Choked with emotion, Spencer Pearson’s distraught father apologized directly to his son’s victims in a gripping courtroom scene at his Friday sentencing.
“I’m so sorry,” Dan Pearson said as Madison Schemitz, her mother Jacki Roge, and hero Good Samaritan Kennedy Armstrong looked on from the front row. “I’m so sorry this happened to you. Madison, you were always so sweet coming over. You were such a beautiful person to be around,” he said.
Spencer Pearson stabbed Schemitz 17 times outside a Ponte Vedra Beach restaurant in June 2023, not long after the Ponte Vedra High School classmates split up after nine months together.
“You were so good to our family,” he told Schemitz, who was left partially paralyzed. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I think about you every day. I pray for you everyday. You’re a sweet soul and a beautiful person.”
The day before Friday’s sentencing, Schemitz and Roge sued Spencer Pearson and his parents, alleging that Dan and Tonya Pearson failed to address their son’s erratic behavior ahead of the incident.
“Jacki, I’m sorry,” the father told Roge Friday in court. “I’m so sorry. I know you’ve had to go through a world of hurt. I can’t say I’m sorry enough. You don’t deserve this.”
Pearson then turned his attention to Armstrong, who heroically intervened during Pearson’s assault and suffered stab wounds.
“Kennedy, thank you for saving multiple lives,” he said. “You are a hero. I believe you also saved my son.”
Pearson cut his own throat during the incident in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
He faces up to life in prison Friday, while his attorneys have asked for a 12-year term.
“Spencer deserves a chance to have a life,” Dan Pearson said of his son, adding that he believes he can be rehabilited.
Lawyer Matthew Kachergus said his client suffered from mental impairments as a child and adolescent, and never exhibited violent behaviors before the June 2023 incident that stunned St. Johns County.
