ARCADIA, Fla. - Seven siblings, all poisoned, and their father is sentenced to death for their murder. But he didn't do it. Saturday, October 25th marked the 41st anniversary of this Southwest Florida tragedy.

Verna Hickson describes the scene around Arcadia to WINK News, "there was people crying, I mean for days." Today, seven kids ages two to eight, lay in small graves. Their final resting place is a few miles away from where they were poisoned.

Verna's husband ran the ambulance service that hauled the kids to the hospital. Taken for help in a small ambulance one-by-one. "Every time he'd come in, back in, one had died," Verna remembers. "By the time he'd go again the phone kept ringing, back and forth, back and forth, they just kept dying behind one another."

The kids had just eaten their lunch. That lunch was laced with a deadly pesticide. "At that time you didn't know they were poisoned. You just knew these kids were sick," Verna recalls.

"The public cries out for justice," Attorney Robert Barrar says. Barrar is the lawyer for the kids father, James Joseph Richardson. The justice for the seven murders was doled out to Richardson. With-in a year of the kids death, Richardson was arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death.

Richardson's lawyer tell WINK News it was a miscarriage of justice. "It was impossible for Mister Richardson to have committed this crime," Barrar states.

The proof comes 21 years after the murders. Richardson has been in jail that entire time. In 1989 Governor Bob Martinez reopened the case, and orders the case to be reexamined. Richardson is freed from jail. The case was reopened because evidence stolen by concerned Arcadia resident Remus Griffin is turned over to the Governor's office. That new evidence shows the investigation was not thorough and some of the testimony in court was very from questionable sources.

Now today 41-years after the kids death, the memory has not gone away. "People still recall this tragedy having happened," says Verna. The house where the kids were poisoned is gone. The area is now a parking lot for a church. But, if you ask anybody that lives in the neighborhood, they know what happened there. "Such a terrible thing to have happened," Verna recollects. "I'll never forget... It will always, I guess, be in our memory."

After getting out of jail James Richardson left Florida. He currently lives in the Midwest. He's now trying to use a new Florida law to collect money for the time he spent in jail after being wrongfully convicted.

Trust WINK News to tell you about this case as it makes its way through the court system.