John Baltazar was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of five year old Adriana Marines
According to court documents John Baltazar was upset that his mother was beaten up by her boyfriend. Baltazar would head to the boyfriend’s sister home where he was staying. Baltazar would shoot and injure a ten year old girl, murder five year old Adriana Marines and shoot and injure the husband of the sister. The boyfriend was not in the residence
John Baltazar would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
John Baltazar would be executed by lethal injection on January 15 2003
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John Baltazar was executed on January 15 2003
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A Corpus Christi man, who said he didn’t mean to kill a 5-year-old girl as she was curled up on her family’s couch watching Sleeping Beauty was executed Wednesday night.
John Baltazar had no final statement. Once the drugs began flowing, his eyes partially closed and his lips closed tightly. He took deep breaths and then gasped for air before his mouth fell open and he was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m., eight minutes after the lethal dose began.
Relatives of Adriana Marines witnessed the execution. A stoic Arturo Marines comforted his wife, Matilda, as she and her sister, Dalinda Cuellar, sobbed as the death occurred. Marines said his daughter’s 1997 death was no accident. “He pretty much knew what he was doing,” Marines said earlier. “He kicked the door in and just started shooting. He was executioner. He was judge and jury for my daughter all in one evening.” Baltazar’s execution was the second of the year.
Baltazar, 30, said he remembers shooting Arturo Marines, but had no idea he shot Marines’ daughter or his 10-year-old niece, Vanessa Marines. Adriana died from two bullet wounds to her head. Vanessa survived a gunshot to her chest. “I didn’t intentionally nor knowingly kill this child,” Baltazar said last week from death row. “It was accidental.”
Baltazar said he was drunk and looking for Arturo Marines’ brother-in-law, Narciso “Ted” Cuellar, who had moved out of the family’s home a week earlier. Cuellar had previously been sleeping on the couch where his two young nieces nestled on the night of Sept. 27, 1997, to watch the movie. Baltazar said he had gotten a call informing him that Cuellar had beaten his mother. “I’ve never been very good with controlling my anger, but if Ted were to beat my mom again, I would try and go whip on (him) again,” he said.
Baltazar, who was paroled from prison just two months before the shootings, said he feels bad about killing Adriana Marines and wounding her cousin, but doesn’t regret shooting Arturo Marines. “He jumped up and he was in my face,” Baltazar said. “That’s why he got shot.”
Arturo Marines says Baltazar turned his family’s life “inside out.” “I don’t believe shooting innocent children, or for that matter, anybody, is an accident,” he said. “Why couldn’t you go after who you were really looking for instead of destroying an innocent family the way you did?”
Baltazar said he didn’t know the answer to that question. “I’ve been locked up most of my life,” Baltazar said. “There ain’t too much I can say about it.”
Last year, Texas executed 33 people. Baltazar was the 291st person executed since Texas reinstated the death penalty in 1982. The execution was the second in as many nights. Samuel Gallamore, 31, was executed Tuesday night for the beating and stabbing deaths of a partially paralyzed woman, her husband and daughter in Kerr County in 1992.
