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Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was executed at William C. Holman Correctional Institution in south Alabama.
He was one of four teenagers convicted of killing Vickie DeBlieux, 37, as she hitchhiked across the state on her way to her mother’s home in Louisiana. The woman was attacked, beaten and thrown from the cliff.
Alabama began using nitrogen to carry out some executions earlier this year. The method involves placing a respirator gas mask over the face to replace the breathing air with pure nitrogen, causing death from lack of oxygen.
Alabama Commissioner of Corrections John Q. Hamm said the nitrogen flowed for 15 minutes, and an electrocardiogram showed Grayson no longer had a heartbeat about 10 minutes after the gas started flowing.
Like the other two previously executed by nitrogen, Grayson occasionally shook before taking occasional gasps.
The victim’s daughter told reporters afterward that her mother’s future was stolen. But she also spoke out against the decision to execute Grayson and the “killing of prisoners under the guise of justice”.
The curtains on the execution room were opened shortly after 6 p.m. Strapped to a gurney with a blue-rimmed gas mask over his face, Grayson shot back an obscenity when asked by the warden if he had any closing words.
Prison officials turned off the microphone.
Grayson appeared to be speaking toward the witness room where government officials were present, but his words could not be heard. He raised both middle fingers at the start of the execution.
The man who boasted that he was the ‘Hitler of Africa’
It was not clear when the gas started flowing. Grayson shook his head, shook himself, and pulled on the stroller belt. He clenched his fist and seemed to be struggling to try to gesture again. His legs, wrapped in sheets, lifted off the gurney into the air at 6:14 p.m.
At times he breathed in more than a dozen gasps for several minutes. He appeared to stop breathing at 18:21 and then the curtains in the viewing room were closed at 18:27.
Grayson was pronounced dead at 6:33 p.m
DeBlieux’s mutilated body was found at the bottom of a cliff near Odenville, Alabama, on February 26, 1994. She was hitchhiking from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to her mother’s home in West Monroe, Louisiana, when four teenagers offered her a ride.
Prosecutors said the teenagers took her to the woods and attacked and beat her. They came back to mutilate her body.
A pathologist testified that her face was so broken that she was identified by an earlier X-ray of her spine. Investigators said the teenagers were identified as suspects after one of them showed a friend one of DeBlieux’s severed fingers and bragged about the murder.
DeBlieux’s daughter, Jodi Haley, spoke to reporters in the media center on the prison grounds after the execution. Haley was 12 years old when her mother was killed. She said that they stole the mother’s life and future.
“She was unique. She was spontaneous. She was wild. She was funny. She was beautiful to begin with,” Haley said of her mother.
She said Grayson was abused in every possible way in his youth, but “society failed this man when he was a child, and my family suffered because of it.”
“Killings of prisoners under the guise of justice must stop,” she said, adding that “no one should have the right to take away someone’s opportunities, days and life.”
Gov. Kay Ivey said afterward that she is praying for the victims’ loved ones to find closure and healing.
Some thirty years ago, Vicki DeBlieux’s journey to her mother’s house, and ultimately her life, were cut short horribly by Carey Grayson and three other men, Ivey said in a statement.
“She sensed something was wrong, tried to escape but was brutally tortured and killed instead.”
Grayson’s crimes “were heinous, unimaginable, without any regard for human life and simply inexplicably evil. The execution by nitrogen hypoxia (of the bear) does not compare to the death and dismemberment that Ms. DeBlieux experienced,” she added.
Grayson was the only one of the four teenagers to face the death penalty since the other teens were under 18 at the time of the murder. Grayson was 19 years old.
The execution was carried out hours after the US Supreme Court rejected Grayson’s request for a stay. His final appeals centered on a call for further testing of the nitrogen gas method.
His lawyers have argued that the execution method causes “conscious asphyxiation” and that the first two nitrogen executions did not result in rapid loss of consciousness and death as the state had promised.
Hamm said he thought some of Grayson’s initial movements were “all visible,” but argued that the rest of the movements Grayson and the other two performed on nitrogen were expected involuntary movements, including breathing at the end.
No state except Alabama has used nitrogen hypoxia to carry out the death penalty. In 2018, Alabama became the third state—along with Oklahoma and Mississippi—to authorize the use of nitrogen to execute prisoners.
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