Jessy San Miguel was executed by the State of Texas for four murders
According to court documents Jessy San Miguel and a teenage accomplice would wait for a Taco Bell to close and then would force their way into the restaurant when an employee would take out the trash
During the armed robbery Jessy San Miguel would murder Michael Phelan, Son Nguyen, Frank Fraga and Theresa Fraga who was pregnant
Jessy San Miguel would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Jessy San Miguel would be executed by lethal injection on June 29 2000
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When Was Jessy San Miguel Executed
Jessy San Miguel was executed on June 29 2000
Jessy San Miguel Case
Convicted killer Jessy Carlos San Miguel, a 10th grade dropout with a history of mayhem, was executed Thursday evening for leaving four people dead after robbing a Dallas-area Taco Bell nine years ago. In a brief final statement, San Miguel urged friends and relatives watching him die to be strong and said he loved them. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Ironic, isn’t it?” he noted while his arms were outstretched on the death chamber gurney. “I’m a cross. Y’all take care of each other. I’ll be watching over you.” Asked by the warden if that was all he had to say, San Miguel replied, “Yeah.”
As the drugs began taking effect, he sputtered and gasped. He was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m., eight minutes after the lethal doses began. Six members of his victims’ families watched him die, but he never acknowledged their presence.
“It was very disappointing,” Mary Gomez, whose daughter and nephew were killed at the restaurant, said after watching San Miguel die. “He at least could have said: ‘I’m sorry.'” San Miguel’s lethal injection, the fifth of the month in Texas and the 24th this year, attracted little of the attention of a week ago when hundreds of demonstrators and media descended on Huntsville for the execution of Gary Graham. Less than two dozen death penalty opponents showed up outside the prison. There was only one television crew.
Graham’s claims that he was innocent and was tried unfairly put under intense national scrutiny the support of the death penalty by Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Unlike Graham, who was belligerent with officers throughout his final hours, San Miguel was reported docile as his punishment time approached and the U.S. Supreme Court was delivered 11th-hour appeals. He selected an extensive final meal that included pizza, 10 quesadillas, five strips of grilled beef, five strips of stir-fried beef, ice cream, double fudge chocolate cake, broccoli, grapes and tea.
The carnage after San Miguel and an accomplice left the suburban Irving Taco Bell before dawn Jan. 26, 1991 was so overwhelming, the police officer who discovered the four bodies in the walk-in freezer fainted. And there was so much blood on the floor, authorities had to use a squeegee to locate the spent cartridges from the murder weapon. “It was just a cold-blooded, methodical execution of four people,” Toby Shook, an assistant district attorney in Dallas County who prosecuted the case, said. San Miguel and his attorneys contended he unfairly was convicted because of racial stereotyping, that prosecutors and his own court-appointed defense attorney cited Mexican-American culture in their arguments to the jury that sentenced him to death. “What troubles me is Gov. Bush continually tells the media and the newspapers that he has always been fair, that they have ways in the system to be ensured everybody has a fair trial, but all that is not true,” San Miguel said in a death row interview Wednesday.
San Miguel was convicted and condemned for fatally shooting Michael Phelan, 28, the assistant manager at the restaurant. The other victims included restaurant employees Theresa Fraga, 16, of Irving, and her cousin, Frank Fraga, 23, of Dallas; and a friend of Ms. Fraga’s, Son Truong Nguyen, 35, of Mesquite. Theresa Fraga was six months pregnant. Nguyen had been wounded while serving in the Vietnamese army, then fled the war-torn country for what he thought would be a life of safety in the United States. Phelan and Nguyen were shot once in the head. The Fraga cousins were shot twice in the head.
San Miguel and a companion, Jerome Mike Green, were pulled over by Irving police who suspected them of drunken driving. When the officers found a Taco Bell bag filled with $1,390, two ski masks, a 9 mm pistol and two pairs of gloves, they began checking the chain’s restaurants in the area for a robbery. The slaughter was discovered a few blocks away. Green had worked part-time at the restaurant. San Miguel, records showed, had applied for a job there but was not hired. At the time, the 19-year-old San Miguel was free on bonds totaling $45,000 on four charges of weapons violations and burglaries. He confessed to police that he robbed the store and shot the victims. He did not testify at his trial. Green later pleaded guilty and received a 50-year prison term.
Evidence showed the pair planned the robbery for a few weeks and waited outside the locked place during the overnight hours until employees opened the door to take out the trash. Nguyen was waiting outside to pick up Theresa Fraga from work when he was herded into the cooler with the Fraga cousins while San Miguel waited with Phelan for a time-lock safe to open. According to Shook, Jessy San Miguel said in his confession he left the restaurant and the hostages in the cooler but went back inside “and asked them to give him a good reason why he shouldn’t kill them.” “Then he started shooting,” the prosecutor said.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Jessy San Miguel said from death row. “There is nothing I could do to stop what happened. People react in the heat of the moment, in the heat of deep emotions. When something happens out of instinct, we just do it. We don’t do it out of intent. We don’t do it on purpose. It just happens.” According to court records, San Miguel told an officer while in jail: “The only reason why I killed those people is they couldn’t make good Mexican food.” San Miguel was well known to police. He had been arrested nine times and was accused at age 16 of shooting another person. He also was linked to at least two drive-by shootings and a number of burglaries. “He’d just kind of done it all,” Shook said. “It wasn’t gang related. Testimony showed he was kind of his own gang. He didn’t need it. He did his own stuff.”
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