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News :: Miscellaneous |
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McVeigh Executed |
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by O. Ricks
Email: omarricks (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified!) |
11 Jun 2001
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Convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was pronounced dead this morning at 7:14am Central Daylight Time. |
Convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was pronounced dead this morning at 7:14am Central Daylight Time. Warden Harley Lappin of the federal prison in Terre Haute, IN, answered some press questions this morning shortly after the execution. McVeigh was killed by lethal injection. One intravenous needle conveyed the poison through his leg. Lappin said that McVeigh had no final words except for a written press release, the poem "Invictus" by W.E. Henley. Lapping said that the only departure from standard execution procedure was a transmission difficulty with the closed circuit to Oklahoma City viewers. This implies that McVeigh was not one of the as many as 40% of US executed prisoners who experience painful complications with the lethal injection method of execution. McVeigh's body will be examined by his lawyers, cremated, and scattered at an undisclosed location.
Statements of press witnesses released on National Public Radio at 7:45am say that McVeigh didn't say a word and died with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, where there was a camera connected to witnesses in Oklahoma City. One witness described the last image they had of McVeigh alive as "paler and thinner" than he had been before, another as tight-lipped. Witnesses say that he looked each of them in the eye and then stared up at the ceiling for the remainder of the execution.
More than 1000 witnesses in Oklahoma City were offered the opportunity by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to view the execution on closed circuit television. About 320 had indicated that they would watch. Only 232 actually decided to watch the execution this morning.
McVeigh was convicted of the 19 April 1995 bombing the Murrow Federal Building, in which 168 people died. He admitted to planning the attack, intending to kill many more people. It is not known whether he acted alone.
A decorated Persian Gulf soldier, McVeigh said that his action was inspired by 1970s "The Turner Diaries," a racist apolocalyptic novel whose author supported violent revolution against the federal government and the en masse killing of anyone not considered white. |
