Death row inmate's final words revealed as victim’s son snaps: ‘I hope he suffered’
For the first time in more than 14 years, three separate U.S. states carried out executions on the same calendar day, bringing renewed national attention to the stark reality of capital punishment and the final words spoken from the execution gurney.
Prison authorities in Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama proceeded with lethal injections following a flurry of unsuccessful last-minute appeals to state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.
The rare alignment of execution dates marks the first time three states have executed inmates on the same day since 2010.
As is custom across state correctional facilities, each condemned inmate was offered a final meal and final opportunity to address the witness room—comprising victim family members, media representatives, spiritual advisors, and prison officials—before the lethal drugs were administered.
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The first execution came from rural McAlester, Oklahoma, where 70-year old Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez died at roughly 10:13am CDT.
He was convicted of fatally shooting his girlfriend Olimpia Fisher at their Oklahoma City home in 2003.
In the years since his conviction, he repeatedly expressed remorse for her killing and told a board he didn’t want clemency for his crime.
In his final moments, he turned to two relatives in attendance and mouthed “I love you” but said he had no further last words to give.
Just half an hour later, at 10:43am, the second of Thursday’s three executions took place in Tennessee, where 54-year-old Anthony Darrell Hines was executed for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins.
Hines stabbed Jenkins to death while the 54-year-old was working as a motel maid in Kingston Springs.
Prior to his death, when asked if he had any final words, Hines initially said: “not right now, thank you”but he later recanted this, and instead left a message for his son, who he had only just reconnected with in the four days prior to his execution, after not being present in his life from the age of 3.
“Tell my son hello”, he said.
Following the execution, Jenkins’ own son Dennis, addressed reporters with his thoughts on finally gaining justice for his late mother. “I hope he did suffer. I hope he felt severe pain because what he did to my mother is nothing compared to what he may have just gone through,” he declared.
The third execution of the day, was that of Jeremy Williams, 42, whose life was ended for the 2021 rape and murder of a 5-year-old Georgia girl, at approximately 6:16 p.m.
It is currently unknown whether he gave any final words.
Williams, who plead guilty to killing Kamarie Holland, did not appeal his execution and instead asked for his death sentence to be carried out.
Williams raped and strangled Holland after offering her mother $2,500 for the child to perform a sex act, prosecutors said.
In a further violation, Williams filmed his attack on the girl and kept her body to continue to abuse.
“To see on video what he did to this baby, what a grown man could do to a child, it’s shocking, it’s horrible, it’s disgusting,” Russell County District Attorney Richard Chancey said prior to his death. “It’s just a level of evil.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall issued a statement Thursday evening following the execution of Jeremy Tremaine Williams by lethal injection at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore: “Justice has been served. In addition to molesting and murdering five-year-old Kamarie Holland in 2021, Williams confessed to a series of violent crimes against children. He killed his infant daughter in Alaska, raped at least two other small children, and sexually abused his young cousin. At his own request, his execution was set and carried out. This is one of the most atrocious crimes we have seen against an innocent child. This lack of humanity is hard to comprehend.
“For her entire life, little Kamarie was exploited by the people around her who were supposed to keep her safe. First, by a father who refused to follow a court order keeping Kamarie and her brother away from their mother, then by a mother who sold her innocent child, and then by Williams, who assaulted and murdered her. At trial, the court wrote that Williams’s actions ‘were so shockingly evil in everything that you did that there’s nothing that I can order to give you what you truly deserve.’
“My office will always stand for victims and fight to ensure that the perpetrators who commit the most violent crimes in Alabama are punished to the maximum extent of the law. It is my sincere hope tonight that survivors of Williams’s crimes know that he can never hurt them, or another innocent child, again.”
If you've been affected by any of the issues in this article, you can contact The National Sexual Assault Hotline on 800.656.HOPE (4673), available 24/7. Or you can chat online via online.rainn.org
Phoebe Tonks