Posted on 02/11/2004 6:41:43 PM PST by Pharmboy
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - Maintaining his innocence, a convicted killer was executed Wednesday for a 1991 triple slaying in which one victims was a 10-year-old girl pregnant with his child. "I just want to say I am not sad or bitter with anybody," Edward Lagrone said in a brief final statement. "Like I've said from Day One, I didn't kill them. But I'm no better than the people that did."
He concluded by saying: "Jesus is Lord. That's all I have to say."
After the lethal injection, Lagrone, 46, sputtered and gasped before he was pronounced dead seven minutes later.
"I forgive him, because it's not right to hate a person," said Kendra Lloyd, who called her slain cousin, Shakeisha Lloyd, her "best friend."
"But I mean, he took my cousin away," she said after watching Lagrone die and breaking into sobs.
Shakeisha Lloyd was 17 weeks pregnant when Lagrone barged into her family's home before dawn and began shooting with a double-barreled shotgun. Shakeisha had completed the fourth grade the day before the shooting.
Two of the girl's great-aunts also were killed. An uncle was wounded.
"Just a cold-blooded murderer," said David Montague, the district attorney who prosecuted the case. Montague said DNA evidence linked Lagrone to the fetus.
Authorities believed Lagrone was enraged because Shakeisha's mother wouldn't drop a sexual assault complaint she filed against him for impregnating her daughter. The mother once dated Lagrone.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday afternoon declined to hear a final appeal.
Lagrone was released from prison in 1984 after serving seven years of a 20-year term for another murder.
AP-ES-02-11-04 2112EST
Shakeisha Lloyd
Amen, and amen. Only He knows why these little ones are cut down early in life.
Lagrone refused to speak with reporters as his execution date approached. The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday afternoon, acting on an appeal filed by Lagrone's lawyers, refused to review his case and stop the punishment.
Lagrone lived in Arlington and had worked as a cook but was known in Fort Worth's Stop Six area as a drug dealer.
He denied impregnating the girl, who completed the fourth grade the day before she was killed. DNA evidence, however, excluded 99.99 percent of other men as the father. Eight genetic tests could not exclude him, a DNA expert testified.
Pamela Lloyd testified Shakeisha was concealing her 19-month-old sister behind some boxes and shouting at her mother to hide when she was shot. The woman fled to a closet.
Omar Anderson, Lagrone's son, serving a life prison term for a 1992 murder, testified at his father's trial another man was responsible for the killings. Montague, however, said relatives who survived the shooting spree identified Lagrone.
"We had a lock-tight case as far as we were concerned," Montague said.
A jury deliberated 50 minutes before finding him guilty of capital murder.
During punishment phase, two of Lagrone's sisters testified he terrorized and sexually assaulted them at gunpoint in 1986. The same jury needed 25 minutes to decide he should get lethal injection.
In 1997, Pamela Lloyd was arrested for killing her husband of four years. Sentenced to five years on a murder conviction, she's scheduled for release in July.
While state procedures allow family members to witness the execution of the person condemned for killing a relative, prison regulations bar Lloyd, as an inmate, from watching the killer of her daughter die.
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