Alabama has executed a man who withdrew his appeal and asked for the death penalty for murdering five people in their beds.
Derrick Dearman, 36, pleaded guilty to killing five members of his estranged girlfriend’s family with an ax and a gun during an Aug. 20, 2016, drug spree.
He was pronounced dead at Holman Prison in south Alabama on Thursday at 6:14 p.m., and his last words were a plea for forgiveness.
Forgive me. This is not for me. This is for you… I took so much,” he said, strapped to a stretcher in the execution room.
He ended by telling his own family, “You all know by now that I love you all.” Some of his words were impossible to hear.
Derrick Dearman, a 36-year-old death row inmate in Alabama, pleaded for execution, withdrawing his calls to allow the families of the five people he massacred in 2016 to receive “justice.”
Dearman’s bloodlust began when he broke into the house where his girlfriend Lanera Lester (pictured) was taking refuge after running away from him
The lethal injection was carried out after Dearman withdrew his appeals this year and demanded that the execution continue.
“I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to the judge, adding that “it is unfair to the victims and their families to extend the justice they so rightly deserve.”
Dearman’s execution was one of two scheduled for Thursday across the United States, but a judge granted Texas lawmakers’ request to delay the second execution.
Robert Roberson was to be the first person in the country to be sentenced to death for a murder related to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome – the death of his two-year-old daughter in 2002.
The Texas Attorney General’s Office was expected to quickly appeal the judge’s order.
Dearman’s bloodlust began when he broke into the house where his girlfriend Lanera Lester had taken refuge after running away from him.
The killer, who had struggled with drug addiction since he was a teenager, was under the influence of methamphetamine when he burst into a home near Citronelle, about 50 miles north of Mobile.
He murdered Shannon Melissa Randall (35), Joseph Adam Turner (26), Robert Lee Brown (26), Justin Kaleb Reed (23) and Chelsea Randall Reed (22).
Chelsea, who was Justin Reed’s wife, was pregnant when she was murdered, giving Dearman a sixth count of capital murder.
The House of Horrors on Jim Platt Road near Citronelle, Alabama, where Lester was hiding when Dearman broke in and killed five of her family members while they slept
The victims were Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; and Robert Lee Brown, 26, and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, five months pregnant
After the massacre, Dearman put his estranged girlfriend and a three-month-old baby – the child of one of the victims – in the car and drove to his father’s home in Mississippi.
Upon arrival, he released Lester and the infant and then turned himself in to the local sheriff’s office.
Bryant Henry Randall, father of Chelsea Reed, who also lost a sister and brother, wrote a statement read at the execution by the Alabama prison commissioner.
He wrote that he had no words to describe the impact the murders had on him and his family, and so on Dearman had to say goodbye to his family, but they didn’t.
“I so want to say a final goodbye to my daughter and I would love to meet my granddaughter,” he wrote, adding that his siblings did not have the opportunity to see their children grow up.
“Your senseless act has deprived me of happiness and family ties in many ways.”
Robert Brown, Robert Brown’s father, told reporters that his family “will suffer for the rest of their lives.”
“It doesn’t restore anything. I can’t get my son or any of them back,” he said.
Dearman, then 27, is escorted to the Mobile County Metro Jail in Mobile, Alabama, after his 2016 arrest.
The execution began around 5:58 p.m., but it was unclear when the drugs began flowing.
At one point, Dearman looked up and looked around the room as if to ask when they were starting. Shortly thereafter, he appeared to lose consciousness.
His left arm moved slightly as the guard performed a consciousness check, which involves shouting his name and pinching his arm to make sure he doesn’t wake up when the final lethal drugs are administered.
Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said Dearman was awake and that his arm movements were not a sign of consciousness.
When the curtains in the screening room closed around 6:08 p.m., his father, who was in the same room as media witnesses, sobbed and repeatedly shouted his son’s name.
Lester’s brother, Joseph Turner, brought her home the day before the massacre, after Dearman began to abuse her.
Dearman showed up at the house multiple times that evening, asking to see his girlfriend, but was told he couldn’t stay there.
According to the judge’s order, he returned around 3 a.m., when all the victims were asleep.
According to the prosecutor’s office, he made his way through the house, attacking the victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a weapon found in the house.
This undated photo from the Alabama Department of Corrections shows Dearman in prison
As he was being escorted to prison, Dearman blamed the madness on drugs, telling reporters that he was high on methamphetamine and that “drugs made me think about things that weren’t actually happening.”
Dearman initially pleaded not guilty, but after his lawyers were released, he changed his plea to guilty.
Because this was a capital murder case, Alabama law required the jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the state had proven its case.
The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence.
Dearman’s former lawyers questioned whether he was competent to decide to plead guilty.
Before he withdrew his appeal, Dearman’s lawyers argued that his trial counsel had not done enough to show Dearman’s mental illness and “incompetence to plead guilty.”
The Equal Justice Initiative, which represented Dearman in the appeal, wrote on its website that Dearman “suffered from a lifelong serious mental illness, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features” and was executed “despite evidence of serious mental illness.”