A Death Row prisoner was executed in a grim method compared to “torture”, but not before filling up on a last meal of delicious Mexican food.
Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was executed at midnight on November 21 at the William C. Holman Correctional facility in Alabama, US, becoming only the third person in the US to die by nitrogen gas hypoxia. The process involves strapping a gas mask over the person’s face and replacing breathable air with nitrogen, leading to death from oxygen deprivation. Witnesses of previous executions of the same method have described it as “torture”.
For his last meal on Death Row, the inmate ate a banquet of Mexican food made up of soft tacos, beef burritos, tostada, chips, and guacamole, washed down with Mountain Dew Blast, USA Today reports.
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Minutes before he was executed, Grayson hurled obscenities at prison officials. After the prison governor announced the death warrant, he placed the microphone near Grayson’s mouth to ask if he had any last words. Grayson spat at him: “For you, you need to f*** off.”
The warden quickly removed the mic following Grayson’s expletive and then watched as Grayson gave him the middle finger with both hands, reports the Mirror.
According to USA Today, Grayson tightly clenched his hands as the execution began and shook his head vigorously. He appeared to lose consciousness at 6:18pm, six minutes after the nitrogen gas had begun flowing and was pronounced dead at 6.33pm.
(Image: AP)
Grayson was found guilty of the brutal 1994 murder of hitchhiker Vickie Deblieux. The 37-year-old woman’s mutilated body was found at the base of a bluff near Odenville, Alabama, on 26 February 1994. She had been hitchhiking from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to her mother’s home in West Monroe, Louisiana, when four teenagers – one of them Grayson – offered her a ride.
According to prosecutors, the teens took her to a wooded area where they assaulted and beat her. They threw her off a cliff and later returned to mutilate her body, stabbing her 180 times.
A medical examiner testified that the victim’s face was so severely fractured that she was identified by an earlier X-ray of her spine. Investigators revealed that the teens were identified as suspects after one of them showed a friend one of Vickie Deblieux’s severed fingers and bragged about the murder.