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Texas loss of life row inmate Ramiro Gonzales was executed by deadly injection Wednesday, regardless of quite a few appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court docket, for the 2001 homicide and rape of a teenage girl.
Gonzales was pronounced lifeless at 6:50 p.m. following a chemical injection on the state penitentiary in Huntsville. His execution comes after he admitted to fatally taking pictures 18-year-old Bridget Townsend, a southwest Texas girl whose stays had been discovered almost two years after she vanished in 2001.
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Ramiro Gonzales, 41, was pronounced lifeless at 6:50 p.m. CDT following a chemical injection on the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the January 2001 killing of Bridget Townsend. (Texas Division of Legal Justice through AP)
In an announcement launched by the Texas Division of Legal Justice, Gonzales repeatedly apologized to the sufferer’s household from the execution chamber.
“I can’t put into phrases the ache I’ve induced y’all, the harm, what I took away that I can’t give again. I hope this apology is sufficient,” he mentioned.
“I by no means stopped praying that you’d forgive me and that in the future I might have this chance to apologize. I owe all of you my life and I hope in the future you’ll forgive me,” he added.
The united statesflag and the Texas State flag fly over the Texas State Capitol (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)
Townsend, who would have turned 41 this 12 months, was kidnapped from her house in January 2001 and sexually assaulted by Gonzales earlier than he murdered her.
Her physique wasn’t discovered till October 2002, when Gonzales led authorities to her stays in southwest Texas after he had acquired two life sentences for kidnapping and raping one other girl.
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“We now have lastly witnessed justice being served,” Townsend’s brother, David, mentioned after watching the execution. “Today marks the top of an extended and painful journey for our household. For over 20 years, we now have endured unimaginable ache and heartache.”
David mentioned Gonzales’ loss of life “gives us a bit of little bit of peace. I do wish to say we aren’t joyous, we aren’t completely satisfied. It is a very, very unhappy day for everybody all the best way round.”
FILE – The execution chamber on the Idaho Most Safety Establishment is proven as Safety Establishment Warden Randy Blades look on in Boise, Idaho on Oct. 20, 2011. (AP Photograph/Jessie L. Bonner, File)
Gonzales’ attorneys, Thea Posel and Raoul Schonemann, beforehand made requests asking the board to vary his loss of life sentence to a lesser penalty.
“He has earnestly devoted himself to self-improvement, contemplation, and prayer, and has grown right into a mature, peaceable, type, loving, and deeply non secular grownup. He acknowledges his accountability for his crimes and has sought to atone for them and to hunt redemption via his actions,” Gonzales’ attorneys wrote in a request to the U.S. Supreme Court docket on Monday.
Earlier this month, a bunch of 11 evangelical leaders from Texas and across the nation requested the parole board and Gov. Greg Abbott to halt the execution and grant clemency.
On Monday, the parole board voted 7-0 in opposition to commuting Gonzales’ loss of life sentence to a lesser penalty. Members additionally rejected granting him a six-month reprieve.
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Gonzales’ execution was the second this 12 months in Texas and the eighth within the U.S.
On Thursday, Oklahoma is scheduled to execute Richard Rojem for the 1984 abduction, rape and killing of a 7-year-old woman.
The Related Press contributed to this report.
Sarah Rumpf-Whitten is a breaking information author for Fox Information Digital and Fox Enterprise.
She is a local of Massachusetts and relies in Orlando, Florida.
Story ideas and concepts will be despatched to sarah.rumpf@fox.com and on X: @s_rumpfwhitten.
