The 1st Execution of 2017
Christopher Wilkins, was executed in Texas on
January 11, 2017 for killing two men. He
was declared dead at 6:29 p.m., 13 minutes after a lethal injection of
pentobarbital, reported The Associated Press.
Before the drug was administered, he twice mouthed
“I’m sorry,” to two relatives of one of the murder victims as they watched
through a window. He gave no final statement.
Wilkins had explained to jurors at his capital
murder trial in 2008 how and why he killed his friends in Fort Worth three
years earlier, saying he didn’t care if they sentenced him to death.
Wilkins was released from prison in 2005 after
serving time for a federal gun possession conviction. He drove a stolen truck
to Fort Worth, where he befriended Willie Freeman, 40, and Mike Silva, 33.
Court records show Freeman and his drug supplier,
who wasn’t identified, duped Wilkins into paying $20 for a piece of gravel that
he thought was a rock of crack cocaine. Wilkins said he shot Freeman on Oct.
28, 2005, after Freeman laughed about the scam, then he shot Silva because he
was there. Wilkins’ fingerprints were found in Silva’s wrecked SUV and a
pentagram matching one of Wilkins’ numerous tattoos had been carved into the
hood.
Wilkins also testified that the day before the
shootings, he shot and killed another man, Gilbert Vallejo, 47, outside a Fort
Worth bar in a dispute over a pay phone, and about a week later used a stolen
car to try to run down two people because he believed one of them had taken his
sunglasses.
“I know they are bad decisions,” Wilkins told jurors
of his actions. “I make them anyway.”
Wes Ball, one of Wilkins’ trial lawyers, described
him as “candid to a degree you don’t see,” and had hoped his appearance on the
witness stand would have made jurors like him.
“It didn’t work,” Ball said.
While awaiting trial, authorities discovered he had
swallowed a handcuff key and fashioned a knife to be used in an escape attempt.
“This guy is the classic outlaw in the model of Billy
the Kid, an Old West-style outlaw,” said Kevin Rousseau, the Tarrant
County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Wilkins.
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