A South Carolina man convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat was put to death by firing squad on Friday in the first such execution in the United States in 15 years.
Brad Sigmon, 67, was executed by a three-person firing squad at the Broad River Correctional Institution in the state capital Columbia, South Carolina prison spokesperson Chrysti Shain said.
According to Shain, Sigmon was declared dead by a doctor at 6:08 p.m. (2308 GMT), after the fatal rounds were fired at 6:05 p.m. (2305 GMT).
Sigmon was tied into a chair in the death chamber, wearing a black jumpsuit, and had a little red bullseye made of paper or fabric over his heart, according to journalists who watched the execution via bulletproof glass.
Gerald “Bo” King, his lawyer, read aloud Sigmon’s farewell speech, in which he expressed his desire to convey “love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty.”
A hood was then placed over Sigmon’s head and about two minutes later shots were fired by the firing squad made up of volunteers from the South Carolina Department of Corrections through a slit in a wall about 15 feet (five meters away).
Anna Dobbins of WYFF News 4 TV station said the shots “were all fired at once” like it was “just one sound.”
“His arms flexed,” Dobbins said. “There was something in his midsection that moved — I’m not necessarily going to call them breaths, I don’t really know — but there was some movement that went on there for two or three seconds.”
“It was very fast,” she said. “I did see a splash of blood when the bullets entered his body. It was not a huge amount, but there was a splash.”
Sigmon, who confessed to the 2001 murders of David and Gladys Larke and admitted his guilt at trial, had asked the Supreme Court for a last-minute stay of execution but it was denied.
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster also rejected his appeal for clemency.
