13 Nov Texas Executes John Allen Rubio for 2003 Killings of Three Children in Brownsville

Texas executed John Allen Rubio, 46, by lethal injection Thursday evening at the state prison in Huntsville for the 2003 killings of three young children in Brownsville, according to the Brownsville Herald. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said he died at 6:47 p.m.

Rubio and Angela Camacho, who lived with him as his common-law wife, were accused in the deaths of Julissa, 3, John, 1, and Mary Jane, an infant, who lived with the couple in a Brownsville apartment. Camacho received three life terms for her part in the case. A Cameron County judge ruled Rubio mentally fit for execution Oct. 7.

The Texas Tribune reported that Rubio’s first conviction was thrown out in 2007, when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that prosecutors leaned wrongly on statements Camacho had given outside court before she invoked the Fifth Amendment. A second jury returned a guilty verdict in 2010 following his not-guilty-by-insanity plea. The appeals court turned down his last appeal Nov. 5, and a lawsuit he joined in August seeking to block the state’s use of pentobarbital was unsuccessful. He was the eighth person Texas has executed this year, and Reinaldo Dennes is scheduled for execution Nov. 19, according to the Tribune.

Witnesses in the chamber saw Rubio strapped to a gurney and barely moving after the pentobarbital was administered. Twenty-one minutes passed before he died, and the only sound he made was a faint snoring that faded. The sheet covering his torso was drawn over his face afterward.

Asked for last words, Rubio thanked friends, family and prison staff and spoke about the faith he found during his time on death row. “I know I don’t deserve to be loved by anybody, but you have shown me the love of God through all of it,” he said. He apologized to the families, including his wife’s. “I’m sorry that this had to happen, it didn’t have to happen, but it did,” Rubio said, adding that he still loves Camacho.

Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz, who was among the witnesses, said attention should go to the children. “Forget John Allen Rubio, please,” he said. “Justice has been done. I want to talk about the children. Memorialize them.”

Agnes Steenssens, a prisoner-rights activist from Belgium who has corresponded with condemned prisoners for years, traveled to Texas at Rubio’s request to see him the day he died. She opposes capital punishment. Steenssens said Rubio told her, “My biggest punishment is what I’ve done. I know what I’ve done and I need to be punished, but I’m not a monster.”

ValleyCentral reported that Saenz also spoke by phone to a vigil at Tres Angeles Park in Brownsville after the execution. “It’s done,” he told the crowd, which applauded. A relative of the children, an aunt, lifted her arm and said in Spanish, “Thank you, God. I love you Julissa.”