Alabama to execute man for killing 5 in what he says was a meth-fueled rampage

Alabama prepared Thursday to put to death a man who admitted to killing five people with an ax and gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016 and dropped his appeals to allow his execution to go forward.

Derrick Dearman, 36, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Holman prison in southern Alabama. He pleaded guilty in a rampage that began when he broke into the home where his estranged girlfriend had taken refuge.

Dearman dropped his appeals this year. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it's not fair to the victims or their families to keep prolonging the justice that they so rightly deserve.”

"I am willingly giving all that I can possibly give to try and repay a small portion of my debt to society for all the terrible things I've done," Dearman said in an audio recording sent this week to The Associated Press. “From this point forward, I hope that the focus will not be on me, but rather on the healing of all the people that I have hurt.”

Dearman's scheduled execution is one of two planned Thursday in the U.S. Robert Roberson in Texas is to be the nation's first person put to death for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter.

Dearman's is to be Alabama’s fifth scheduled execution of 2024. Two were carried out by nitrogen gas. The other two were by lethal injection, which remains the state’s primary method.

Killed on Aug. 20, 2016, at the home near Citronelle, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Mobile, were Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22. All the victims were related.

Chelsea Reed, who was married to Justin Reed, was pregnant when she was killed. Turner, who was married to Randall, shared the home with the Reeds. Brown, who was Randall’s brother, was also staying there the night of the murders. Dearman’s girlfriend survived.

The day before the killing, Joseph Turner, the brother of Dearman's girlfriend, brought her to their home after Dearman became abusive toward her, according to a judge's sentencing order.

Dearman had shown up at the home multiple times that night asking to see his girlfriend and was told he could not stay there. Sometime after 3 a.m., he returned when all the victims were asleep, according to a judge's sentencing order. He worked his way through the house, attacking the victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a gun found in the home, prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend to get in the car with him and drive to Mississippi.

Dearman surrendered to authorities at the request of his father, according to a judge’s 2018 sentencing order.

As he was escorted to jail, Dearman blamed the rampage on drugs, telling reporters that he was high on methamphetamine when he went into the home and that the “drugs were making me think things that weren’t really there happening.”

Dearman initially pleaded not guilty but changed his plea to guilty after firing his attorneys. Because it was a capital murder case, Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the state had proven the case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence.

Dearman has been on death row since 2018.