Billy Adams III, a Tampa rapper known as Ace NH, has sent a handwritten letter asking a Florida judge to sentence him to death for the 2023 killing of his pregnant girlfriend and her unborn child.
The 28-year-old was convicted last month of first-degree murder in the death of 22-year-old Alana Sims and of killing an unborn baby by injury to the mother.
A jury recommended life without parole for Sims’ murder but voted 8-4 in favor of the death penalty for the unborn baby’s death.
Sims was found dead on January 30, 2023, in an unfinished section of the Easton Park subdivision in New Tampa.
She had been shot in the back of the head from roughly three feet away.
Sims’ approximately 18-month-old son, Yazan, was asleep in a car seat inside her Ford EcoSport next to where she was killed and was unharmed. She was five months pregnant, with a baby she planned to name Leilani.
Prosecutors argued Adams lured her to the secluded spot under the pretense of a party celebrating his acquittal on double murder charges.
Three days earlier, on January 27, a jury had acquitted him of two first-degree murder charges in the 2020 shooting deaths of Trevon Albury and Daniel Thompson at a Lutz recording studio. Adams had claimed self-defense.
Instead, Adams murdered her because he was not ready to be a father and wanted to continue a relationship with another woman.