ATMORE, Alabama — When Derrick Dearman entered 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 who came before him is that he went to his death willingly.
In April, Dearman, 36, dropped his appeal and wrote a letter to Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall asking for an execution date, saying he no longer wanted to delay justice for his victims’ families . In the days leading up to his death, Dearman got high on the illegal drugs being smuggled into the prison and feared 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 Caleb 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 had woken up high on methamphetamine for nearly a week before the crime.
Bryant Randall, Chelsea’s father and Shannon and Robert’s brother, said he forgives Dearman because of his Christian faith, but he believes Dearman is trying to alleviate his own suffering.
“That might be the easy way out for him because he might not be able to stand being in jail,” Randall said. “I believe in the death penalty, but it might be fairer for him to spend the rest of his life in prison.
“Now that he’s clean, he probably can’t live with what he did,” he said.
Dearman’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, said Dearman had been using it for years.
“Most of the time I’ve known him, he’s been hopelessly addicted to drugs, and if he has the money, he can have anything he wants,” said Hood, an activist in the abolitionist movement.
It was not clear that Dearman was “clean” in the days before his execution, according to a source at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility who requested anonymity without permission to speak. Dearman was high in the days before he was set to die, the person said.
The presence of illegal drugs in Alabama prisons is well documented. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state, alleging prison conditions violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The complaint detailed the availability of drugs in the prison system, citing meth and fentanyl as causes of inmate violence and overdose deaths.
Last week, a Holman correctional officer was accused of 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 their pre-execution ministry, he described his crime in vivid detail, characterizing it as an out-of-body “bad” experience.
Dearman said that after living in a “dope house” for “two or three months,” he reconnected with his on-off girlfriend, Laneta Lester.
Lester and Dearman had a “volatile” long-term relationship, according to court records, but she had recently fled from him to the home of her brother, Joseph Turner; his wife, Shannon Randall; and their three-month-old baby in Citronelle, Alabama.
Dearman went to the house and was told he could not stay overnight.
“I wanted to be in a place where I could move away from drugs,” Dearman said. “I broke down, poured my heart out and was told no.”
After being turned away several times, Dearman drove out of the building and ran out of gas.
“I sat there for a minute and just thought, I’m way out here, out here in Alabama, you know, no gas, I’m stuck here. Just the failures. You know, I always fail,” he said. “And then in my mind it was just something that kept pushing through my mind, you know, just this evil.”
Dearman walked several miles back to the house in the middle of the night.
“Everyone was sleeping, so I knocked on a window in the living room where Laneta was sleeping, and she looked up. She came through the front door,” he said.
Lester didn’t invite him in; instead, she and Dearman argued outside. She told him to get some sleep and something to eat and to come back in the morning.
“I didn’t want to hear any of that,” he said. “Something has taken over. And I now know with all my being that it was bad.
“I walked to the front yard; there was an axe. I grabbed it. I went to the front door. There was a small lock on the inside. I opened it and then went inside.”
He went through the house and attacked five residents with an ax while they slept. The first victim was Robert Brown, who was sitting in an armchair with Laneta, the second victim. He then entered Turner and Randall’s bedroom and hit them with the axe, but left their baby unharmed.
Dearman wrestled a gun away from Justin Reed as Reed tried to defend himself and Chelsea Reed. After shooting the Reeds, he went back and shot the other victims as well.
He then kidnapped Lester and the baby and fled to his father’s home in Leakesville, Mississippi.
Lester escaped with the baby the next morning and went to the police. At the same time, Dearman surrendered to Leakesville police after coming down from his high and realizing 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% 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 when he was a teenager.
Hood said: “His drug use has opened him up to seismic manifestations of evil in his life. Derek allowed 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 consequences for the victims and was able to recognize the wrongfulness of his behavior.”
Dearman pleaded guilty to the murders in 2018 and said he had gone through the appeals process for his family. In the days before his execution, he was accompanied by his father, his sister and his two sons in the prison visiting room.
The day before the execution, he told his sons that he would give up his life because it was the only way to save his soul.
Dearman’s younger sister, Abagail, told NBC News an hour before his execution that she was “surprised” when her brother ultimately gave up his appeal, even though he had spoken to her about the possibility a few times over the years. At first she thought this was the “easy way out.”
“I don’t feel like it’s suicide anymore because I feel like he repented of his sins,” Abagail told NBC News the day after the execution. “I feel like he made up for his mistake. I think it was heroic of him.”
She said Dearman’s access to drugs in prison has been frustrating for her and her family over the years.
“I’ve seen him when he was sober and doing well. I’ve seen that side of my brother. I’ve seen him do things out of the kindness of his heart that no one else would do,” she said.
Dearman’s father, sister, brother-in-law and a friend witnessed his execution.
Strapped to the execution table with the IV lines attached, Dearman expressed his remorse to the families of his victims, who were also present.
“To the families of the victims, please forgive me. This isn’t for me; This is for you. “I brought so much with me,” he said. “I already told my family, you all already know I love you.”
In the weeks before his death, Dearman struggled to take responsibility for his actions, blaming the killings on forces outside himself.
“I knew it wasn’t 100% me and my anger,” he said. “It was something I wish I had words to describe, something that picked me up and harnessed that anger.”
The Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that works with prisoners who have been denied due process, represented Dearman during his appeal process and raised questions about his mental competency in a blog post this week.
“Derrick Dearman only left his profession after a lifetime of severe mental illness and suicidal behavior that the Alabama courts have repeatedly ignored,” the report said.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, about 150 people have volunteered to be executed, or about 10% of all people executed.
Alabama has one of the highest execution rates per capita in the country. Carey Dale Grayson’s execution via nitrogen gas is scheduled for next month.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
