Roy Pippen was executed by the State of Texas for two murders
According to court documents Roy Pippen was laundering money for a Colombian Cartel and believed that Elmer and Fabio Buitrago were stealing from him. The two men were kidnapped and brought to a motel where they were questioned. The two men were brought to a warehouse where they would be shot. Fabio Buitrago would die quickly however Elmer Buitrago was able to escape and tell police what happened and then died the next day at the hospital
Roy Pippen would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Roy Pippen would be executed by lethal injection on March 29 2007
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Roy Pippen was executed on March 29 2007
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Prison officials credited a chaplain for calming an angry condemned prisoner who set a fire in his cell hours before he was scheduled to die, promised to be uncooperative with officers but then walked himself to the Texas death chamber for execution. “Throughout the afternoon, you could see his demeanor changing,” Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said officers told her of inmate Roy Lee Pippin, who received lethal injection Thursday evening for the shooting deaths of two Florida men in Houston 13 years ago.
From the death house gurney, Pippin, 51, spoke forcefully, blaming jurors, the judge and prosecutors for executing an innocent man and the courts for allowing it. “You will answer to your maker when God has found out that you have executed an innocent man,” he said. “May God have mercy on your souls.”
The former Houston air conditioning contractor had acknowledged involvement in a Colombian drug operation that used his business to transport drugs and launder cash. He insisted, though, he wasn’t the triggerman who killed cousins Elmer and Fabio Buitrago almost 13 years ago. The two Miami men were taken to a warehouse rented by Pippin and fatally shot because $2 million in drug proceeds was missing.
In his final statement, he also asked for forgiveness “for all the poison I brought into the United States, the country I love.” Eight minutes later, he was pronounced dead, making him the 11th convicted killer executed this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state, and the second in as many nights.
Pippin had warned in the weeks before his punishment that he would not go quietly. Just before he was taken from death row near Livingston to the Huntsville, about 45 miles to the west, where executions are carried out, he piled up trash in front of his cell door and set it on fire, using a piece of wire he stuck in an electric outlet to ignite it. Officers responded with a water hose to extinguish the blaze. “The acts of a desperate man,” his lawyer, Winston Cochran, said.
When he arrived at the Huntsville Unit, Pippin repeated his intention to not cooperate, but his conversations with a chaplain, whom prison officials did not identify, cooled his anger. Pippin had been disenchanted with his legal help and filed many appeals himself,. “If I was guilty of what they said I did, I wouldn’t haven’t a problem at all,” he said in a recent interview. “I wouldn’t be doing all this legal work. I wouldn’t be fighting.”
For years, he railed about conditions on death row and earlier this week ended a six-week hunger strike to protest the living conditions and the lethal injection method he faced. On Thursday, he requested no final meal.
Cochran handled some of Pippin’s early appeals and stepped in to file a late appeal to try to block the execution. His appeal challenged the Texas sentencing law and argued the killings were ordered by Colombian drug lords and that Pippin was under their pressure at the time of the shootings. “He got dragged into this,” Cochran said. “Basically, it was kill or be killed. That could be considered mitigating.” The execution was delayed briefly until the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the appeal.
Evidence showed Elmer Buitrago, 34, and his cousin, Fabio, 55, were held captive at a Houston motel for about a week, then before dawn on May 4, 1994, were taken to a warehouse rented by Pippin where each was shot four times. Before he died, Elmer Buitrago was able to tell police Pippin was the gunman.
Pippin, who claimed to have moved as much as $600 million in drug proceeds, blamed the slayings on others in the drug ring. “Pippin himself testified, the jury got to hear his tale and explanation and rejected it,” Julian Ramirez, the Harris County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Pippin, said.
Among witnesses who testified against him was a man who had been tortured at the warehouse and managed to flee. Authorities said another man believed held at the warehouse was found dead in nearby Fort Bend County. Pippin was not charged with that slaying.
Twenty-four hours earlier, a San Antonio man, Vincent Gutierrez, received lethal injection for killing an Air Force captain 10 years ago during a carjacking. Three more convicted killers are to die in Texas in April.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/4674273.html
