Derrick Sonnier was executed by the State of Texas for the murders of a mother and her son
According to court documents Derrick Sonnier would break into the apartment of Melody Flowers who would be sexually assaulted and murdered. Her two year old son Patrick Flowers would also be killed
Derrick Sonnier would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Derrick Sonnier would be executed by lethal injection on July 23 2008
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When Was Derrick Sonnier Executed
Derrick Sonnier was executed on July 23 2008
Derrick Sonnier Case
Seventeen years after a suburban Houston woman and her 2-year-old son were attacked and killed at their apartment, the man convicted of their slayings was put to death. Derrick Sonnier, 40, said nothing in the seconds before his lethal injection Wednesday evening, shaking his head once from side to side when asked by a warden if he had any final statement. He nodded to a friend and cousin who watched through a window but never acknowledged five relatives of his victims watching through an adjacent window. Eight minutes later, he was pronounced dead.
“Justice can never be done,” Tameka Traylor, whose mother, Melody Flowers, 27, and brother, Patrick, 2, were killed in 1991. “After 17 years, it can never be done. “What hurts the most is not about justice. It’s not about him dying. That doesn’t change anything. It’s the many nights I had to stay up and cry and want her as a child… Taking his life, that doesn’t give any kind of comfort, no type of comfort for what he took from us.”
Traylor, who watched Sonnier die, was 8 when the murders occurred. “This world is a mean place,” she said. “A lot of people are full of so much hate. The bad thing is our family isn’t going to be the last family to have to go through this.” Sonnier made a similar trip to the death house seven weeks ago but was spared when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stopped his scheduled punishment about 90 minutes before he could have been executed. There was no reprieve this time.
Lawyers then — on June 3 — raised questions about the legality of Texas’ lethal injection procedures. That appeal, however, subsequently was rejected and no new legal efforts were attempted to save him from becoming the third Texas inmate to die this year. Executions were on hold in Texas and around the country for more than seven months until the U.S. Supreme Court in April rejected an appeal from two Kentucky prisoners who argued lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel. Texas resumed carrying out executions last month.
Sonnier had maintained his innocence, but a Harris County jury was convinced evidence showed he was responsible for the slayings. Flowers was raped, stabbed, strangled and beaten with a hammer until its handle broke. Her child was stabbed eight times. Her body was dumped into a bathtub filled with water and the child’s body was tossed on top of her.
Sonnier lived two doors away in the same apartment complex in Humble, just northeast of Houston. Neighbors called police after another of Flowers’ children, a 1-year-old girl with blood on her clothes, was crying at the door of the apartment. When neighbors looked through an open patio door, they saw a pool of blood on a bed.
Police knocking on doors in the area found Sonnier with his hand wrapped in a bloody towel. “I didn’t hurt her,” he told officers. But inside his place they found other bloodstained towels and a blouse identified as belonging to Flowers. DNA evidence also tied him to the slayings.
Testimony showed the Sulphur, La., native grew up in Houston, had been obsessed with Flowers and had stalked her. Witnesses testified how they repeatedly chased him away from her place and that he was known to peek through her windows and even hide inside her apartment.
Sonnier initially was scheduled to die in February. That execution date, however, was withdrawn by prosecutors pending the outcome of the Kentucky case before the Supreme Court. Then on June 3, he got within about 90 minutes of punishment before Texas’ highest criminal appeals court saved him.
Sonnier declined to speak with reporters in the weeks leading up to his execution. At least 15 other condemned prisoners have execution dates in the nation’s most active death penalty state, including six in August.
Next week, condemned inmate Larry Davis, 40, is set to die for the gang initiation robbery-slaying of Michael Barrow, 26, at Barrow’s home in Amarillo 13 years ago.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5904665.html
