In the early morning hours of September 25, 1982, a wave of violence shattered the community of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, forever marking it with one of the state's most horrific mass murders. Among the innocent lives tragically cut short was that of 4-year-old Boende Banks, a young boy who fell victim to a brutal rampage carried out by his own father, George Emil Banks.
The tragedy unfolded across two locations, beginning at the family's home on Schoolhouse Lane.
George Banks, a 40-year-old former prison guard, had been at a party the night before where he had been drinking. In the hours that followed, he armed himself with an AR-15 rifle and methodically took the lives of those inside his home. Boende, along with his mother Susan Yuhas, his 20-month-old sister Mauritania, his 6-year-old half-sister Montanzima, and his half-brother Foraroude, who was only a year old, were all killed. Also murdered in the house were two of George Banks' other girlfriends, Regina Clemens and Dorothy Lyons, and Dorothy's 11-year-old daughter, Nancy.
The violence did not end there. After leaving a scene of unimaginable horror at his own home, Banks continued his killing spree. He drove to the Heather Highlands mobile home park in nearby Jenkins Township, where his former girlfriend, Sharon Mazzillo, lived with their 5-year-old son, Kissmayu. There, he shot and killed Sharon, Kissmayu, Sharon's mother Alice, and her 7-year-old nephew, Scott. In the street outside his home, Banks also shot and killed a bystander, 24-year-old Raymond F. Hall Jr., and wounded another man.
The manhunt for George Banks culminated in a four-hour standoff at a friend's house before he was eventually talked into surrendering by a former co-worker. In the aftermath, the full scope of the familicide became clear, leaving the community in shock and mourning. Banks, who was described as bi-racial, later claimed he had killed his children to spare them from the racism he had experienced in his own life.
On June 22, 1983, a jury found George Banks guilty of 13 counts of first-degree murder. The following day, he was sentenced to death for 12 of those murders and given a life sentence for the thirteenth. His attorneys had argued for an insanity defense, but this was rejected by the jury. Throughout his years on death row, Banks's case went through numerous appeals. In 2010, he was declared mentally incompetent to be executed due to his deteriorating mental state. George Banks ultimately died of natural causes in prison on November 2, 2025, at the age of 83, never having faced his sentence of execution for the brutal murder of his son, Boende, and twelve others.
