Death Row is quiet, except for the murmured praying from one of my fellow condemned to
die.
It’s not his day, it’s mine, but he prays all the same- for himself, and for each man
ahead of him that makes that last lonely walk to the execution chamber.
In sixty minutes, it’ll be my turn to make that walk.
In a week, it’s his.
You’d think death row would be a madhouse, condemned men screaming and ranting against
the system that condemned them to death.
I certainly thought I’d be doing both of those things, but that was back when the shock
of my sentence was still fresh, back when I had years of appeals and fighting ahead
of me.
Back when there was a sliver of hope that this terrible nightmare could all go away.
Now though, well I’ve accepted my fate, and I’m not fooling myself anymore- I deserve
it for what I did.
As I sit here waiting to be executed all I can think about is that night, the night I
had my own family slaughtered like animals.
I’d set the whole thing up, because...well, that’s something I’m still struggling
to understand today.
I lied to my mom, my pop, and my brother, and told them that I’d just passed my final
exams with flying colors.
I said, “Hey, we should go out and celebrate.”
And that's what we did.
At the same time my partner in crime was hiding inside our family home, waiting to gun us
down on our return.
Gun them down, I should say.
I was supposed to look like the fortunate survivor of the ordeal...the victim, a young
man who’d lost his nearest and dearest.
When we got home that evening we were met by a man in a ski mask.
The bullets rang out…brother down…mother down…father down…and me, well, I took
a hit to the arm in what was a choreographed struggle.
With an hour to go before they inject me with a cocktail of deadly drugs, that’s all I
can think about.
How could I do such a thing?
No doubt you think I’m evil…no doubt you think I deserve to die.
But please, hear me out first.
I haven’t given up completely just yet.
There’s still a chance for a last minute pardon.
I have a lot of people fighting for me, including my father, who survived that terrible night.
Can you believe that?
He said he forgave me.
I think he’s a braver man than I could ever be.
I’m waiting for the governor to call, to stay the execution.
I’m hoping for the best, which is a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Better than dying young I guess.
I’m currently in what is called the “Death House”.
That’s a special cell, the last stop before the execution room.
It’s hard to find anything likeable about this place, given that in an hour I will no
longer be in this world, but at least there is a shower in here.
At least there’s kind of a view.
That’s not for my benefit, though, it’s so I can be observed by the guard.
They don’t want me trying to hurt myself before they lay me down on that gurney.
You’re probably wondering what I got for a last meal, but I’m afraid to tell you
that I had nothing special at all.
I received no steak, no pizza, no cans of Coca-Cola and no double-fudge chocolate cake.
I got the standard prison fare.
That’s ‘cos I’m in Texas, and because some dude a while ago had ordered a huge meal
and eaten none of it.
The state stopped letting prisoners order a bespoke last meal after that guy rubbed
pie in their faces.
Some people really do just want to watch the world burn, thanks for nothing, A-hole.
I had my last visit with my father early in the morning.
The next time he’ll see me I’ll be lying on the gurney and he’ll be on the other
side of thick observation glass.
He was there at my birth, watched me come into this world.
Now he’ll watch me leave it.
Poor guy, what have I done to him.
It’s like I told the chaplain this morning.
I don’t want anyone to forgive me for what I did, but for my father’s sake I think
I should be allowed to live.
You see, I wasn’t brought up like most kids.
I was spoiled, and I mean very spoiled.
I don’t know, I guess when you grow up in an environment in which you have everything,
well, you can end up not appreciating anything.
I had everything I wanted.
Amazing toys when I was young…my parents bought me a townhouse when I got older…they
gave me an expensive Swiss watch, and bought me not one, but a bunch of expensive sports
cars.
“How did that make you feel?” asked the chaplain, just a few hours ago.
I told him that I was the unhappiest kid in the world at times.
I was mentally unwell and I was selfish to the highest degree.
I was barely even human.
I grew up with riches and I began to see riches as the very meaning of life.
I didn’t value life itself.
I didn’t value love, friendship, not even the security I'd been granted.
As for my parents…well…they were in the way of me acquiring more wealth.
They were giving me all that cash and they thought I was doing really well in college.
What they didn’t know is that I wasn’t even attending college…I was plotting their
assassination.
I wanted EVERYTHING; the life insurance.
and the entire family fortune.
There’s pacing from one of the guards, sorry each time he makes his rounds it breaks my
concentration.
