A firing squad in South Carolina executed Brad Keith Sigmon on Friday for the beating deaths of his ex-girlfriend’s mother and father, marking the first firing squad execution within the state in fashionable historical past and the primary within the U.S. since 2010.
Sigmon was strapped to a specifically made chair and had a hood over his head whereas three volunteer corrections staffers aimed loaded rifles at his coronary heart and every fired off stay rounds, in keeping with a number of information media witnesses who spoke at a information convention afterward. He was pronounced useless at 6:08 p.m., the witnesses mentioned.
“Brad’s dying was horrifying and violent,” Gerald “Bo” King, Sigmon’s lawyer and an execution witness, mentioned in a press release. “It’s unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute considered one of its residents on this bloody spectacle.”
The execution got here shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court docket denied Sigmon’s final remaining attraction, and Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster declined to grant him clemency.
Sigmon, 67, was convicted of the 2001 murders of Gladys and David Larke, who have been crushed to dying with a baseball bat of their small-town residence in northwestern South Carolina. Sigmon, who selected the firing squad over deadly injection or the electrical chair, all the time admitted to killing the Larkes.
“Women and gents of the jury, I’m responsible,” Sigmon instructed jurors at his trial, in keeping with archived protection in the Greenville News, a part of the USA TODAY Community. “I’ve no excuse for what I did. It’s my fault and I’m not making an attempt responsible no one else for it, and I’m sorry.”
Throughout his final phrases Friday, Sigmon listed 4 Bible quotes that he mentioned confirmed that “nowhere does God within the New Testomony give man the authority to kill one other man.”
“I need my closing assertion to be considered one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to assist us finish the dying penalty,” Sigmon mentioned by means of his lawyer. “We at the moment are underneath God’s grace and mercy.”
Sigmon’s ex-girlfriend, Rebecca Armstrong, instructed USA TODAY − in her first interview within the 24 years since her mother and father’ homicide − that Sigmon’s actions ripped her household aside however that she did not agree along with his execution, saying dying must be in God’s fingers.
This is what you’ll want to find out about Sigmon’s execution, together with extra in regards to the uncommon firing squad technique and what else his victims’ household has to say.
How the firing squad execution technique labored
Sigmon was seated and restrained in a steel chair, a hood over his head, within the nook of a room shared by the state’s electrical chair, in keeping with the execution witnesses.
The firing squad group − three voluntary corrections workers − have been standing behind a wall with loaded rifles 15 toes from Sigmon. The wall has a gap for the weapons.
A small goal was positioned over Sigmon’s coronary heart, after which his lawyer learn his final phrases, the warden ordered the execution and the group fired, the witnesses mentioned. The bullets all appeared to hit his chest over his coronary heart, said Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins.
“It was instantaneous,” Collins mentioned. “When the photographs have been fired, it was very loud, it was very jarring … I believe at that time everybody within the room flinched … There was just one place the place I might see any injury in order that makes me suppose they (the bullets) have been all clustered.”
Sigmon selected the firing squad over the electrical chair or deadly injection, along with his lawyer citing “extended and probably torturous deaths” brought on by the state’s current execution drug and the barbarity of an “historical electrical chair, which might burn and prepare dinner him alive.”
“He selected the firing squad realizing that three bullets would shatter his bones and destroy his coronary heart,” King mentioned Friday. “However that was the one alternative he had.”
The state has defended the constitutionality of all its execution strategies in court docket information however the South Carolina Lawyer Basic’s Workplace has not answered a number of requests from USA TODAY for additional remark.
South Carolina firing squad: Is the ‘barbaric’ method making a comeback?
What’s the fashionable historical past of the firing squad within the U.S.?
5 states − South Carolina, Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma and Idaho − have legalized firing squads as an execution technique, most recently Idaho in 2023.
The final inmate within the U.S. to be killed by firing squad earlier than Friday was in 2010, when Utah executed Ronnie Lee Gardner for killing a person throughout a theft. Each different firing squad executions have been in Utah, Gary Mark Gilmore in 1977 and John Albert Taylor in 1996.
Among the many witnesses to Gardner’s execution was an Associated Press reporter who mentioned that 5 volunteer jail workers members fired at him from about 25 toes away with .30-caliber rifles, aiming at a goal pinned over his chest as he sat in a chair. One of many rifles had a clean so not one of the volunteers knew whether or not they fired a deadly bullet, AP reported.
King, Sigmon’s lawyer, mentioned in a press release forward of Friday’s execution that with it, “there isn’t a justice.”
