A Texas man who drank the blood of a 12-year-old boy and tried to decapitate him at Satan’s request was executed Wednesday on the nation’s busiest death row.
Texas issued a lethal injection into the arms of Pablo Vasquez, 38, at the state prison in Huntsville Wednesday evening.
According to reporters who witnessed the execution in Texas, Vasquez looked at four of his victim’s relatives and told them in his final statement, “this is the only way that I can be forgiven. You got your justice right here.”
After the deadly pentobarbital began entering his body, Vasquez said he was feeling dizzy and “see you on the other side.”
He was pronounced dead at 7:35 p.m. EDT.
Vasquez told police he was drunk and high when voices told him to murder David Cardenas in 1998. Vasquez beat the seventh-grader with a pipe, then slit his throat, licking the boy’s dripping blood off his face as he carried the body.
Wednesday’s execution was the sixth in Texas this year; the rest of the nation combined has executed five murderers in these first three months of 2016.
Vasquez’s last legal hope was snuffed out Wednesday afternoon by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to issue a stay so that courts could hear an appeal claiming that some potential jurors were improperly excused because they opposed the death penalty.
The state’s lawyers, in briefs to the court, called the claim “nothing more than a meritless attempt to postpone his execution,” and the justices apparently agreed.
Joseph Orendain, the lead trial prosecutor, told the Associated Press last week that the murder was “really horrendous.”
Vasquez, Cardenas and Andres Rafael Chapa, a 15-year-old cousin of the killer and friend of the victim, had left a party in Donna, in the Rio Grande Valley, when Vasquez began hearing the voices, he told detectives in a statement. to police.
“Something just told me to drink,” Vasquez said. “You drink what?” a detective asked. “His blood,” Vasquez replied.
Cardenas’s body was found nearly decapitated and missing some limbs under some discarded metal scraps.
“The devil was telling me to take (the head) away from him,” Vasquez said, adding that “it couldn’t come off.”
Chapa, who helped dispose of the body, was convicted as an accomplice and is serving a 35-year sentence. Three other relatives of the two killers were convicted of cover-up related offenses that drew probationary sentences and one was deported to Guatemala.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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