This isn’t like regular lockup, they do regular foot patrols to make sure nobody’s
hurting themselves.
Kind of ironic, considering I’ll be dead in, oh about another 46 minutes now.
Where was I?
Oh, yeah.
I wasn’t right in the head, that’s for sure.
I’d been a troubled kid since I was old enough to tie my own shoelaces.
In my teens, they said I had a personality disorder after I'd been caught stealing.
There I was, a child born to obscene wealth, the kid with a wide open mouth full of silver
spoons, and I still wanted to take what wasn’t rightfully mine.
To be honest, I think that’s why my parents bought me all those gifts…they thought that
might stop me stealing.
What they didn’t know is that it wasn't the loot that I was interested in.
It was the crime itself that appealed to me.
The kid who had everything needed a hit, and crime was my drug…well…I was doing a lot
of illegal substances, too, which didn’t help my state of mind.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
In another 40 minutes I will die, or I will if that phone doesn’t ring and the governor
puts a stop to all of this.
Another five minutes and the warden comes by my cell.
The execution room is all in order.
I’m told it will be painless.
My father will be watching from an observation room and some of my extended family members
will be there.
My mother and my brother are already on the other side, thanks to me and my unforgivable
crime.
Will I meet them on the other side?
The chaplain would probably say yes, but personally I have my doubts.
I don’t think we’re headed for the same place.
I have to tell you, that crime wasn’t a spur of the moment thing.
A couple of years before I had them gunned down for real, I’d plotted to have them
all executed.
They actually got wind of this after rumors circulated as to what I was planning, but
I just told them I’d joked about it…C’mon, I said, do you think I’d kill my own family.
They believed me, of course, because who wants to think a kid would plot to murder his own
family.
To all outward appearances, I loved all of them, but it was my younger brother that I
was closest to.
I loved him; I cherished him.
But you know what, I also felt like I lived in his shadow.
I never felt like I received the same love as he did from our parents.
Maybe that made me jealous.
Maybe it made me angry.
I don’t know, the old memories hurt too much so I’ve tried my best over the years
to not think about it.
What happened to me?
How did a sweet boy become a teenager the media would say became a ticking time bomb
of rage.
What happened to the kid who cycled for hundreds of miles with his adoring father?
I can’t tell what snapped inside of me.
I’m sorry, I just can’t.
I guess I just thought I never fit in.
And I was greedy.
That night of the murders, I couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the black ski mask
waiting in our home, waiting for us to walk through that front door so he could gun every
single one of my family members down.
But as much as I kept thinking about it, I said nothing.
I could’ve stopped it.
It would’ve been as simple as asking that we all go for ice cream, or to a movie.
If I just delayed them by an hour or more, the gunman would leave the house, thinking
something had gone wrong.
Then, I could call the whole thing off.
But I didn’t.
I ate my meal and watched my family eat theirs, their last meal on earth.
Well, for most of them.
As we approached the house you could say I was just on auto-pilot, I wasn’t really
aware of what was happening.
The crime had been set up…all I had to do was go along with it.
We all got out of the car, but I went back to get a cellphone I’d left in the backseat.
My brother meanwhile walked in the door first, followed by my mother.
That’s when my accomplice opened fire.
A second accomplice waited in a getaway car.
They fled, and I pretended the whole thing had been a burglary gone wrong.
I feigned shock and wept a river of tears.
The neighbors couldn’t believe that this had happened in their sleepy, upper-middle
class neighborhood.
I cried and cried big fat crocodile tears, which mixed with my brother’s blood on my
hands and face.
Both of my accomplices were eventually arrested.
The cops knew I’d plotted to kill my parents in the past, and they knew that I had likely
orchestrated the killings to get my hands on over a million bucks in life insurance
and whatever else was left to me.
They were also suspicious about the burglary itself…how come stacks of cash, jewelry
and other valuables hadn’t been taken?
Investigators knew there was more to the story.
I'd already fled to Mexico though where I got a job in a furniture store.
I made lots of new friends down there, and told them all that the bullet wound I had
was from fighting in Afghanistan.
I told them the exact opposite of my real life story, in that I grew up poor... my mom
sold her body on the streets... and I became an orphan.
Just over two years later, the authorities finally found me.
I was arrested in Mexico and sent back to the U.S. to pay for my atrocity.
