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. | Photo: AP
Alabama is preparing to execute a man who admitted killing five people with an ax and a gun during a 2016 drug-fueled riot and dropped his appeals so his execution is moving forward.
Derrick Dearman, 36, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in South Alabama.
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Dearman pleaded guilty to killing five people during a 2016 rampage that began when he broke into the home where his estranged girlfriend had taken refuge. Dearman dropped his appeals this spring so his execution could proceed. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it is not fair to the victims or their families to continue to delay the justice they so rightfully deserve.”
“I’m willing to give whatever I can give to try to pay a small part of my debt to society for all the terrible things I’ve done,” Dearman said in an audio recording sent this week to Associated Press. “From this point forward, I hope the focus will not be on me, but rather on the healing of all the people I’ve hurt.”
Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Caleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, were killed on Aug. 20, 2016, at the home near Citronelle, about 33 miles (53 km) north of Mobile. All the victims were related.
One of the victims, Chelsea Reid, who was married to Justin Reid, was pregnant when she was killed. They planned to name the boy Aidan Caleb, according to her obituary. Turner, who was married to Randall, shared the home with the Reeds. Brown, who was Randall’s brother, was also staying there the night of the murders.
The day before the murder, Joseph Turner, Dearman’s girlfriend’s brother, brought her to their home after Dearman began raping her, according to the judge’s sentencing order.
Dearman showed up at the home several times that night asking to see his girlfriend and was told he couldn’t stay there. Sometime after 3 a.m., he returned to the home when all the victims were asleep, according to the judge’s order. He made his way through the house, attacked the victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a gun found in the home, prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend, who survived, into the car with him and drove to Mississippi.
Dearman turned himself in to authorities at his father’s request, according to a judge’s 2018 sentencing order.
As he was escorted to jail, Dearman blamed drugs for the rampage, telling reporters he was high when he entered the home and “the drugs made me think things were going on that weren’t going on there.”
Dearman initially pleaded not guilty, but changed his plea to guilty after firing his lawyers. Because this was a capital murder case, Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the state had proven its case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended the death penalty.
Dearman has been on death row since 2018.
This is Alabama’s fifth scheduled execution of the year. Two of the state’s executions were carried out by nitrogen gas. The other two were carried out by lethal injection, which remains the state’s primary method of execution.
Published – October 17, 2024, 12:19 PM IST
