A South Carolina murderer who kidnapped his ex-girlfriend and beat her parents to death is set to become the state’s first prisoner executed by firing squad on Friday.
Brad Sigmon, 67, chose to be killed by the team of armed prison staff in Columbia’s Broad River Correctional Institute after his lawyer said the murderer didn’t want to be electrocuted to death in the electric chair or deal with unreliable lethal injections.
Sigmon would be the first person executed by firing squad since 2010, which was carried out in Utah against convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner. Utah is the only state to perform this style of execution and has killed prisoners in 1977 and 1996 by firing squad.
On Thursday, Sigmon’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to delay his execution after arguing South Carolina withheld information about its lethal injection drugs. South Carolina’s high court already denied his appeal on the same grounds.
South Carolina’s Department of Corrections said the three-man firing squad will stand behind a wall 15 feet away from the condemned inmate.
Sigmon will be strapped to a chair — the same one used for fatal electrocutions — with a hood over his head and a target over his heart, the state’s DOC said.
The warden will then read the execution order, and the firing squad will open fire at the prisoner. A doctor will be sent in to examine the inmate afterward.
Sigmon’s execution stems from the 2001 double murder of David and Gladys Larke, the parents of his former girlfriend Rebecca Armstrong, who had just broken up with him.
The killer told police he planned on tying up Ms. Armstrong’s parents so he could kidnap her, spend a romantic weekend together and kill her afterward — a scheme he came up with after smoking crack cocaine the night before.
But Sigmon wound up beating the Larkes to death with a baseball bat at their Greenville County home on April 27, 2001.
He managed to kidnap Ms. Armstrong as well, court records showed, but she escaped from her ex-lover by jumping out of his moving car. Sigmon shot her in the foot while she ran away.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am guilty,” Sigmon told jurors at his 2002 trial, according to archived Greenville News coverage obtained by USA Today. “I have no excuse for what I did. It’s my fault and I’m not trying to blame nobody else for it, and I’m sorry.”
At his trial, Sigmon told jurors he “probably” deserved to die, even though he didn’t want to.
Sigmon is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Friday.
