Ricardo Ortiz would be executed by the State of Texas for a prison murder
According to court documents Ricardo Ortiz believed that the victim was talking to authorities regarding bank robberies. Ortiz would give the victim a fatal shot of morphine causing his death
Ricardo Ortiz would be convicted and sentenced to death
Ricardo Ortiz would be executed by lethal injection on January 29 2009
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When Was Ricardo Ortiz Executed
Ricardo Ortiz was executed on January 29 2009
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A high-ranking prison gang member was executed for injecting a fatal dose of heroin, which was smuggled into the El Paso County jail, into a fellow inmate 11 years ago.
Ricardo Ortiz, 46, was condemned for the murder of Gerardo Garcia, in order to prevent Garcia from testifying against him in a bank robbery investigation.
On Thursday night, Texas prison officials injected lethal drugs to execute Ortiz for the retaliation slaying. It was the second execution in as many nights in the nation’s busiest death penalty state and the fifth this year.
Ortiz expressed love for his family and thanked them for their support in the moment before he was put to death. “Stay strong,” he said, although he had no friends or relatives in the death chamber. Relatives of Garcia also declined to witness the punishment. “I’m at peace,” Ortiz said. “I love you and my kids. See you.” Nine minutes later, at 6:18 p.m. CST, he was pronounced dead.
The punishment was carried out after courts refused Ortiz’s bid for a reprieve. He was seeking federal money to hire an attorney to draw up a clemency petition to present to the governor. A condemned Tennessee inmate now before the U.S. Supreme Court is seeking similar permission in his state and the high court is considering his case, but so far no other death row inmates from around the country have been successful winning delays for that reason.
Ortiz’s violent history included an attack on an inmate with a homemade spear. Authorities said he killed Garcia, 22, in August 1997 in the county jail where he was “tank boss” as the highest-ranking member of the Texas Syndicate, a well-known Hispanic prison gang. “The facts of his capital crime … make Ortiz the ‘poster child’ for future dangerousness: his victim was a fellow inmate,” the Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a court filing.
“If you saw him on the streets, you probably wouldn’t believe what he was accused of,” Max Munoz, one of Ortiz’s trial lawyers, said Thursday. But Munoz said evidence against Ortiz was strong “and his past history — that’s what the jury focused on.” He had a long record that included robbery, aggravated robbery, burglary and possessing deadly weapons in prison, including using the spear to stab a fellow inmate. Records show he was known as “Serrucho,” Spanish for “Handsaw.” “This is very hard,” Munoz said. “Horrible. I’ve never believed in the death penalty.”
At trial, defense attorneys unsuccessfully tried to show jurors the victim, Garcia, had a death wish and was considering suicide.
After their arrests, Garcia and Ortiz were allowed to see one another being interviewed by FBI agents investigating a series of unsolved bank robberies as authorities hoped each would assume the other was cooperating. Neither man would budge, however, and both were placed in the same area of the El Paso Detention Center, where Garcia was found dead of a heroin injection three times more potent than the amount that could kill him.
Other jail inmates testified Ortiz obtained the drug the previous day and injected Garcia, saying his bank robbery partner had to die for implicating him.
Evidence also showed Ortiz was arrested in 1990 but never tried for the execution-style slayings of two Houston-area parolees, Anthony Rosalio Acosta, 42, and Jimmy Lopez Rangel, 29, whose bodies were found in the desert near Fabens, southeast of El Paso.
Ortiz’s execution came 24 hours after Virgil Martinez, 41, a former Houston security guard, was put to death for gunning down four people, including his ex-girlfriend and her two small children, during a 1996 shooting frenzy in Brazoria County.
Next week, condemned prisoner David Martinez is set to die Wednesday for the 1994 slayings of his live-in girlfriend, Carolina Prado, 37, and her son, Erik, 14, at their home in San Antonio. Both victims were fatally beaten with a baseball bat.Two more executions are on the schedule for the following week.