Texas ready to execute member of ‘Texas 7’

KENEDY, Texas: Texas scheduled yesterday to execute a member of the “Texas 7”, a group of inmates who killed a police officer at a sporting goods store on Christmas Eve in 2000 after they escaped a maximum security prison days earlier.

Joseph Garcia, 47, is scheduled to die by lethal injection in the state’s death chamber in Huntsville at 6 pm. Garcia was serving a 50-year sentence for murder when he and six other inmates broke out of maximum security prison in Kenedy, Texas, on Dec. 13, 2000, court documents showed.

Eleven days later, on Christmas Eve, Garcia and the other escapees robbed a sporting goods store in Irving. Police officer Aubrey Hawkins, 31, was shot and killed by the group as the men fled, according to court filings.

They were apprehended about a month later at a Colorado RV park where one of the escapees committed suicide.

Garcia was sentenced to die in 2013 after he was convicted of capital murder of a police officer.

Despite not shooting Hawkins, he was convicted of murder under the state’s law of parties, a statue that holds a person criminally responsible if they act as an accomplice.

Garcia’s attorneys have for years unsuccessfully challenged the merits of the case and conviction in court, including filing an appeal to the US Supreme Court last week.