COLUMBIA, S.C. – A South Carolina man who killed his ex-girlfriend’s mother and father with a baseball bat was executed by firing squad Friday, the primary U.S. prisoner in 15 years to die by that methodology, which he noticed as preferable to the electrical chair or deadly injection.
Three volunteer jail workers used rifles to hold out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced lifeless at 6:08 p.m.
Sigmon killed David and Gladys Larke of their Greenville County house in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He advised police he deliberate to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.
Sigmon’s legal professionals mentioned he selected the firing squad as a result of the electrical chair would “cook dinner him alive,” and he feared {that a} deadly injection of pentobarbital into his veins would send a rush of fluid and blood into his lungs and drown him.
The main points of South Carolina’s deadly injection methodology are kept secret in South Carolina, and Sigmon unsuccessfully requested the state Supreme Court docket on Thursday to pause his execution due to that.
On Friday, Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white goal with a pink bullseye over his chest.
The armed prison employees stood 15 ft (4.6 meters) from the place he sat within the state’s demise chamber — the identical distance because the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court docket. Seen in the identical small room was the state’s unused electrical chair. The gurney used to hold out deadly injections had been rolled away.
The volunteers all fired on the identical time by openings in a wall. They weren’t seen to a couple of dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass. Sigmon made a number of heavy breaths throughout the two minutes that elapsed from when the hood was positioned to the pictures being fired.
The pictures, which seemed like they had been fired on the identical time, made a loud, jarring bang that brought on witnesses to flinch. His arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the goal was blasted off his chest. He appeared to provide one other breath or two with a pink stain on his chest, and small quantities of tissue might be seen from the wound throughout these breaths.
A health care provider got here out a couple of minute later and examined Sigmon for 90 seconds earlier than declaring him lifeless.
Witnesses included three members of the family of the Larkes. Additionally current had been Sigmon’s lawyer and non secular advisor, a consultant from the prosecuting solicitor’s workplace, a sheriff’s investigator and three members of the information media.
Sigmon’s lawyer learn a closing assertion that he mentioned was “certainly one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to assist us finish the demise penalty.”
Jail spokeswoman Chrysti Shain mentioned Sigmon’s final meal was 4 items of fried hen, inexperienced beans, mashed potatoes with gravy, biscuits, cheesecake and candy tea.
The firing squad is an execution methodology with a long and violent history within the U.S. and around the globe. Demise in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Previous West and as a device of terror and political repression within the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Since 1977 solely three different prisoners within the U.S. have been executed by firing squad. All had been in Utah, most just lately Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. One other Utah man, Ralph Menzies, might be subsequent; he’s awaiting the results of a listening to through which his legal professionals argued that his dementia makes him unfit for execution.
In South Carolina on Friday, a bunch of protesters holding indicators with messages reminiscent of “All life is treasured” and “Execute justice not individuals” gathered outdoors the jail earlier than Sigmon’s execution.
Supporters and legal professionals for Sigmon requested Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in jail. They mentioned he was a mannequin prisoner trusted by guards and labored every single day to atone for the killings and likewise that he dedicated the killings after succumbing to extreme psychological sickness.
However McMaster denied the clemency plea. No governor has ever commuted a demise sentence within the state, the place 46 different prisoners have been executed because the demise penalty resumed within the U.S. in 1976. Seven have died within the electrical chair and 39 others by deadly injection.
Gerald “Bo” King, chief of the capital habeas unit within the federal public defender’s workplace, mentioned Sigmon “used his remaining assertion to name on his fellow individuals of religion to finish the demise penalty and spare the lives of the 28 males nonetheless locked up on South Carolina’s demise row.”
“It’s unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute certainly one of its residents on this bloody spectacle,” King mentioned in an announcement. “However South Carolina has ended the lifetime of a person who has devoted himself to his religion, and to ministry and repair to throughout him. Brad admitted his guilt at trial and shared his deep grief for his crimes together with his jury and, within the years since, with everybody who knew him.”
Within the early 2000s, South Carolina was among the many busiest demise penalty states, finishing up a mean of three executions a 12 months. However officers suspended executions for 13 years, partly as a result of they had been unable to acquire deadly injection medicine.
The state Supreme Court docket cleared the way to renew them in July. Freddie Owens was the primary to be put to death, on Sept. 20, after McMaster denied him clemency. Richard Moore was executed on Nov. 1 and Marion Bowman Jr. on Jan. 31.
Going ahead the court docket will permit an execution each 5 weeks.
South Carolina now has 28 inmates on its demise row together with two who’ve exhausted their appeals and are awaiting execution, most probably this spring. Only one man has been added to demise row prior to now decade.
Earlier than executions had been paused, greater than 60 individuals confronted demise sentences. A lot of these have both had their sentences diminished to life or died in jail.
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Related Press author Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, contributed.
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