Shannon Thomas was executed by the State of Texas for a triple murder
According to court documents Shannon Thomas would go to the home of a known drug dealer and would murder him and his two young children: Roberto Rios and 11 year old Victor and 10 year old Maria
Shannon Thomas would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Shannon Thomas would be executed by lethal injection on November 16 2005
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When Was Shannon Thomas Executed
Shannon Thomas was executed on November 16 2005
Shannon Thomas Case
A Houston man was executed Wednesday evening for a Christmas Eve killing spree that left a Baytown man and two of his children dead.
In a final statement, Shannon Charles Thomas repeatedly expressed love for his family. “I want you to be strong and get through this time,” Thomas said with his sister standing a few feet from him, looking through a window. “Do not fall back. Keep going forward. Don’t let this hinder you. Let everybody know I love them.” Thomas mentioned several people by their first names, telling his sister to tell them he loved them and to stay strong. “This is kind of hard to put words together. I am nervous and it is hard to put my thoughts together. Sometimes you don’t know what to say. I hope these words give you comfort. … Let everybody know I love them and love is unconditional as mama always told us. I may be gone in flesh but I am always with you in spirit.” He was pronounced dead at 6:52 p.m., five minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow.
Shannon Thomas, 34, was the 19th inmate executed this year and the second in as many nights in the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.
Relatives bringing Christmas gifts to the home or Roberto Rios 13 years ago in Baytown, just east of Houston, were greeted with the horror of discovering the three bodies. Rios, 32, had been shot, beaten and stabbed, a steak knife still in his neck. His 11-year-old son, Victor, and 10-year-old daughter, Maria, were upstairs in the small house, both face down and shot in the head.
“When you’re at a murder scene looking at dead kids and there’s Christmas presents around and you look at the TV and ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ is playing, it took me five years before I could watch that movie again,” Baytown Detective Randy Rhodes said Tuesday. “For the rest of my life, Christmas is going to be associated with those kids. “I hope for his own sake and his own soul he’s gotten straight with the Lord, but he’s got a debt to pay and it’s time to pay it.”
‘Beat with this pair of tin snips’
Nearly three years ago, an accomplice, Keith Bernard Clay, was put to death for the beating and fatal shooting of a convenience store clerk two weeks after the Rios slayings. Authorities said Clay was the shooter in that case while Thomas waited outside in a car. Thomas also was charged in that slaying but was not tried. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year refused to consider an appeal from Thomas. His lawyers on Tuesday lost a late appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, then took their case back to the U.S. Supreme Court. In that appeal, which delayed Thomas’ punishment past the scheduled 6 p.m. CST (0000 GMT) time, defense lawyers said prosecutors failed to disclose an agreement that in exchange for his testimony in Thomas’ case, they’d help out a witness facing a drug charge. Prosecutors said there was no deal. The Supreme Court denied the appeal.
Authorities said Rios, whose ex-wife lived in Monterrey, Mexico, was a small-time marijuana dealer. “They wanted dope and money out of him,” said Harris County Assistant District Attorney Marie Munier, who prosecuted the case. Munier said evidence showed Rios was duct-taped to a chair, tortured and “beat with this pair of tin snips or metal snips, a humongous pair of scissors, then stabbed … The family comes over later that evening to bring presents and they find bodies.”
Friend turned him in
It was almost two years before any arrests were made in the slayings. Thomas and Clay apparently told friends about the murders. When one of those friends was arrested on a drug charge, he gave police information implicating Thomas and Clay. A friend testified Thomas told him shortly after the slayings he was responsible for the Rios family killings. At the time of the killings, Thomas was on probation for delivery of a controlled substance, and records show a motion to revoke his probation was pending. He had also served time at a Harris County boot camp after an assault conviction. Thomas declined to speak with reporters in the weeks before his scheduled punishment. On a Web site where death row inmates seek pen pals, he described himself as “a very honest person and those are the type of people with whom I choose to associate myself with.”
Tuesday night Robert Rowell, 50, was executed for fatally shooting three people at a Houston crack house. One more execution is scheduled in Texas this year. Convicted killer Tony Ford is set to die December 7 for the slaying of an El Paso man during a home robbery a week before Christmas in 1991. If carried out, the 20 lethal injections would be three less than a year ago and the fewest for a year in Texas since 17 inmates were carried out in 2001. A record 40 were executed in 2000.
