Forty-one-year-old Kevin Varga (left) was given lethal injection Wednesday evening. His clemency request had been rejected by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and his court appeals were exhausted.
Kevin Varga was upbeat and smiling as the lethal drugs were delivered into his arms.
"I know I took someone very precious to you," he told the parents and friends of David Logie as they watched through a window. "I wish what was torn from you was not."
He said he loved them, asked them for forgiveness but said he didn't require it "because God has forgiven me."
"I hope you find peace," he said.
He turned his head toward his mother, who watched through a window in an adjacent room, and told her he would "go to sleep and wake up with Jesus."
"This is the only way God could save me, Mom," he said.
After thanking the warden, a chaplain and God, he uttered a loud sigh as the drugs began taking effect.
"Oooh! Thank you Jesus," he said. "I'm going, Mom."
He was pronounced dead 7 minutes later, at 6:19 p.m.
Varga's lethal injection was carried out after his court appeals were exhausted and a clemency request rejected.
"We took our best shot," said his lawyer, Robin Norris.
Billy Galloway, 41, Varga's former cellmate in South Dakota and his partner in Logie's 1998 slaying was set to die Thursday in the same chamber. Like Varga, Galloway's appeals were exhausted.
Weeks after Varga and cellmate Billy Galloway were paroled in 1998 from a South Dakota prison, they and two girlfriends drove south from Sioux Falls. Over the next week, the group robbed and killed a man in Wichita, Kan., then did the same to 37-year-old Major David Logie of Fayetteville, N.C. Logie was beaten to death behind a building in Greenville, about 50 miles east of Dallas.
Galloway is set to die Thursday for the same crime.
Varga becomes the 8th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Texas and the 455th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1082. Varga becomes the 216th condemned inmate to be put to death in Texas since Rick Perry became governor in 2001.
Varga becomes the 16th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1204th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.
Source: AP, May 12, 2010
Kevin Varga's "Death Watch Journal" may be read on Thomas Whitaker's website "Minutes Before Six". Thomas Whitaker is currently incarcerated on Death Row in the state of Texas.
No comments:
Post a Comment