HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Texas executed John Allen Rubio on Thursday evening for stabbing and beheading three young children in a Brownsville apartment in 2003, killings that shook the border city so deeply that the building was later demolished and the lot turned into a park and community garden.
Rubio, 46, was pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. after receiving a lethal injection at the state prison in Huntsville, according to The Associated Press.
The children were Julissa Quesada, 3; John E. Rubio, 14 months; and Mary Jane Rubio, 2 months. They were killed on March 11, 2003, in a squalid, windowless apartment in Brownsville, on the U.S. border with Mexico.
Rubio told police the children were possessed. Officers who arrested him that day have said he told them he knew he had done something bad, but that he would rather his children be dead than possessed.
His common-law wife, Angela Camacho, the children’s mother, helped hold down one of the children, prosecutors said. She pleaded guilty and is serving three life sentences.
Two trials and a reversal
A jury convicted Rubio of capital murder in 2003. That conviction was thrown out in 2007, after an appeals court found that statements by Camacho had been wrongly admitted at his first trial. He was tried again in 2010. His lawyers argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity. A second jury convicted him anyway, and he was sentenced to death again.
The legal fight ran on for years. Judges repeatedly found Rubio competent to be executed, most recently on Oct. 7, when Cameron County District Judge Noe Gonzalez ruled that he understood he would be executed and why. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed another appeal on Nov. 6, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously against clemency on Nov. 10.
Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz has called the murders one of the most brutal crimes in the county’s history.
Oklahoma carries out the day’s first execution
Hours before Rubio died, Oklahoma executed James Pavatt at the state penitentiary in McAlester. Pavatt was pronounced dead at 10:12 a.m., and the injection took 11 minutes, according to The Oklahoman. He said nothing while strapped to the gurney.
Pavatt, a former Sunday school teacher and Air Force master sergeant, was convicted of the 2001 shotgun killing of Rob Andrew, his lover’s husband, in Oklahoma City. Prosecutors said Pavatt and Andrew’s wife, Brenda, plotted the killing to collect an $800,000 life insurance policy. Pavatt maintained his innocence. The U.S. Supreme Court turned down his request for a stay about an hour before the execution.
His was the 21st execution in Oklahoma since the state resumed executions five years ago after a long hiatus, The Oklahoman reported. Together, the two executions were the 36th and 37th carried out in the United States this year, according to a count by USA Today.