Alabama to execute man for 2016 quintuple murder

Alabama is preparing to execute a man who admitted killing five people with an ax and a gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016 and withdrew his appeal so his execution would go ahead.

Derrick Dearman, 36, will be executed by lethal injection Thursday at 6 p.m. at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in south Alabama.

Dearman pleaded guilty to killing five people in a 2016 rampage that began when he broke into the home where his estranged girlfriend had taken refuge. Dearman dropped his appeal this spring so his execution could go ahead. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it is not fair to the victims or their families to continue to prolong the justice they so rightly deserve.”

“I willingly give whatever I can give to try to repay a small part of my debt to society for all the terrible things I’ve done,” Dearman said in an audio recording provided to The Associated Press this week sent. “From this moment on, I hope the focus will not be on me, but rather on healing all the people I have hurt.”

Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Caleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, were killed on Aug. 20, 2016, at the home near Citronelle, about 33 miles (53 kilometers) north of Mobile. All victims were related.

One of the victims, Chelsea Reed, married to Justin Reed, was pregnant when she was killed. According to her obituary, they planned to name the boy Aiden Kaleb. Turner, who was married to Randall, shared the house with the Reeds. Brown, Randall’s brother, was also staying there the night of the murders.

The day before the murder, Joseph Turner, the brother of Dearman’s girlfriend, brought her to their home after Dearman assaulted her, according to the judge’s ruling.

Dearman had shown up at the house several times that evening to see his girlfriend and was told he could not stay there. Sometime after 3 a.m., he returned to the house when all the victims were asleep, according to the judge’s ruling. He forced his way through the house, attacking the victims with an ax recovered from the yard and then with a gun found in the home, prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend, who survived, to get into his car and drive to Mississippi.

Dearman surrendered to authorities at his father’s request, according to a 2018 judge’s ruling.

As he was escorted to jail, Dearman blamed drugs and told reporters that this was the case high on methamphetamine when he entered the house and the “drugs made me think things that weren’t really there were happening.”

Dearman initially pleaded not guilty, but changed his plea to guilty after dismissing his attorneys. Because it was a murder case, Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the state had proven the case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence.

Dearman has been on death row since 2018.

This is Alabama’s fifth scheduled execution of the year. Two of the state’s executions were carried out by nitrogen gas. The other two were executed by lethal injection, which remains the state’s primary method of execution.