in Aiken on Sept. 15, 1997.