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A chilling reminder of the terrible things people can do.
By Dan O'Reilly — Written on Feb 01, 2022
Jeremy Main is a disturbed man who has admitted to doing the unthinkable.
On October 9th, 2017, Lake County Sheriff’s deputies kicked the door into a family home in Lady Lake. What they found inside shook even veteran officers.
17-month-old Mackenzie Main was found floating face down in a bathtub. Mackenzie was unresponsive.
Now, Jeremy Main is due to stand trial for the murder of Mackenzie.
Main, 43, could face the death penalty for the horrific murder, to which he admitted to carrying out hours after the toddler was found dead.
The murder was allegedly an act of revenge against his wife who had recently asked him for a divorce.
Lieutenant Fred Jones said of the scene, “Throughout 20 years, you think you’ve seen the worst of the worst, then you see something like this, and you wonder what would take a person’s humanity to do something like that. It’s hard on the detectives down there, hard on the crime scene investigators, the road patrol guys. We are all mothers and fathers, and it impacts us.”
Police went to the house following a 911 call by Mckenzie’s mother, Holly Farrington. Farrington had just gotten off of a chilling phone call with her husband, Jeremy Main. Their conversation will certainly haunt her for the rest of her life.
When Jeremy Main called Holly Farrington, he told her, “you’re going to have a bad day.”
Main continued by telling her about the terrible thing he’d done, “He went to telling me how he tried to kill himself. You know, he tried to kill himself like his dad, and that he’d tried to slit his wrists, but ... he was unsuccessful."
"But that he was successful in that he was going to give me my divorce, but that I wouldn’t have Mackenzie, that she was no longer with us.”
After his call with Farrington, but before police arrived and Mackenzie’s body was discovered, Main drove himself to a Sumpter County Sheriff’s Office where he told the front desk, “I killed my daughter and failed to kill myself.”
When questioned later by investigators, Main showed little remorse.
Main remarked on how his crime had affected him, saying “I ruined my life,” and that he had made “a big mistake.”
Main’s defense seeks to mitigate some of the blame put on Main for Mackenzie’s death, even going so far as to bring in an engineer, who said “It is biomechanically feasible that Mackenzie Main climbed into the bathtub independently.”
The prosecution, on the other hand, seeks the death penalty.
Any potential jurors with moral opposition to the death penalty will be dismissed.
As for Holly Farrington, she’s made her stance on the issue clear, she doesn’t want Main to get the death penalty, but it isn’t for the reasons you might think.
“My wishes are not aligned with the state attorney’s… mine are different. My reasons are way more complicated… I personally don’t want to wait 14 years for him to die," she says.
"I think that if he was to take a plea agreement and just go off to prison for the rest of his life, I think he would be murdered whenever he went to prison. And I would like to see it happen sooner than later. That’s my honest opinion. I’d like to drown him, personally.”
Dan O'Reilly is a writer who covers news, politics, and social justice. Follow him on Twitter.