HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- An east Texas man who pleaded guilty to killing a neighbor couple during a shooting rampage 13 years ago and said he wanted to be put to death for the crime was executed Wednesday evening.
Barney Fuller Jr., 58, had asked that all his appeals be dropped to expedite his death sentence.
Fuller never made eye contact in the death chamber with witnesses, who included the two children of the slain couple.
Asked by Warden James Jones if he had any final statement, Fuller responded: "I don't have anything to say. You can proceed on, Warden Jones."
Fuller took a deep breath as Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials injected a lethal dose of pentobarbital into each arm, then blurted out: "Hey, you fixing to put me to sleep."
Within 30 seconds, all movement stopped. Fuller was pronounced dead 38 minutes later, at 7:01 p.m.
Fuller became the seventh convicted killer executed this year in Texas and the first in six months in the nation's most active capital-punishment state. Fuller's execution was the 16th in the U.S. this year.
Fuller surrendered peacefully at his home outside Lovelady, about 100 miles north of Houston, after a middle-of-the-night shooting frenzy in May 2003 that left his neighbors, Nathan Copeland, 43, and Copeland's wife, Annette, 39, dead inside their rural home.
Court records show Fuller, armed with a shotgun, a semi-automatic carbine and a pistol, fired 59 shots before barging into the Copeland home and opening fire again. He had been charged with making a threatening phone call to Annette Copeland, and the neighbors had been engaged in a two-year dispute over that.
Fuller pleaded guilty to capital murder. He declined to appear in court at his July 2004 trial and asked that the trial's punishment phase go on without his presence. He entered the courtroom only when jurors returned with his sentence.
Last year, Fuller asked that nothing be done to prolong his time on death row.
A federal judge in June ruled Fuller competent to drop his appeals after he testified at a hearing that he was "ready to move on."
A Section on 10/06/2016