On a tragic morning in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, six-year-old Montanzima Banks's life was cut short in a horrifying act of violence. On September 25, 1982, she was murdered in her home, one of thirteen victims in a mass shooting perpetrated by George Emil Banks, a 40-year-old prison guard who was the father of five of the children he killed that day.
The rampage, which remains one of the deadliest in Pennsylvania's history, unfolded across two locations.
The massacre began in the early morning hours at 28 Schoolhouse Lane. After drinking heavily and taking prescription drugs, George Banks, dressed in military fatigues and armed with a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, systematically shot eight people inside the house. The victims included three women who were his girlfriends and five children, one of whom was Montanzima. After killing his family members, Banks went outside and shot two men on the street, killing one and seriously wounding the other. He then drove to the Heather Highlands mobile home park in Jenkins Township, where he murdered a former girlfriend, their young son, her mother, and her seven-year-old nephew.
Following the shootings, Banks fled to his mother's home, initiating a four-hour standoff with police before he was eventually persuaded to surrender. In the investigation that followed, Banks, who was biracial, claimed he had killed the children to protect them from the pain of enduring a racist society. He was charged with numerous crimes, including thirteen counts of murder.
The subsequent legal proceedings drew significant attention. On June 21, 1983, a jury convicted George Banks of twelve counts of first-degree murder, one count of third-degree murder, attempted murder, and aggravated assault, among other charges. The following day, the jury handed down twelve death sentences. However, Banks was never executed. His case went through decades of appeals, with his mental competency being a recurring issue. In 2010, a judge ultimately ruled that he was mentally incompetent to be executed, effectively commuting his sentence to life in prison. George Banks spent the remainder of his life incarcerated and died of natural causes in his prison cell on November 2, 2025, at the age of 83, forty-three years after he murdered Montanzima Banks and twelve others.
