Alabama executed a man Thursday who admitted killing five people with an ax and a gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016 and withdrew his request to have his lethal injection go forward.
Derrick Dearman, 36, was pronounced dead at 6:14 p.m. Thursday at the Holman prison in south Alabama. He pleaded guilty to a crime that started when he broke into the house where his girlfriend was hiding.
Dearman had withdrawn his applications this year. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to the judge, adding that “it is not right for the victims or their families to continue to delay the justice they deserve.”
“I’m willingly giving everything I can to try to pay a small part of my debt to society for all the bad things I’ve done,” Dearman said in an audio recording sent this week to the Associated Press. “From this point forward, I hope the focus will not be on me, but on the healing of all the people I have hurt.”
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Dearman’s execution was one of two scheduled for Thursday in the US. Robert Roberson was scheduled to become the first person in the nation to be executed for a homicide related to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, in the death of his two-year-old daughter in 2002. but the judge accepted a request from Texas lawyers for a delay his execution. The judge’s order was expected to be immediately forwarded to the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
Dearman’s was Alabama’s fifth homicide of 2024. Both are made by nitrogen gas. The other two were by lethal injection, which is still the country’s main method.
Killed on August 20, 2016, at a home near Citronelle, about 30 miles north of Mobile, were Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22.
This undated photo from the Alabama Department of Corrections shows Derrick Dearman, who is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Alabama on Oct. 17, 2024. (Alabama Department of Corrections via AP)
Chelsea Reed, who was married to Justin Reed, was pregnant when she was killed. Turner, who was married to Randall, lived with the Reeds. Brown, who was Randall’s brother, was also staying there the night of the murders. Dearman’s girlfriend survived. Turner and Randall were with their three-month-old son when they were attacked, but the child was not injured.
The day before she was killed, Joseph Turner, the brother of Dearman’s girlfriend, brought her to their home after Dearman began abusing her, according to the judge’s order.
Dearman had come home several times that night asking to see his girlfriend and was told that he would not be staying there. After three in the morning, he returned when all the victims were asleep, according to the judge’s order. He worked his way into the house, attacked the victims with an ax taken from the yard and fired a gun into the house, prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend who survived to get into the car with him towards Mississippi.
Dearman turned himself in to authorities at his father’s request, according to a 2018 sentencing judge’s order.
When he was taken to prison, Dearman blamed drug violence, telling reporters that he gave me methamphetamine when he came into the house and that “drugs made me think things that weren’t really happening.”
Dearman initially pleaded not guilty but changed his plea after firing his lawyers. Because it was a murder charge, Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and decide whether the state had proven the case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended the death penalty.
Before he withdrew his plea, Dearman’s attorneys argued that his trial attorney had failed to do enough to demonstrate Dearman’s mental illness and “lack of competency to plead guilty.” The Equal Justice Initiative, which represented Dearman in the appeal, wrote on its website Wednesday that Dearman “suffers from a lifelong and severe mental illness, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features.”
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Dearman has been on death row since 2018.
In the hours before his execution by lethal injection, Dearman was visited by his sons, sister and father. He had a last meal of a seafood platter delivered from a local restaurant.
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