Three electricians who traveled to Central Florida for contract work were killed inside the house their crew used for temporary lodging.
BARTOW, Fla. — Kevin Lanusse, Dewlon Donell and Gregory Dolezal came to Central Florida as members of an out-of-state electrical crew. Five years later, the co-worker convicted of killing them is approaching a formal sentence of life in prison without parole after a jury rejected the death penalty.
The case began in the routine logistics of contract work: employees from Pennsylvania were assigned to a project connected to Publix and stayed together in a short-term rental near Davenport. That shared arrangement placed supervisor Lanusse, 41, Donell, 46, Dolezal, 41, and Shaun Runyon under the same roof or within the same crew. It also became a crucial fact after a workplace dispute, because prosecutors said Runyon knew where his colleagues would be and when they were likely to be sleeping.
A Polk County jury convicted Runyon, now 44, on Sept. 10 of three counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted second-degree murder. Prosecutors sought death on the murder charges. After a separate penalty phase, jurors recommended life without parole on Sept. 26. Florida law requires a judge to impose life when a capital jury makes that recommendation. Runyon’s formal sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 22 at the Bartow courthouse.
The Sheriff’s Office identified Lanusse as being from Effort, Pennsylvania, Donell from Baltimore and Dolezal from Akron, Ohio. They were among workers living away from their home communities while completing the Florida assignment. On Oct. 1, 2021, Runyon and Lanusse had an on-the-job disagreement. Authorities said Runyon punched his supervisor and left. The other workers believed he was heading home to Pennsylvania.
That assumption became a turning point in the prosecution’s reconstruction of the case. Rather than continue north, investigators said Runyon traveled toward Tampa. He left a work vehicle at Tampa International Airport, rented another vehicle and visited a Target store. Surveillance evidence later showed him with an orange aluminum baseball bat in a shopping cart. Prosecutors said he also obtained a prepaid cellphone and removed the SIM card from his work phone.
The state presented additional evidence that Runyon bought clothes and shoes and later used a different license plate on the rental car. Those acts occurred over a period of hours between the job-site fight and the fatal attacks. Prosecutors argued the sequence showed he had repeated opportunities to stop but instead continued making preparations. The defense later disputed what that organization revealed about his mental state, but the jury’s guilty verdicts show it accepted the state’s proof of premeditated murder.
Runyon returned to the rental on the morning of Oct. 2. Authorities said Lanusse and Donell were attacked while asleep. Dolezal was also assaulted and died after reaching the front porch. Albert Read, another co-worker, was hit but survived. Three other people in the residence, among them a child who was 7, escaped without physical injury. Investigators said a baseball bat and a knife were used during the attacks.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office responded after a 911 call reporting a possible murder. A manhunt followed. Investigators gathered evidence from the rental, nearby witnesses, surveillance recordings and Runyon’s travels. An arrest affidavit said he adjusted a security camera inside the residence after noticing it pointed toward the rear entrance he used. That detail was later cited as evidence that he was aware of being recorded and acted to interfere with what the camera might capture.
Evidence also traced Runyon after he left the house. Trial reporting said nearby vacationers saw him as he returned toward his vehicle. He later sought help for an injury to his wrist and eventually went to a hospital. Detectives located him there. Statements he gave investigators became part of the prosecution’s case and later part of the defense’s mitigation argument, though for different reasons.
Authorities said Runyon claimed that co-workers had sexually assaulted him and were part of a drug cartel. Investigators said they did not find evidence supporting a sexual assault. Prosecutors treated the claims as unsupported and pointed instead to the conflict with Lanusse and the documented preparations. The defense argued during the penalty phase that the claims fit a broader history of delusional thinking and should be considered when jurors decided between death and life without parole.
The trial did not begin until Aug. 31, 2026, almost five years after the killings. A grand jury had indicted Runyon in October 2021, and the intervening years included litigation and mental-health evaluations. At the guilt phase, jurors heard the state’s reconstruction of the workplace dispute, Runyon’s movements and purchases, the attacks and the investigation. The jury convicted him on all three first-degree murder counts and on attempted second-degree murder for the attack on the surviving co-worker.
Those verdicts shifted the courtroom’s focus from the victims’ deaths to the punishment Runyon would receive for causing them. Prosecutors asked jurors to recommend execution, emphasizing the planning they said preceded the killings and the circumstances in which the victims were attacked. The defense called mental-health experts and relatives. One expert testified that Runyon suffered from a delusional disorder, and another described severe emotional disturbance. Jurors also heard evidence about substance abuse.
Runyon’s family described episodes that they believed showed his mental condition had been unstable well before the crime. His sister recounted a time when he said people in trees were trying to shoot him, though a photograph he sent her showed no such people. His mother said that before he went to Florida she thought he was doing better, staying clean and becoming active in church. The testimony was offered not to undo the convictions, but to give jurors reasons to choose imprisonment rather than death.
Prosecutors challenged that interpretation. They argued Runyon remembered events clearly and carried out a series of goal-directed actions: leaving the job, traveling a long distance, changing vehicles, buying the bat, altering phone use and returning to the residence. The state contended that those steps reflected awareness and control. Defense lawyers responded that a person can act in an organized way while still experiencing serious delusions and asked jurors to treat mental illness as mitigation.
The jury’s Sept. 26 decision resolved the death-penalty question. Florida law requires at least eight jurors to recommend death in a capital case after the necessary aggravating findings. A recommendation supported by fewer than eight must be life without parole. The statute says that when the jury recommends life, the judge shall impose that sentence. That rule means the upcoming hearing is a formal sentencing proceeding, not another opportunity for the state to obtain death on the three murder counts.
For the families of Lanusse, Donell and Dolezal, the case has stretched from a temporary work assignment in 2021 through a capital trial in 2026. The men’s names appeared first in a sheriff’s announcement describing an active homicide investigation and later in an indictment, years of court filings and finally a jury verdict. The legal process has now established Runyon’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and fixed the most serious punishment available in the case at life without parole.
The fourth co-worker’s survival also remained part of the case. Runyon was convicted of attempted second-degree murder for that attack, a separate count from the three capital murders. The presence of other people in the rental, including the family that escaped, gave investigators additional witnesses and underscored that the violence occurred in shared lodging rather than at the work site where the conflict began.
What transformed the employment dispute into a first-degree murder case was the time and conduct between the argument and the return to Davenport. Prosecutors did not ask jurors to infer premeditation from anger alone. They presented an itinerary of travel, purchases and concealment-related acts that, in the state’s view, showed decisions made over many hours. The jury accepted that theory at the guilt phase, then separately decided that execution was not the appropriate punishment.
Runyon is scheduled to appear in the 10th Judicial Circuit on Oct. 22 for formal sentencing. The court must impose life without parole on the first-degree murder counts under the jury’s recommendation and Florida law, while also entering sentence on the attempted-murder conviction. The hearing will bring the trial stage to an end nearly five years after three traveling workers were killed in the temporary Florida home they shared for a job.
Author note: Last updated Oct. 21, 2026.