This undated photo from the Alabama Department of Corrections shows Derrick Dearman, scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Alabama on Oct. 17, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Alabama is preparing to execute a man who admitted to killing five people with an ax and gun during a 2016 drug-fueled rampage and dropped his appeals, so his execution go forward.

Derrick Dearman, 36, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in south Alabama.

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Dearman pleaded guilty to killing five people during a 2016 rampage that began when he broke into the home where his estranged girlfriend had taken refuge. Dearman this spring dropped his appeals so his execution could go forward. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it’s not fair to the victims or their families to keep prolonging the justice that they so rightly deserve.”

“I am willingly giving all that I can possibly give to try and repay a small portion of my debt to society for all the terrible things I’ve done,” Dearman said in an audio recording sent this week to The Associated Press. “From this point forward, I hope that the focus will not be on me, but rather on the healing of all the people that I have hurt.”

Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, were killed on Aug. 20, 2016 at the home near Citronelle, about 33 miles (53km) north of Mobile. All of the victims were related.

One of the victims, Chelsea Reed, who was married to Justin Reed, was pregnant when she was killed. They had planned to name the boy Aiden Kaleb, according to her obituary. Turner, who was married to Randall, shared the home with the Reeds. Brown, who was Randall’s brother, was also staying there on the night of the murders.

The day before the killing, Joseph Turner, the brother of Dearman’s girlfriend, brought her to their home after Dearman became abusive toward her, according to a judge’s sentencing order.

Dearman had shown up at the home multiple times that night asking to see his girlfriend and was told he could not stay there. Sometime after 3 a.m. he returned to the home when all the victims were asleep, according to a judge’s sentencing order. He worked his way through the house, attacking the victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a gun found in the home, prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend, who survived, to get in the car with him and drive to Mississippi.

Dearman surrendered to authorities at the request of his father, according to a judge’s 2018 sentencing order.

As he was escorted to jail, Dearman blamed the rampage on drugs, telling reporters that he was high on methamphetamine when he went into the home and the “drugs were making me think things that weren’t really there happening.”

Dearman initially pleaded not guilty but changed his plea to guilty after firing his attorneys. Because it was a capital murder case, Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and determine if the state had proven the case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence.

Dearman has been on death row since 2018.

This is Alabama’s fifth scheduled execution of the year. Two of the state’s executions were carried out by nitrogen has. The other two were carried out by lethal injection, which remains the state’s primary execution method.