A South Carolina man who killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat was on Friday executed by firing squad, the first US prisoner in 15 years to die by the method, which he saw as preferable to the electric chair or lethal injection.
Three volunteer prison employees used rifles to carry out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced dead at 6:08pm.
Sigmon killed David and Gladys Larke in their Greenville County home in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.
Photo: Reuters
Sigmon’s lawyers said he chose the firing squad because the electric chair would “cook him alive,” and he feared that a lethal injection of pentobarbital into his veins would send a rush of fluid and blood into his lungs and drown him.
The details of South Carolina’s lethal injection method are kept secret, and Sigmon unsuccessfully asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to pause his execution because of that.
On Friday, Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white target with a red bullseye over his chest. The armed prison employees stood 4.6m from where he sat in the state’s death chamber. The volunteers all fired at the same time through openings in a wall. They were not visible to about a dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass.
Witnesses included three family members of the Larkes, Sigmon’s attorney and spiritual adviser, a representative from the prosecuting solicitor’s office, a sheriff’s investigator and three members of the news media.
Sigmon’s lawyer, Gerald “Bo” King, read a closing statement that he said was “one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty.”
Since 1977 only three other prisoners in the US have been executed by firing squad. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Another Utah man, Ralph Menzies, could be next; he is awaiting the result of a hearing in which his lawyers argued that his dementia makes him unfit for execution.
“Brad’s death was horrifying and violent,” King said in a statement. “It is unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle.”
Supporters and lawyers for Sigmon asked South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in prison, but McMaster denied the clemency plea. No governor has ever commuted a death sentence in the state, where 46 other prisoners have been executed since the death penalty resumed in the US in 1976. Seven have died in the electric chair and 39 by lethal injection.
Additional reporting by AFP
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