JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The last day of Gabrielle Hanshaw’s short life was unseasonably warm for February. The temperature soared to 80 degrees in Jacksonville that Sunday in 1996.
Gabby’s family spent the hot afternoon running errands, then went back to their home on Epson Lane, near Normandy Boulevard.
Gabby was placed in her playpen. Her mom, Misty, took her 2-year-old sister, Ashley, into a bedroom to lie down because Ashley had been sick.
That left 5-month-old Gabby in the care of 22-year-old Andrew Lukehart, her mother’s boyfriend.
He would be the last person to see her alive.
On June 2, 2026, Lukehart is set to be executed, more than 30 years after Gabby drew her last breath while in his care.
He was convicted in February 1997 of child abuse and felony murder in Gabby’s death, and a jury recommended the death penalty in a 9-3 vote.
After decades of appeals, Tuesday’s execution at Florida State Prison in Raiford feels like it’s been a long time coming for Gabby’s mother.
Misty declined an interview for this story, but she did tell News4JAX she will be at Lukehart’s execution.
How the case unfolded
Around 4:30 p.m. on Feb. 25, 1996, Lukehart picked Gabby up out of the playpen and noticed she had a messy diaper. He went into the room where Misty was lying down with Ashley to get a clean diaper and some baby wipes, but Misty told him the baby wipes were in the back den.
Lukehart took the clean diaper and Gabby into the room at the back of the house.
Misty never saw Gabby alive again.
Around 5 p.m., she heard her car – a white 1981 Oldsmobile Regency - start up in the driveway and looked out to see Lukehart driving away. She checked the house but couldn’t find Gabby anywhere.
Where was he going? And where was Gabby?
Half an hour later, Lukehart called from a Lil’ Champ convenience on Normandy Boulevard and told Misty to call 911.
He said someone had come into the home, taken Gabby and left in a blue Chevrolet Blazer. He was chasing the kidnappers in her car.
That was a lie.
But Misty didn’t know that, so she hung up and called police to report the kidnapping.
Around 6 p.m., half an hour after Lukehart had called Misty, a Clay County deputy responding to a crash report found Misty’s Oldsmobile abandoned on the side of County Road 217.
It was still running and in drive about 50 feet off the road in a ditch near a telephone pole.
Deputy Jeff Gardner saw a baby chair in the back seat on the passenger side and some baby clothes on the floorboard.
He didn’t know about the reported abduction and spent the next hour trying to find the owner of the car. Eventually, he got a number for Misty’s house and called.
Someone with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office answered the phone.
Gardner heard the story about the reported abduction of a 5-month-old and that Misty’s boyfriend said he had used her car to chase potential kidnappers in a blue Chevy Blazer.
Gardner had found the car, but where was Lukehart?
A few minutes after talking with the officers, Gardner found out.
Lukehart, wearing no shirt and no shoes, had walked up to a home in rural Clay County that happened to belong to a Florida Highway Patrol trooper.
That’s where Gardner picked him up and brought him back to the crash site, where he eventually spoke with JSO Detective Tim Reddish.
When Reddish told Lukehart that neighbors on Epson Lane had seen him driving away in the Oldsmobile but never saw a blue Blazer, Lukehart shifted his story.
Now, he said the kidnappers had taken Gabby out of the car at the Lil’ Champ.
The whole situation seemed bizarre.
But a reported child abduction was serious and time was crucial.
A command center was set up in Clay County, where Lukehart said he had lost sight of the Blazer before crashing on the side of CR 217. (He later confessed that he’d tried to ram the telephone pole but had missed.)
After crashing, Lukehart left the car running in the ditch and walked into the woods, where he tried to hang himself from a tree using his shirt. When it didn’t work, he walked out of the woods and up to the home of the FHP trooper.
Still believing they were on the hunt for potential kidnappers, about 25-30 officers from Clay County and Jacksonville searched for Gabby through the night using dogs, helicopters and a dive team.
