A death row inmate struggled with guilt and addiction before his execution

ATMORE, Ala. – When Derrick Dearman walked into Alabama’s execution chamber Thursday evening, he was the fifth man the state has put to death this year. The difference between Dearman and the men before him is that he went to his death willingly.

In April, Dearman, 36, dropped his appeals and wrote a letter to Gov. Kay Ivey and state Attorney General Steve Marshall asking for an execution date, saying he no longer wanted to delay justice for the families of his victims. In the days before his death, Dearman became high on illegal drugs smuggled into prison and worried that giving up his life would not be enough to change the perception of his monstrous crime.

Dearman was convicted in 2016 of killing Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, who was five months pregnant.

Dearman said in an interview with NBC News in April that he was awake for nearly a week before the crime, high on methamphetamine.

Bryant Randall, Chelsea’s father and Shannon and Robert’s brother, said he forgives Dearman for his Christian faith, but believes Dearman is trying to ease his own suffering.

“This might be the easy way out for him, because he might not be able to handle being in jail,” Randall said. “I believe in the death penalty, but it might be more justice for him to spend the rest of his life in prison.

“Now that he’s clean, he probably can’t live with what he’s done,” he said.

Dearman’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, said Dearman had been using for years.

“Most times I’ve known him, he’s been hopelessly addicted to drugs, and if he’s got the money, he can get whatever he wants,” said Hood, an activist in the death penalty movement.

It was unclear whether Dearman was clean in the days before his execution, according to a source at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility who spoke on condition of anonymity without authorization to speak. Dearman was high in the days before his death, the person said.

The presence of illegal drugs in Alabama prisons is well documented. In 2020, the United States Department of Justice sued the state, alleging that its prison conditions violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The complaint detailed the availability of drugs in the prison system, pointing to methamphetamine and fentanyl as causes of inmate violence and overdose deaths.

Last week, a Holman correctional officer was charged with smuggling meth into the prison, which houses the state’s death row population, and distributing it to an inmate.

In a recording Dearman made with Hood in September during his pre-execution ministry, he described his crime in vivid detail, characterizing it as an “evil” out-of-body experience.

Dearman said that after living in a “drug house” for “two or three months,” he reconnected with his girlfriend, Laneta Lester.

Lester and Dearman were in a “volatile” long-term relationship, according to court documents, but she had recently run away from him at the home of her brother, Joseph Turner; his wife, Shannon Randall; and their 3-month-old baby in Citronelle, Alabama.

Dearman went home and was told he couldn’t spend the night.

“I wanted to be in a place where I could distance myself from drugs,” Dearman said. “I broke down, I poured my heart out, and they said no.”

After being turned away several times, Dearman left the property and ran out of gas.

“I sat there for a minute and thought, here I am here in Alabama, you know, out of gas, out here. Just all the failures. You know, I’m always failing,” he said. “And then, in my mind, it was just something that kept pressing on my mind, you know, just this hurt.”

Dearman walked several miles to the house in the middle of the night.

“Everyone was asleep, so I knocked on a window in the living room where Laneta was sleeping, and she looked up. He came through the front door,” she said.

Lester did not invite him in; instead, she and Dearman argued outside. He told her to get some sleep and eat something and come back in the morning.

“I didn’t want to hear any of that,” he said. “Something just took over. And now I know with all my being that it was evil.

“I went up to the front yard; there was an axe. I took it. I went to the front door. It had a little latch thing on the inside. I took it out and then went in.”

He went through the house and attacked five of the occupants with an ax while they slept. The first victim was Robert Brown, who was in a recliner near Laneta, the second victim. He then moved into Turner and Randall’s room, hitting them with the ax but leaving their baby unharmed.

Dearman wrestled a gun away from Justin Reed as Reed tried to defend himself and defend himself against Chelsea Reed. After shooting the Reeds, he returned and shot the other victims as well.

She then kidnapped Lester and the baby and fled to her father’s house in Leakesville, Mississippi.

Lester escaped with the baby the next morning and went to the police. At the same time, Dearman turned himself in to Leakesville police after he got off his high and realized what he had done.

“I knew my life was over,” he said. “I knew something terrible had happened and that I was responsible, whether it was 100 percent me or not.”

Dearman said he still struggled with the idea that he had the ability to carry out the gruesome murders and continued to struggle with his addiction, which began as a teenager.

Hood said: “His drug use has opened him up to seismic manifestations of evil in his life. Derek let things into his life and into his body that manifested tremendous evil.

A psychological evaluation during his trial found that although Dearman was “abusing methamphetamine at the time, (he) appears to have been aware of his actions and their effects on the victims and to have been able to discern the illegality of his behavior”.

Dearman pleaded guilty to the murders in 2018 and said he went through the appeals process for his family. In the days leading up to his execution, his father, sister and two sons joined him in the prison’s visiting room.

The day before the execution, he told his children that he was giving up his life because it was the only way to save his soul.

Dearman’s younger sister, Abagail, told NBC News that in the hour before his execution, she was “shocked” when her brother finally dropped his appeals, even though she had mentioned to her the possibility a few times over the years.

Dearman’s father, sister and brother-in-law and a friend witnessed his execution.

Strapped to the execution table with IV lines in place, Dearman expressed his remorse to the families of his victims, who were also present.

“To the families of the victims, forgive me. This is not for me; this is for you I’ve taken so much,” he said. “To my family, I’ve said it, you know I love you.”

In the weeks before his death, Dearman struggled to take responsibility for his actions, blaming the murders on forces outside of himself.

“I knew it wasn’t 100 percent me and my anger,” she said. “It was something I wish I had words to describe, something that took me and used that anger.”

The Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that works with inmates who may be denied fair trials, represented Dearman during his appeals process and raised questions about his mental competency in a release on the blog this week.

“Derrick Dearman stopped his appeals only after a lifetime of serious mental illness and suicidal behavior that Alabama courts have repeatedly ignored,” he said.

Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, about 150 people have offered to be executed, or 10% of all those who have been executed.

Alabama has one of the highest per capita execution rates in the country. Carey Dale Grayson’s execution by nitrogen gas is scheduled for next month.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com