Texas: Jesus Flores, 25, commits suicide on TX death row

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- A convicted killer sent to death row for killing a sheriff's deputy apparently committed suicide in his cell, prison officials said Tuesday.

The body of Jesus Flores, 25, was found by a corrections officer about 4 a.m. Tuesday. Flores was pronounced dead about an hour later, said Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

"He had lacerations on his throat and forehead," she said.

Flores apparently tried to use his own blood to scribble a message on the wall, but it was illegible, Lyons said.

Flores was convicted of capital murder for the May 2001 death of Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Joseph Dennis, 35. Flores was 19 at the time of the shooting.

Flores had been on death row since December 2001. His case was still on appeal before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which had already upheld his conviction and death sentence.

An execution date was never set.

On a Web site devoted to prisoners seeking pen pals, Flores said he was a drug addict and had smoked marijuana, drunk alcohol and used cocaine when he took a car belonging to his sister, who was in the military. He said he also had taken the prescription drug Xanax and vaguely remembered being arrested by Dennis, he said.

"He spreads my legs and does a search of my body," Flores wrote. "What he failed to do was find a gun I had in my back right hand pocket... I got scared, panicked, angry. I don't know, but I wasn't myself.

"At the time he places the cuff I reach for the gun in my back pocket, pull it out and turn and raise the gun and by the time I fully turned around I had fired one shot. I just see this man fall.

"I know that I did something so bad," he added. "I took a man's life."

Flores is the first Texas death row inmate to commit suicide since October 2006, when Michael Johnson killed himself the same day he was supposed to be executed for the slaying of a convenience store clerk near Waco.

Flores becomes the eighth condemned man in Texas to take his own life since death row reopened in 1974.

Source: CNN.com