The truth comes out
By 6:45 a.m., during an interview at JSO headquarters, Lukehart said he would help Reddish retrace his route following the kidnappers. On the way, Reddish got Lukehart breakfast at a Burger King and clothes at a Walmart.
At the time, he thought Lukehart was a witness, not a suspect.
After going back over the route, Reddish and Lukehart ended up back at the crash scene, where Lukehart met Lt. Jimm Redmond with the Crimes Against Persons Unit of the Clay County Sheriff’s Office.
Redmond had asked to talk with Lukehart, hoping he might be able to get some new details out of him that could help investigators find Gabby.
Around 10:30 a.m., Redmond got into the patrol car with Lukehart and went back over the kidnapping story with him. Then someone handed Redmond a photo of Gabby.
He showed it to Lukehart, but the 22-year-old balked.
“Don’t show me the picture,” he said.
Redmond asked why, and Lukehart said he “just didn’t want to look at the picture.” He was crying.
Something shifted.
Lukehart’s reaction made Redmond switch gears.
Suddenly, he told Lukehart he didn’t believe his story about the kidnappers, and he tried to convince Lukehart to tell them where the baby was.
About 20 minutes later, Lukehart caved.
It was all a lie.
There was no blue Chevy Blazer. There were no kidnappers. Gabrielle was not in Clay County.
Something had happened at Misty’s house when he was changing Gabrielle’s diaper, and the little girl was dead.
He’d panicked and left the house with her, then threw her body in a pond off Crystal Springs Road.
That’s where investigators found Gabby.
Previous child abuse case
One of the factors jurors considered when they recommended the death penalty for Lukehart was that he had a previous child abuse conviction from just two years earlier.
Lukehart pleaded guilty in September 1994 and received four years’ probation in a case involving the 8-month-old daughter of a woman he was living with.
Prosecutor Angela Corey, who was on the team that tried Lukehart, said the baby had suffered a “severe” head injury, retinal hemorrhages and broken ribs and had nearly drowned.
Lukehart admitted to leaving the 8-month-old alone in a tub briefly and finding her face down in the water.
Despite pleading guilty, Lukehart has since claimed he was covering for the child’s mother and did not cause the 8-month-old’s injuries.
So what really happened to Gabby?
According to testimony from the Medical Examiner, 5-month-old Gabrielle had bruises on her arm and head. She’d suffered five blows to the head, two of which had caused skull fractures.
But like his previous child abuse case and his claim that Gabby was kidnapped, Lukehart’s story about how Gabby had suffered her injuries kept changing.
In his four-page written confession, he said he’d dropped Gabby when she was wiggling in his arms after he changed her diaper, and she’d fallen on her head and stopped breathing.
But during the trial, when Lukehart testified in his own defense, he said he’d been changing Gabby’s diaper on the floor when she kept pushing herself up on her elbows. He said he forcefully pushed her down in the upper chest and neck four or five times and she struck her head on the carpet.
“The last time I did it, she just stopped moving. She was just completely still,” he said on the stand.
But he admitted the distance he was pushing her down was only about 4 to 5 inches.
“It would have to be quite a forceful push to cause a fracture of this nature from that distance,” Dr. Jack Daniel said on the stand.
He also said it “would be a little unusual” for a 5-month-old child to be able to push up on their elbows the way Lukehart had described.
During the trial, Medical Examiner Dr. Bonifacio Floro said that Gabrielle’s injuries required “the use of substantial force” and could have been caused by “hard blows with a fist” or by “being slammed against a floor” but not by an accidental fall from a few feet.
At the time Gabby died, she was 24 inches long and weighed just 15 pounds. Lukehart, on the other hand, was 6-1 and weighed 225 pounds.
During later appeals, Lukehart claimed he’d been on medication during the trial that messed with his memory, forcing him to come up with the story about pushing Gabby to the ground. He reverted to saying he’d dropped Gabby accidentally.
The truth is, the only person who knows how Gabby suffered her fatal injuries will likely take those answers to his grave on Tuesday.