Texas executes inmate for killing girl, grandmother
HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A prisoner on Texas death row for killing a 5-year-old girl and her grandmother in a gang-related shooting at a child’s birthday party in Fort Worth a decade ago was executed Wednesday .
Erick Davila received lethal injection for using a semi-automatic rifle to spray bullets at about 20 people — more than a dozen of them children. Annette Stevenson, 48, and her granddaughter, Queshawn Stevenson, were killed and four others were wounded, including the girl who was celebrating her birthday.
Davila, 31, offered no apologies. As several relatives of his victims entered the witness area, he raised his head off the gurney and acknowledged some that he appeared to know.
“I may have lost the fight, but I’m still a soldier,” he said when asked by the warden if he wanted to make a statement. “Take it as it is. To my supporters and family, y’all hold it down. Ten toes down. That’s all I got to say.”
He was pronounced dead 14 minutes after the lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered. Davila was the ninth prisoner executed in the U.S. this year, five of them in Texas.
Authorities said the April 6, 2008, attack was in apparent retaliation for a previous run-in Davila had with the slain girl’s father.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Davila’s lawyers about 30 minutes before the punishment was carried out.
Davila’s attorneys argued to the Supreme Court that his execution should be stopped because it was improper for his trial judge, Sharen Wilson, now the Tarrant County district attorney, to request an execution date. They also questioned the role of a lawyer working with Wilson on capital appeals cases who had represented Davila in an earlier appeal.