“The whole lot about this barbaric, state-sanctioned atrocity − from the selection to the strategy itself − is abjectly merciless,” he mentioned. “We should always not simply be horrified – we must be livid.”
He had argued that Sigmon was a “tortured” man on the time of the killings due to an undiagnosed psychological sickness that induced “irrational and impulsive episodes,” one thing he tried to deal with with avenue medication.
“And that Brad, who was already scuffling with natural mind injury and grief from his violent childhood, succumbed to a psychotic break,” King mentioned. “The jury that sentenced him had no thought of how severely compromised his psychological well being was, or that he was most likely incompetent even to face trial.”
After the execution, he mentioned that in 23 years on Loss of life Row, Sigmon had not dedicated any violence and “devoted himself day-after-day to prayer and repentance.”
“Brad spent hours kneeling on the ground of his cell so he might write letters to the household and mates for whom he has been a wellspring of affection and help,” King mentioned. “Brad’s love for his brothers (on Loss of life Row), his household, his mates, and the women and men who’ve guarded him is plain. It’s a disgrace that South Carolina has not lived up the instance that Brad has set for all of us throughout his ultimate days.”
Who’s Brad Keith Sigmon? More about the South Carolina man who chose the firing squad
What was Brad Keith Sigmon’s final meal?
Sigmon’s final meal was fried rooster, inexperienced beans, mashed potatoes with gravy, biscuits, cheesecake and candy tea, the corrections division mentioned.
King mentioned that Sigmon had requested three buckets of Unique Recipe Kentucky Fried Hen in order that “he might feed the boys locked up with him” however “that request was denied.”
What was Brad Keith Sigmon convicted of?
On April 27, 2001, Sigmon confirmed up at David and Gladys Larke’s home with a plan that he hatched whereas doing crack cocaine the evening earlier than: He was going to tie them up and kidnap his ex, he instructed police.
As an alternative, he beat the couple to dying with a baseball bat, hitting every of them 9 instances, in keeping with police and a medical expert’s report. Sigmon kidnapped Armstrong in his automobile however she jumped out of the transferring car and was in a position to escape, although Sigmon shot her as soon as within the foot earlier than his gun ran out of bullets, in keeping with court docket information.
Sigmon instructed jurors at his 2002 trial that he had no excuse for what he did, saying that when Armstrong fell out of affection with him, it “set me off,” in keeping with the Greenville Information.
“I used to be obsessed along with her,” he instructed jurors. “Did I like her? Greater than the rest on the planet.”
He continued to inform jurors that the dying penalty was most likely applicable in his case, saying: “I hate what I did.”
“Do I should die? I most likely do,” he mentioned. “I don’t need to die … I simply need to stay for my household’s sake.”
Who have been Gladys and David Larke? The small-town parents of 5 killed by Brad Keith Sigmon
The Larkes’ household says they have been their ‘glue’
Armstrong instructed USA TODAY this week that her mother and father have been easy nation folks who had 5 kids and have been all the time searching for everybody. Her mother, who was 59 when she was killed, liked cooking up a feast for the entire household. Her dad, who was 62, “had a very good coronary heart” who was fast to forgive and ask forgiveness.
“They have been the glue of the household,” Armstrong mentioned, including that they’ve missed the births of a few of their eight grandchildren and 5 great-grand kids since they have been murdered. “He took that away.”
She didn’t attend the execution, saying that she was ultimately in a position to forgive Sigmon by means of God’s love and the counseling of a Christian psychiatrist.
“The Bible tells you, I do know it says ‘an eye fixed for an eye fixed’ and ‘a tooth for a tooth’ however in case you learn on down in there it says, ‘Revenge shouldn’t be mine, says the Lord, revenge is God’s,” she mentioned. “I do not suppose someone being put to dying is gonna convey me closure.”
Rebecca Barbare, who now goes by Rebecca Armstrong, sits and watches as attorneys talks about testimony given by her ex-boyfriend Brad Keith Sigmon on July 18, 2002.
However, she added, she hoped it might convey some aid.
”I miss my momma and daddy,” mentioned Armstrong, who had damaged up with Sigmon earlier than the killings and has by no means given an interview in regards to the crimes till she spoke with USA TODAY this week. “I didn’t get to see them develop outdated. I didn’t get to handle them. My brothers and sisters, we missed that.”
Sigmon was the second inmate executed in South Carolina this yr and the sixth in the U.S.
This text initially appeared on USA TODAY: Firing squad execution: Brad Keith Sigmon executed in South Carolina
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