Texas Executes John Allen Rubio for 2003 Killings of His Three Children

John Allen Rubio, 46, was executed by lethal injection in Texas on Thursday for fatally stabbing and beheading his three young children in 2003. According to The Guardian, he was pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. at the state prison in Huntsville.

The execution used pentobarbital, a sedative drug. Rubio took three breaths, with snoring-like sounds, and was pronounced dead 21 minutes after the injection began.

The children were three-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E Rubio and two-month-old Mary Jane Rubio. They were killed in an apartment in Brownsville, Texas. The building was later demolished, and the land was turned into a park and community garden.

Rubio's common-law wife, Angela Camacho, pleaded guilty for her role in the slayings and received a life sentence. A common-law wife is a partner who is treated as a spouse under the law without having had a formal marriage ceremony.

Rubio's first capital murder conviction was overturned on appeal because Camacho's statements had been improperly admitted as evidence. At his second trial, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, a plea arguing that mental illness meant he should not be held criminally responsible. He was again convicted and sentenced to death. Defense experts diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, a finding that prosecution experts rejected.

On the same Thursday, Oklahoma executed James Pavatt, 73, by lethal injection at a state prison. Pavatt had been convicted for the 2001 fatal shooting of his girlfriend's estranged husband. The victim was shot as he arrived to pick up his two young children before Thanksgiving.

The Texas and Oklahoma executions were the 36th and 37th carried out in the United States this year.