(NewsNation) — A Florida woman has been accused of killing her children’s father outside their day care, in a shooting caught on surveillance video.
The alleged shooter, Mindy Osteen, arrived on scene after her ex-partner and the children’s father, Christopher Jones, had come to pick up their kids before shooting him eight times.
Jones’ sister, Melanie Russo, told “Banfield” that she feels the killing was “premeditated.”
“She can be heard saying, ‘You have to die, let him die,'” Russo said. “She had just been walking the road in front of his home that Sunday before.”
“So just a week before, she was walking the road with the same backpack, concealing something in her hands, just waiting for the moment to be able to do this. And this was her moment.”
Osteen and Jones’ kids were in the back seat of the car when she began shooting, putting them in harm’s way.
The two boys, now in the care of Russo, were terrified about the situation unfolding in front of them.
“Thank God nothing happened to them,” Russo said. “Thank God nothing ricocheted, nothing went through and hit them because they were right there.”
Russo acknowledged that she had only known Osteen for a few years, but called her a “really good actress” at putting on a calm face, when in reality, Osteen was spiraling.
“She would show up, she would show up quiet,” Russo added. “She really wouldn’t make a big scene, and she really wouldn’t draw a lot of attention to herself.”
“That mask would start to fade off, and you would start to see some of the signs that something wasn’t right. Chris would tell us the stories of the kinds of things going on when they lived together, when he was in the home with her behind closed doors about the violence, about the abuse.”
Because of Osteen’s history of violence going back several years, Russo is calling for the “death penalty.”
Why? Prison, Russo says, is too good for her for what she has done.
“I will push in every way possible to see that she gets the death penalty, because how do you let someone continue to walk this Earth that can do something like this, not only to another person, but in front of innocent children?”