CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM-CLEVELAND, Ohio-A Cuyahoga County jury last month recommended death for convicted murderer and teen rapist Christopher Whitaker, the sex offender who kidnapped, raped and dismembered 7th grader Alianna DeFreeze at an abandoned home in January of last year in the Kinsman neighborhood on Cleveland's largely Black east side.

Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Friedland, per state law, will decide, following a sentencing hearing at 11 am March 26, whether to accept the jury's recommendation or to sentenced Whitaker to life in prison.

The same 12-member jury that recommended a death sentence last month convicted the 45-year-old Whitaker on all counts, including aggravated murder, rape and kidnapping.

Whitaker, of Cleveland, confessed to the crimes, saying he was high on cocaine and acting out the morning of the gruesome murder. And he has apologized to the victim's family.

But Whitaker and his lawyers do not want him put to death, the height of punishment in the state of Ohio for aggravated murder.

Cleveland community activist organizers want Whitaker, who literally dismembered Alianna's body with lawn tools, including a saw, punished to the hilt under state law, and they are upset.

"We are pleased with the jury's verdict as well as its recommendation for the death penalty for Mr. Whitaker," said community activist Kathy Wray Coleman of Cleveland, who leads the Imperial Women Coalition, a women's and children's rights group founded relative to heightened rape and murders of Black women and girls and other women and girls in Cleveland since 2009.

Coleman said that Whitaker "must be held accountable for his crimes against this young and innocent Black girl that he kidnapped, raped, tortured and dismembered and we hope he rots in hell."

The  14-year-old Black girl, whose dismembered body was found in January 2017 by police in an abandoned home at the the 9400 block of Fullmer Avenue, was snatched by Whitaker in the 3400 block of East 149th Street as she was getting off the RTA bus headed to school.

Alianna never arrived at school, and her mother, notified some 10 hours later, filed a missing person's report.

The child's maimed body was identified by the Cuyahoga County medical examiner's office through dental records.

Whitaker used his sex offender's address of South Euclid, Ohio but lived in Cleveland, investigators said. He served time in prison for sexual battery, among other convictions, and is in jail held on a $3 million bond.

DNA linked Whitaker to the crime.