KHOU: HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- A convicted hit man was executed Tuesday evening for a triple slaying in Houston nearly 14 years ago.
Christopher Coleman, 37, was condemned for his part in a scheme by a Colombian man who hoped to eliminate a drug debt by staging a robbery. Four people wound up getting shot in a car on a dead-end street. Three of them, including a 3-year-old boy, died.
“Ain’t no way, fo fo,” he said when asked by a warden if he had a final statement from the Texas death chamber gurney. “I love y’all.”
It was unclear what “fo fo” meant, although in urban slang it can refer to a .44-caliber pistol or distinctive car rims made in 1984 and apparently popular in Houston. No relatives of the victims chose to attend the punishment and Coleman selected no personal witnesses to watch him die.
Coleman was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. CDT, eight minutes after lethal drugs began flowing into his arms.
The lethal injection—the 18th this year in Texas, the nation’s most active death penalty state—was carried out after Coleman’s lawyers lost last-day appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier rejected a clemency request for Coleman, who was one of three men convicted in the case. The other two, Enrique Andrade Mosquera, 44, and Derrick Graham, 40, received life in prison.
“All I know is the jury never heard the truth in this case,” said Coleman’s attorney, Patrick McCann. “And I don’t think anybody can say who shot whom.”
Prosecutors said Mosquera owed $80,000 for four kilos of cocaine he received from Hurtado Heinar Prado, 34, also from Colombia, but didn’t want to pay. Instead, he hired Coleman for $12,000 and Graham for $10,000 to stage a robbery during the payoff.
Hurtado Heinar Prado was in the front seat of a car driven by another Colombian, Jose Mario Garcia-Castro, 33, when they met the three men at the end of a Houston street in the early morning hours of Dec. 14, 1995. Elsie Prado, Prado’s sister and Garcia-Castro’s girlfriend, and her son, Danny Giraldo, were in the back seat.
Testimony showed that Coleman approached the passenger side of the car, said something to the two men in the front and opened fire. Only Elsie Prado survived. She identified Coleman as the gunman.
Ballistics tests showed that all 11 shots were fired from outside the passenger side of the car. Testimony showed that Mosquero was standing near the front of the driver’s side and Graham was in front of the car.
Coleman was arrested at a motel in Lawrenceburg, Tenn., a week later. He told police he was at the shooting scene but denied being the gunman. At his trial, Coleman’s lawyers argued he was not the gunman.
Coleman’s appeals attorneys argued that Elsie Prado’s testimony at his 1997 trial was not truthful, that she lied about her involvement in the drug deal and that she failed to disclose that she and Mosquera knew each other and grew up in the same neighborhood in Cali, Colombia.
