The Houston Chronicle reports that Elkie Taylor has been executed.
“You ain’t got to worry about nothing,” Elkie Lee Taylor told an aunt and a couple of friends from the death chamber gurney. “I am going home. I hope to see all of y’all one day. Lord have mercy on my soul.”
Then he looked through another death chamber window where relatives of his victims were standing and told them, “Stay strong. It’s bad to see a man get murdered for something he didn’t do. But I am taking it like a man, like a warrior. I am going home to Jesus.”
After telling the warden he was ready and as the lethal drugs began flowing, he said, “Don’t forget to tell my daughter …” and mumbled something that couldn’t be understood. Nine minutes later, at 6:30 p.m. CST, he was pronounced dead.
Taylor, 46, was condemned for killing Otis Flake in 1993. Flake was found dead — sitting up against a bed, his feet and hands bound and hangers twisted around his neck — by a friend after Taylor and an accomplice were spotted earlier walking away from Flake’s home near downtown Fort Worth.
Taylor was the 15th Texas inmate executed this year and the first of six scheduled for lethal injection this month in the nation’s most active capital punishment state.
The execution came after the U.S. Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals turned down last-day appeals.
