Alabama is preparing to execute a man who pleaded guilty to killing five people with an ax and a gun during a 2016 drug spree and withdrew his appeals, so his execution will continue.
Derrick Dearman, 36, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday at 6 p.m. at the John Paul II Correctional Facility. William C. Holman in south Alabama.
Dearman pleaded guilty to killing five people during a 2016 rampage that began with a home invasion where his estranged girlfriend was sheltering. Dearman withdrew his appeals this spring so his execution could continue. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to the judge, adding that “it is not fair to the victims and their families to extend the justice they so rightly deserve.”
“I’m willing to give whatever I can to try to repay 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 The Associated Press. “I hope that from this point on, the focus will not be on me, but rather on healing all the people I have hurt.”
Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, died Aug. 20, 2016, at a home near Citronelle, about 53 miles north of Mobile. All the victims were related.
One of the victims, Chelsea Reed, who was Justin Reed’s wife, was pregnant when she was murdered. Her obituary shows that they planned to name the boy Aiden Kaleb. Turner, who was Randall’s wife, shared the house with the Reeds. Brown, who was Randall’s brother, was also there the night of the murder.
According to the judge’s order, the day before the murder, Joseph Turner, the brother of Dearman’s girlfriend, brought her home after Dearman began to abuse her.
Dearman showed up at the house multiple times that evening, asking to see his girlfriend, but was told he couldn’t stay there. According to the judge’s order, he returned home around 3 a.m. while all the victims were sleeping. According to the prosecutor’s office, he made his way through the house, attacking the victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a weapon found in the house. He forced his surviving girlfriend to get in the car with him and drive to Mississippi.
According to a judge’s 2018 order, Dearman surrendered to authorities at his father’s request.
As he was being escorted to prison, Dearman blamed the madness on drugs, telling reporters that he had been high on methamphetamine when he entered the house and that “drugs made me think about things that weren’t actually happening.”
Dearman initially pleaded not guilty, but after his lawyers were released, he changed his plea to guilty. Because this was a capital murder case, Alabama law required the jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the state had proven its case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence.
Dearman has been on death row since 2018.
This is the fifth execution planned in Alabama this year. Two of the state’s executions were carried out using nitrogen. The other two were carried out by lethal injection, which remains the state’s primary method of execution.
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