Tommie Hughes was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder
According to court documents Tommie Hughes would fatally shoot two women, Foluke Erinkitola and Roxanne Mendoza in a parking lot before robbing them
Tommie Hughes would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Tommie Hughes would be executed on March 15 2006 by lethal injection
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When Was Tommie Hughes Executed
Tommie Hughes was executed on March 15 2006
Tommie Hughes Case
A former Marine was executed Wednesday night for the shooting deaths of two women during a robbery outside a northwest Dallas theater in August 1997.
“I love my family,” Tommie Hughes, 31, said in his final statement. “You all stay strong. Watch over each other,” he told his mother, grandmother and some friends as they watched from a nearby window. Hughes kept repeating “I love you” and looking at his family until the drugs took effect. He said nothing about his victims, but at one point turned his head and stared at their relatives.
He was pronounced dead at 6:23 p.m., eight minutes after the dose began. Hughes was the fifth prisoner put to death this year in Texas and the first of four scheduled this month in the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.
Hughes was executed for the murder of Foluke Erinkitola. He robbed and then shot in the head Erinkitola and her friend Roxanne Mendoza in their car after the women had watched a movie. During the trial, a cousin testified Hughes snickered when asked why he killed the women and said they could have identified him. Hughes denied he planned the robbery or killed the women. “The picture that they painted of me as being the mastermind, it’s just totally off the rock,” he said.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday rejected requests to commute Hughes’ sentence to life or to issue a 90-day reprieve. A federal judge in Houston and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied appeals to stop the execution on grounds that the lethal drugs are unconstitutionally cruel. About an hour before the execution, the U.S. Supreme Court also turned down an appeal.
Erinkitola, 25, who was from the Chicago area and was a student at the University of Illinois, had been in the Dallas area on a summer internship with GTE Corp. Mendoza, 29, originally from San Francisco, also worked for GTE. “They were very bright girls with tremendous futures ahead of them,” said Toby Shook, who was lead prosecutor in the case for the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office.
Hughes said he was talking to the women when his girlfriend at the time, Alina Henry, shot them in a jealous rage. Shook said Hughes, whom he called “a pathological liar … completely void of remorse,” planned the robbery and shot both women. Hughes’ cousin, Derric English, helped rob the women while Henry was the getaway driver. Hughes was 22 at the time, while English and Henry were 19. All three were caught after a short chase by officers who were in the parking lot on an undercover operation.
Hughes was charged with both killings but only tried for Erinkitola’s death. His defense attorneys presented no witnesses at his trial. At a separate trial, English was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Henry pleaded to a lesser charge of aggravated robbery in exchange for her testimony against both men. She was sentenced to 11 years.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/3726835.html
