Oklahoma has put a man to death for killing his girlfriend in Oklahoma City in 2003.
Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, died by lethal injection at 10:13 a.m. at the state’s penitentiary in rural McAlester.
Oklahoma Department of Corrections officials reported seeing more labored breathing than usual.
Fisher, 43, planned to leave Cuesta-Rodriguez when he shot her in one eye and then waited about eight minutes as she screamed for help before firing the fatal shot into her other eye.
“He made her suffer because she dared to live beyond his control,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond told the state’s Pardon and Parole Board on July 14.
His attorneys had asked for a life in prison sentence, saying he had a difficult childhood in Cuba and suffered from brain damage, post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression with psychotic episodes.
The Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty says he was in a severe bus accident as a child which killed the driver and threw Carlos, through the front window where he struck the motor leaving him with a penetrating brain injury.
Here’s a statement released from Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez’s Family and Friends:
“Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez lived a life of extraordinary beauty and tenderness within the darkest of conditions. Through small, unglamorous, consistent acts of kindness, he expressed his humanity year after year.
He was a different man from the one who committed his horrible crime—remorseful every single day, burdened by the weight of what he had done—but defined by decades of living humbly, gently, and with unwavering love and devotion to his family and to inmates far worse off than himself.
His legacy will not be measured by his worst moment, but by the countless moments after—the letters that never failed to arrive, the art he created from behind those walls, and the love and light he poured out consistently and unconditionally, proving that even from a place of such darkness, one person’s kindness and redemption can still ripple into the world.”
He was the third person put to death this year in Oklahoma and the 20th under Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who leaves office in January after eight years.
