The trial for the murder of Jill Halliburton Su ended on March 18, 2022, when a Broward County jury found Dayonte Resiles guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison two months later. The verdict came at a retrial: a first jury had deadlocked in December 2021 amid allegations that race, not evidence, was driving the deliberations.
The Victim
Jill Halliburton Su was a 59-year-old homemaker and artist who lived in the Westridge gated community in Davie, Florida. She was a distant relative of the founders of the Halliburton oil and energy empire. Her husband, Dr. Nan-Yao Su, was an entomology professor at the University of Florida. She volunteered recording audiobooks for people with visual impairments. On September 8, 2014, her son Justin found her bound in a bathtub inside the family home, stabbed roughly 25 times.
The Evidence Against Dayonte Resiles
The case that eventually went to trial rested on forensic evidence. DNA recovered from the green bathrobe belt used to restrain Jill, from the knife found near the front door, and from broken glass at the back door all matched Dayonte Resiles, a 19-year-old with a juvenile record that stretched back to age 12 and included at least eight burglary-related arrests. Prosecutors argued that Resiles broke in expecting an empty house, encountered Jill, and killed her to keep from being identified. He was arrested on September 18, 2014, ten days after the murder, and charged with first-degree murder.
The defense did not dispute the DNA results directly. Its argument, in both trials, was that the presence of Resiles’s DNA at the scene did not prove he was the killer.
Why the Trial Took Seven Years
Resiles did not face a jury until December 2021. The delay traced back to a courthouse escape in July 2016. Waiting for a hearing in the jury box of a fourth-floor Broward County courtroom, Resiles slipped his shackles with help from another inmate, vaulted a low wall, slipped past bailiffs, and sprinted out an exterior door. He left his restraints and jail jumpsuit behind. The escape had been coordinated with accomplices inside and outside the courthouse, including a getaway driver.
The manhunt lasted about six days. Acting on a tip, a SWAT team surrounded a Days Inn motel in West Palm Beach on the night of July 20, 2016, and Resiles surrendered from Room 149. The escape added six counts of criminal solicitation and one count of criminal conspiracy to his charges, carrying up to 50 additional years. In a letter to the judge after his recapture, Resiles said he was innocent of the murder and had been framed.
The 2021 Mistrial
The first trial ran three weeks in late 2021. Jurors deliberated for four days, choosing between manslaughter, capped at 30 years, and first-degree murder, which in this case carried the possibility of the death penalty.
According to the jury foreperson, most jurors were prepared to convict Resiles of at least second-degree murder. She said three jurors refused to convict because Resiles is Black, framing their resistance around his race rather than the evidence. The jury settled on a compromise verdict of manslaughter, but when the judge polled the jurors individually, the foreperson answered “no,” refusing to affirm a verdict she believed had been reached for the wrong reasons. She later told reporters, “You guys keep saying ‘a young Black man,’ but I don’t see race. I just see a human being.” She also said one juror threatened her after the failed vote, telling her she would have “gotten smacked out in the street” for her stance.
The judge declared a mistrial on December 8, 2021, and set the case for retrial.
The 2022 Retrial and Verdict
The retrial began in March 2022. Prosecutors presented the same core case, anchored by the DNA evidence placing Resiles on the restraint, the knife, and the point of entry. The defense again argued that DNA at the scene was not proof of murder.
This jury deliberated about three days. On March 18, 2022, it found Dayonte Resiles guilty of first-degree murder.
The Sentence
Sentencing was held on May 20, 2022. The Halliburton Su family asked prosecutors to take the death penalty off the table, saying capital punishment was not what Jill would have wanted. Resiles was sentenced to life in prison. He was 27 years old.
What the Case Left Behind
Seven people faced charges tied to the 2016 courthouse escape. The Broward County court system faced questions about how a shackled murder defendant had run out of a fourth-floor courtroom in broad daylight. And the 2021 mistrial left a harder question about how race can shape jury deliberations, aired in this case by the foreperson who refused to sign onto a verdict she believed was reached for reasons other than the evidence.