NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A Connecticut man has been convicted of killing a former Butler County woman and her two daughters during a gruesome 2007 home invasion in which family members were tied up, doused in gas and left to die in a fire.

Joshua Komisarjevsky was found guilty Thursday of capital felony killing and other charges. The same jury will later decide whether he should be sentenced to death or life in prison.

His co-defendant, Steven Hayes, was sentenced to death last year after he was convicted of raping and strangling Jennifer Hawke-Petit and killing her daughters, who died of smoke inhalation.

The crime in the affluent New Haven suburb so unsettled the state that it bolstered efforts to retain the death penalty and led to a newly defined crime of home invasion.

Hawke-Petit spent her early elementary school years in Slippery Rock with her family.

Her father, the Rev. Richard Hawke, and her mother, Marybelle Hawke, have retired to their home in Slippery Rock.