A North Carolina man has been sentenced to death for murdering his 15-year-old daughter after torturing and sexually torturing her for 22 hours at their house in 2019.

Joshua Burgess, 35, strangled his daughter, Zaria Burgess, and cut her throat after putting her through hours of torture when she had gone to visit him at their house in Monroe, North Carolina. Prosecutors also said that the man "psychologically and sexually tortured" her before killing her.

The man has been found guilty of first-degree murder and he has also been convicted of one count of statutory rape, three counts of statutory sex offense, and one count of first-degree sexual exploitation of a minor.

He received a minimum of nearly 76 years in prison for those offenses in addition to the death sentence.

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"This was truly an especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel killing of an innocent child. This case was emotionally taxing for everyone involved. We continue to grieve with and pray for Zaria's mother," said the Union County District Attorney's Office.

The girl lived with her biological mother and had gone to visit her father for the weekend when she was brutally murdered. Burgess himself walked into the Union County Sheriff's Office (USCO) and confessed to killing his daughter, per a report in The Mirror.

Kevin Ware Jr.
CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS / @CSI?cafe. Photo by: Yumi Kimura from Yokohama, JAPAN, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Yumi Kimura/Wikimedia Commons

The investigators say the primary motives for the killing appeared to be lust and control, but Burgess has not given any concrete motive for his actions. He had previously been arrested for common law robbery and larceny.

"The details of this murder are indescribable," Union County Sheriff Eddie Cathey had said at the time. "Every officer and detective involved in this case is feeling the effects of what happened to this child. There is no logical answer to explain why this man did what he is accused of doing."