The state of Texas, in the southern United States, executed this Thursday Brent Brewer, who was sentenced to death for murdering a man in 1990 during a robbery from which he obtained $140. Brewer, a 53-year-old white man, died at 6:39 p.m. local time (00:39 Friday GMT) after receiving a lethal injection at the Huntsville prison, near Houston, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
On April 26, 1990, Brewer, then 19 years old, and his girlfriend, Krystie Lynn Nystrom, approached a flooring manufacturing company in Amarillo, Texas, owned by the man who was to be their victim. Robert Laminack, who was 66 years old.
As demonstrated at trial, Brewer and Nystrom asked Laminack if he could take them with his vehicle to a charity furniture business called the Salvation Army, to which the man agreed. During the ride, Brewer fatally stabbed Laminack and stole the $140 he had in his wallet.
After the events, the two individuals escaped to Red Oak, a town near Dallas, more than 600 kilometers from Amarillo and were arrested on May 8 of that same year. Brewer was sentenced to death a year later, while Nystrom is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison.
In a statement issued this Thursday after the Supreme Court rejected his last appeals, the inmate's lawyer, Shawn Nolan, assured that "the Brent that Texas wanted to execute no longer exists. The Brent that they kill tonight is a man (...) who spent the vast majority of his time repenting."
This was the seventh execution of the year in Texas and the 21st in the entire country. Since the Supreme Court reintroduced the death penalty in 1976, 1,579 people have been executed in the United States, 585 of them in Texas.
