Texas executes Rodrigo Hernandez

Rodrigo Hernandez

A man who had been paroled for an assault in Michigan when his DNA linked him to a years-old murder in San Antonio was executed in Texas on Thursday.

The high court rejected a last-day appeal about two hours before Hernandez was set for lethal injection.

Rodrigo Hernandez faced lethal injection for sexually assaulting and strangling Susan Verstegen, 38, before leaving her body in a San Antonio trash can. Verstegen, a Frito-Lay worker, was stocking snacks at a grocery store when she was attacked in 1994, according to the Texas Attorney General's Office.

Hernandez's DNA wasn't matched to the crime until 2002, when Michigan officials took a sample from him as he was paroled and put it into a national database.

He died by lethal injection at a prison in Huntsville at 6:19 p.m. local (7:19 p.m. EST).

Hernandez said little in the moments before he died.

“I want to tell everybody that I love everybody,” he said. “We are all family, people of God almighty. We're all good. I'm ready.”

As the lethal injection took its course, he said, “This stuff stings man, Almighty.” His relatives there to witness the execution sobbed.

Hernandez is the second person executed in the United States this year following Gary Welch in Oklahoma in January, according to the National Death Penalty Information Center.

Hernandez is the first person executed this year in Texas, which executed 13 people in 2011 and has put to death more than four times as many people as any other state since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the center.

Hernandez told the San Antonio Express-News in an interview published this month he didn't kill Verstegen and will "take that to the grave."

But Verstegen's mother, Anna Verstegen of San Antonio, said this week she hopes Hernandez will, before he dies, feel sorry for what he did to her daughter, who left behind a 15-year-old son.

"It's never too late," she told Reuters. "We're just praying for him. The kind of God I believe in can forgive."

In 2010, Michigan investigators said DNA evidence linked Hernandez to the 1991 murder of Muriel Stoepker, 77, of Grand Rapids, but that he would not be tried since he was on death row in Texas.

Nationwide, the number of executions fell for the second year in a row in 2011, with 43 inmates put to death compared with 46 in 2010 and 52 in 2009, Death Penalty Information Center figures show. In 1999, a record 98 prisoners were executed.

Hernandez becomes the 1st condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Texas and the 478th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1987. He becomes the 239th inmate to be put to death since Rick Perry governor of Texas in 2011; Perry has now been governor for exactly 1/2 of all executions in Texas in the modern era, since the death penalty was re-legalized on July 2, 1976.

Hernandez becomes the 2nd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1279th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Sources: Reuters, AP, Rick Halperin, DPN Staff, January 26, 2012

At death's door, condemned man confessed to 2 killings

Minutes before Rodrigo Hernandez, 38, was executed for the 1994 rape and murder of a single mother in San Antonio, he reportedly confessed to that killing and the 1991 slaying of a homeless woman in Grand Rapids, Mich., to a Texas Ranger, Michigan authorities said.

He agreed to talk to a Texas Ranger assigned to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Huntsville unit as the state prepared to lethally inject him Thursday evening, according to a Kent County, Mich., news release.

Hernandez was executed for raping and strangling Susan Verstegen, 38, but while he was on death row, authorities in 2009 determined his DNA matched evidence from the 1991 shooting death of Muriel Stoepker in Michigan.

Hernandez had retracted a confession he signed in 2002 in the Verstegen case and up until Thursday had denied killing either woman. He told a San Antonio Express-News reporter weeks before his execution date that he'd had sex with Verstegen the night of her death but claimed someone else killed her, although detectives had matched his DNA to evidence from the scene of the slaying.

Just before his execution, though, Hernandez “admitted to his involvement in the 1994 homicide of Susan Verstegen in San Antonio,” the Kent County news release states.

Stoepker, 77, was shot to death in a parking garage at Grand Rapids Community College.

In a recent letter to an Express-News reporter, Hernandez wrote that he'd paid Stoepker for a sexual favor that night but maintained he did not kill her. That story also changed as his execution drew near.

“Hernandez admitted he shot and killed Muriel Stoepker after he paid her for a sexual favor,” the Kent County news release states. “Hernandez claimed the gun he had in his possession went off accidentally.”

The Texas Rangers would not confirm the death-row confession Monday, but a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman said Hernandez did speak to a Ranger before the execution.

Source: Houston Chronicle, January 31, 2012

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