Freddie Owens was executed by lethal injection Friday night for the murder of a Greenville County mother of three, the first person executed in South Carolina in 13 years.
He was executed after the U.S. Supreme Court and Governor Henry McMaster issued last-minute rulings refusing to intervene.
Owens, 46, was sentenced to death for the murder of Irene Grainger Graves, a 41-year-old store clerk. On Nov. 1, 1997, after a string of robberies, Owens fatally shot Graves while robbing the Speedway gas station where she worked one of her three jobs. Owens was 19 at the time.
Throughout decades of appeals, Owens maintained his innocence. In the weeks leading up to his execution, his co-defendant, Steven Golden, told the court that he had agreed to testify against Owens after getting a secret deal from prosecutors. This week, just two days before Owens’ execution, Graves recanted his testimony altogether.
But the courts remained unmoved.
Owens’ execution is the culmination of a years-long battle by South Carolina to resume the death penalty after the state ran out of the drugs needed to administer lethal injections in 2011. In the decade that followed, lawmakers made the electric chair the standard method of execution and legalized death by firing squad before eventually passing a so-called “shield law” that concealed all information about the procurement of lethal drugs and the procedures for lethal injections.
An inmate can choose from three execution options. Owens asked his lawyers to decide, saying his death would be suicide if he chose. His lawyers opted for lethal injection.
The shield law was intended to circumvent public pressure on drug manufacturers and pharmacies to stop providing drugs for executions. Owens was executed by injection of a single drug, pentobarbital, a sedative that causes breathing to stop in high doses. It is a relatively new method, adopted by states such as Georgia and Arizona as the drugs needed for the traditional three-drug lethal injection became harder to obtain.
With Owens’ death, the door has been opened. In the coming months, five more men will die, with each execution 35 days apart.
The Life of Freddie Owens
Owens’ life was marked by violence: both the violence he suffered himself and the violence he inflicted on others.
It swirled around him from before he was born, when his mother physically abused him while he was still in the womb. As a child, he began skipping school to stay home with his mother after witnessing his stepfather chase her with a machete, according to a forensic psychiatrist who testified at his trial.
Throughout his childhood, he was in and out of foster care and saw five of his family members sent to prison, including his grandmother, who served time after shooting another family member.
According to court documents, Owens served a prison sentence in the Juvenile Justice Division, where he said he was physically and sexually abused.
Experts who testified at his trial said Owens suffered from “mild brain dysfunction,” according to court records from one of his appeals. He struggled with a learning disability, impulse control and antisocial personality disorder. That mutated into a tendency to see threats and insults from others and instinctively respond with violence, experts said.
As a young man, Owens turned his anger against the world.
His goal, he told his girlfriend, was to “go down in history as the guy who committed the most murders in Greenville County without getting caught,” reports at the time said.
On Halloween night 1997, Owens and three friends began a rampage around Greenville. In the early morning hours, armed with guns and wearing masks over their faces, Owens and an accomplice, Golden, entered the gas station at Starvin’ Marvin Speedway.
Inside, they demanded that Graves open the store’s safe. When she refused, Owens shot her in the head. Their loot was $37.29, which was taken from the cash register.
While Golden recanted his testimony two days before Owens’ execution, he refused to name the person he now claims was the real shooter. Courts found Golden’s sudden confession unconvincing and the weight of other evidence — from Owens’ participation in the other robberies that night to his confessions to others, including the getaway driver, his girlfriend and his mother — incriminating.
Seven hours after he was convicted of Graves’ murder in 1999, Owens tortured and killed his cellmate Christopher Bryan Lee, a 28-year-old construction worker who was serving a 90-day sentence for drunk driving. In his confession, Owens said that Lee, whose boss held his job for him, had teased him about the conviction.
In a new conviction in 2003, Owens blamed a racist society for his conviction and crimes.
“Believe it or not, I’m your creation,” Owens told the court. “Every white man here, I’m your creation. You’re afraid of me because I’m black. You’re afraid because you don’t know what to do with me.”
In prison he converted to Islam and changed his name to Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah, but continued to use the name “Freddie Owens” in his professions. In 2008, a psychiatrist testified that he had taught himself Arabic, Swahili, some French, and sign language. He used a book about the life of Alexander the Great to teach other prisoners to read.
But he seemed to find little peace. He attacked guards, nurses and inmates, a prison official said. In 2002, he repeatedly stabbed Golden with a homemade “shank” in a prison shower, according to court records.
“The death penalty is for the worst people… and that’s Freddie Owens,” said Robert Ariail, the attorney who prosecuted Owens.
“Freddie is more than his beliefs; he is a person, a son, a brother and a friend,” his mother, Dora Mason, wrote in a statement Friday. “He deserves compassion, understanding and a fair shot at justice. Instead, the system has failed him and the victim in every way possible.”
