Michael Bernard Bell is set to be executed by lethal injection on Tuesday, July 15. He was convicted of the revenge killing of two people in 1993. On December 9, 1993, he went on a rampage with an AK-47, brutally murdering Jimmy West, 23, and Tamecka Smith, 18, outside a Jacksonville bar.
With Bell’s execution, the United States is set to reach a 10-year high for executions next week. He will be the 26th inmate executed in the country this year. This year’s numbers also surpassed the 25 executions that were conducted in the U.S. in 2024. With another nine executions scheduled for this year, it will mark the most executions in any given year in the U.S. since all of 2015.
Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Police Project, told USA Today, “We’re in the midst of something historic.” Just alone in Florida, Bell’s execution marks the eighth this year. The last time this happened in the state was in 1984 and 2014.
Michael Bell committed the crime out of revenge after a man named Theodore Wright killed his brother in self-defense. “Wright belongs in the morgue,” Bell reportedly said while broadcasting his revenge plans, according to the court documents.
After six months of waiting, the moment arrived for Bell, as she spotted Wright’s easy-to-spot yellow Plymouth Fury outside a Jacksonville bar. However, what he was unaware of was that Wright sold his car to Jimmy West, who was his half-brother.
West was leaving the bar with Tamecka Smith and another woman when a ski-mask-wearing Bell appeared out of nowhere and rained a round of bullets. He opened fire on people nearby and at the front of the bar, and recognized West. However, he proceeded to kill him anyway.
This week’s execution:
Michael Bernard Bell – Florida, July 15 at 6 P.M
— Friday-Justice-Obsessions (@death_row0506) July 13, 2025
According to the court records, he later told his aunt, “Theodore got my brother, and now I got his brother.” Before committing the revenge murders, Bell had already been to prison, including once for an armed robbery. Despite multiple arrests and convictions in the earlier years, he received early release three separate times.
At trial, Judge R. Hudson Olliff lamented, “Seven months after that early release, the defendant committed this savage double murder of an innocent 23-year-old man and a teenage girl.”
“These two murders can be laid at the doorstep of the Florida Parole Commission for the irresponsible early prison release of this violent habitual criminal who should have been in prison at the time the murders were committed,” the judge added.
