An evil death row murderer spewed seven disgusting last words before being executed by a controversial gassing method yesterday evening in a shocking final act.
Convicted for the heinous 1994 murder of hitchhiker Vickie Deblieux, Carey Dale Grayson became the third individual to be put to death using nitrogen gas on Thursday, the Mirror reports.
The 37-year-old Vickie was picked up by four people who took her to an isolated woodland spot after she was thumbing a ride from Tennessee to her mum’s place in Louisiana. There, they brutally assaulted her, beating her senseless before tossing her off a cliff.
Grayson was executed at the state penitentiary in Atmore, a small town near the Florida border, roughly 50 miles north of Pensacola. The curtain to the execution chamber was drawn back at about 6.06pm local time on Thursday.
Asked is he had any last words after the prison governor read out the death warrant, Grayson uttered into the microphone: “For you, you need to f*** off.”
The warden swiftly withdrew the mic after Grayson hurled the profanity and then flipped both his middle fingers at the warden. He was then forced to suffocate on a surge of atmospheric gas delivered through a mask while strapped down on a gurney, as reported by Mirror US. Grayson was declared dead at 6.33pm.
Nitrogen gas started being used in Alabama earlier this year and involves placing a respirator gas mask over the person’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing death by lack of oxygen. The US Supreme Court rejected Grayson’s request for stay after his lawyers argued that the method needed more scrutiny before being used again.
The mutilated body of Deblieux was discovered at the bottom of a bluff 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 lift.
The teens took her to a wooded area and attacked and beat her before throwing her off a cliff and later returning to mutilate her body, stabbing her 180 times, prosecutors said. The victim’s face was so fractured that she was identified by an earlier X-ray of her spine. Investigators said the teens were identified as suspects after one of them showed a friend one of Vickie Deblieux’s severed fingers and boasted about the killing, a medical examiner testified
Governor Kay Ivey issued a statement minutes after Thursday’s execution saying she was praying for the murder victim’s loved ones to find closure and healing still decades after the crime.
“Some thirty years ago, Vicki DeBlieux’s journey to her mother’s house and ultimately, her life, were horrifically cut short because of Carey Grayson and three other men. She sensed something was wrong, attempted to escape, but instead, was brutally tortured and murdered,” Kay said in the statement.
Grayson’s crimes “were heinous, unimaginable, without an ounce of regard for human life and just unexplainably mean. An execution by nitrogen hypoxia (bears) no comparison to the death and dismemberment Ms. DeBlieux experienced,” she added.
As he was 19, Grayson was the only one of the four teens who faced a death sentence since the other teens were under 18 at the time of the killing.
Two of the teens were initially sentenced to death but those sentences were set aside when the Supreme Court banned the execution of offenders who were younger than 18 at the time of their crimes. Another teen involved in Deblieux’s killing was sentenced to life in prison.
Grayson’s final appeals centred on a need for increased scrutiny of the nitrogen gas approach. His lawyers contended that the individual suffers “conscious suffocation” and that the first two nitrogen executions did not result in swift unconsciousness and death, as the state claimed.
Lawyers for Alabama’s attorney general requested the justices to allow the execution to proceed, citing a lower court’s finding that Grayson’s claims were speculative.
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