Johnson’s execution, if not delayed, will be Harris county’s 100th execution since executions were resumed in Texas in 1982.
Harris county, if it were a state would be Number Two in the country for executions, following the state of Texas. Number Three is the state of Virginia.
Please read the article from today’s Houston Chronicle and following it an excellent report on Harris County by Amnesty International.
Then make plans to join us on the tree-lined sidewalk in front of Chuck Rosenthal’s home at 7723 Pagewood. The home is three blocks west of Hillcroft and three blocks south of Richmond, in between Hillcroft and Stoneybrook.
Invited speakers for the press conference are Assistant Minister Eric Muhammad with Nation of Islam Mosque 45, the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement, Harris County Green Party, the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, prison activist Ray Hill, producer of S.O.S. Radio Brother Zin and the family of Michael Richard, a mentally retarded man set for execution on September 25.
July 22, 2007, 8:40PM
Tomball killer is set to be executed Tuesday
Case again focuses attention on race relations in community
By ALLAN TURNER
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
Durham, alone in the store, telephoned her friend Gunar “Bubba” Fulk, 16, and asked him to keep her company. Minutes later, Fulk, a strapping 6-foot-plus Magnolia High football player, and his friend Leroy “Punkin'” McCaffrey, 17, pulled into the parking lot.
The teens talked to the man — later identified as Lonnie Earl Johnson — then told Durham they were giving the seemingly stranded motorist a ride.
Four hours later, about 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 15, 1990, a motorist spotted Fulk’s body beside FM 2920, about four miles from the store. He had been shot three times in the head and once in the chest. McCaffrey’s corpse was found 350 feet away.
Detectives traced Johnson to Austin, where he was arrested at a topless bar Aug. 30. Although the Tomball landscape worker said he killed the teens in self-defense, a Harris County jury found him guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to die.
Barring favorable action on last-minute appeals accusing prosecutors of illegally withholding crucial information from defense attorneys, Johnson, 44, will be executed Tuesday. In a recent death row interview, Johnson likened himself to James Byrd Jr., the 49-year-old Jasper man whose racially motivated dragging death in 1998 gained international notoriety.
“The only difference between me and James Byrd,” Johnson said, “is that I lived.”
The case, which has attracted interest from as far away as Canada, again focuses attention on race relations in the tiny northwest Harris County community, which two years ago hosted a Ku Klux Klan function in a city-owned building.
GIVE EM HELL!