Texas executes John Allen Rubio for 2003 murders of three children after Oklahoma puts man to death
John Allen Rubio, 46, was executed by lethal injection of pentobarbital at the state prison in Huntsville, Texas, and pronounced dead at 6.47 pm on Thursday, 21 minutes after the dose began. A physician said he took three breaths, sounded as if he were snoring, then stopped moving. He had been convicted of fatally stabbing and beheading three young children in a squalid, windowless Brownsville apartment in 2003: three-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E Rubio and two-month-old Mary Jane Rubio. He was not the biological father of the two older children but raised them as his own. Common-law wife Angela Camacho is serving life after pleading guilty to her role; the building was later demolished and the site made a park and community garden.
After a spiritual adviser prayed, Rubio thanked friends, family and prison staff, said he was not the same person, expressed love for Camacho, apologised to her family, and said he was going to be with his children and to heaven. An appeals court had overturned his first capital conviction because Camacho’s statements were improperly admitted; at a second trial he again pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and was again sentenced to death. He had claimed the children were possessed and that he was the “chosen one”; defense experts diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, which prosecution experts rejected, and described a childhood of violence, drug use and prostitution.
Hours earlier, Oklahoma executed 73-year-old James Pavatt for the 2001 shooting of Rob Andrew, 39, as Andrew arrived to pick up his two young children before Thanksgiving. Pavatt had been having an affair with Andrew’s wife, Brenda Andrew, who is the only woman on Oklahoma’s death row; they fled to Mexico and were arrested three months later. Pavatt declined last words. Thursday’s deaths were the 36th and 37th US executions this year, with the country on track to exceed 40 for a second year, a pace driven by Florida. Attention has also focused on Tennessee’s failed September execution of Christa Pike, California governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to commute hundreds of death sentences before January, and former Oklahoma death-row inmate Richard Glossip’s guilty plea to a lesser accessory charge in a 1997 murder, with sentencing due in December.
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