The shooter I’d hired got life with the possibility of parole after 30 years and the
driver got 15 years.
Me, well, as you know, I got the death penalty.
Years passed, spending 23 hours a day in that hellhole they call Death Row.
It’s hard to not lose your mind there.
I have a lot of support, but my biggest supporter has always been my father…the man I tried
to have killed…the man whose wife and son I had killed.
Why, you might ask, would this man talk about his love for me on TV and visit me often?
Why would this man help with my appeals for clemency?
Well, I’ve changed.
My pop has seen me change.
I know what I did was unforgivable, but in the end, if they kill me, they are making
my father a victim again.
Thirty minutes to go.
I take a shower and change into a fresh prison jumpsuit.
The state wants you to look your best as they put you to death, I do it because, well, I
don’t really have much else to do.
I sit on my bed, freshly showered, in a clean jumpsuit.
The minutes tick by.
Twenty minutes to go.
I’m still holding out for the governor to call and stop this thing, if only for my father’s
sake.
Killing me will kill him.
He doesn’t deserve that.
Over the years that I’ve been in here I’ve had two appeals turned down, so it looks like
the authorities really want me gone.
It’s actually incredibly rare to get clemency once you’ve been handed the death penalty.
Sure, quite a lot of innocent guys have been exonerated from death row, but the state doesn’t
often have a change of heart and it takes a lot of evidence to convince them of innocence.
I’m asking for mercy, not forgiveness…I will live my life with the mark of Cain, but
my father deserves better.
His rationale is this.
If they kill me, how is justice being served since he will be the only victim remaining.
Fifteen minutes now.
The chaplain is back again and he tells me that everything is set up.
“Is there anything you want to say to me,” he asks.
“Anything you need to clear before you go?”
I think for a while.
What can I possibly talk about?
I said all I had to say to my father this morning, and he told me in return that he
had written to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and had even managed to talk in
person to the Chairman of the Board.
My pop pleaded with this guy to go speak to the governor and explain that he wants his
son alive.
Instead I ask the chaplain to update me on sports.
Unfortunately, this guy isn’t into sports.
I think he was expecting to hear some profound final statement...perhaps so he could pass
the message onto to God.
He tells me that my father, some journalists, and some state-selected witnesses are already
waiting in the observation room.
The curtain he says is drawn, so when I get to the execution room they won’t be able
to see me right away.
I guess that’s probably so the witnesses can avoid having to sit through a man fighting
with the guards as they try to strap him down.
Me?
I’ve got no fight left in me.
I deserve this.
After the priest leaves, I watch the minute hand on a clock hanging off the wall.
Tick… tick… tick...
It’s time.
The warden comes to my cell and explains that he’ll be walking with me to the room.
I don’t make a fuss.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about this.
Still in handcuffs and shackles, I walk to the room with the warden and two other death
row guards.
When I enter the room there are some medical personnel.
I am laid down on the gurney and strapped in.
Those curtains are still not open.
The first thing they do is hook me up to an electrocardiogram machine.
That way they’ll know when my heart stops.
It should be over in minutes, but I once read it took almost two hours for one guy to die.
They insert two intravenous cannulas into my arms through which the drugs will flow
into my veins.
Everything is sterilized, and you might wonder why if I’m going to die anyway.
The reason is because that phone could ring and a “stay of execution”, meaning a suspension
of execution, could happen.
That’s why they don’t want to contaminate a person’s blood.
It wouldn’t be the first time an execution has been called off when the IVs are already
in the arms.
Now it’s a matter of seconds, and if that phone doesn’t ring, I’m gone.
The curtains are drawn back, but I can’t see anyone because the window is a one way
mirror.
I think of my father’s face and the sadness that I have caused him.
I just hope he can live in peace now.
I’m ready to go when something unexpected happens.
Those curtains are closed again.
The warden looks at me and says “Your execution has been stayed.”
I don’t think I can explain to you just how that feels.
I was prepared to die…I had made my peace with death…In a way, I already was dead.
My father has saved me.
His letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole has worked.
The board unanimously voted to keep me alive and the governor accepted their recommendation.
I was spared at the last minute.
I will serve life without the possibility of parole, but at least I will be able to
see my father... and not have to stay in that hell they call Death Row.
Now go watch this video, “What The Last 24 Hours of Death Row Prisoner Look Like in
2019.”
Or have a look at this...