Thirty years ago, a Texas man named Arthur Brown, Jr. was convicted of murdering four people, including a woman who was nine months pregnant at the time of her death. For a long time, Brown was living on Texas death row, waiting for his time to die. When the date of his lethal injection finally came time, he used the opportunity to share final words that sent chills down many people’s spines.
On Thursday evening, Arthur Brown, Jr., 52, received a lethal injection by a Texas state executioner. His life came to an end at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. When he was given a chance to speak his final words, he took the opportunity to speak out about his execution and claim that his death was not justice for the people’s lives he took during a drug-related robbery thirty years ago.
In his final moments, Brown denied any wrongdoing and claimed that he was just another “innocent man” who was dying at the hands of the Texas state executioner. His final words were as follows.
“What is happening here tonight isn’t justice,” Brown said before he was injected with a lethal dose of killing drugs. “It’s the murder of another innocent man.”
Brown was convicted of the 1992 murders of four people. He allegedly conducted a drug robbery that went wrong and ended in the death of four people. He was sentenced to death row more than thirty years ago and has been waiting for his day to die since then.
According to authorities at the time, Brown was a member of a drug operation that would regularly transport narcotics from the state of Texas to the state of Alabama, where they went to use by drug addicts and other users.
Allegedly, Brown and his accomplices visited the home of a married couple who supplied drugs to the gang. When things did not go as planned, authorities claimed that Brown gunned down four people as he and his accomplices raided the property for all drugs and other valuables.
Brown and his drug affiliates allegedly tied up the people in the couple’s home, which included 32-year-old Jose Tovar and his wife’s son Frank Farias, 17. They also tied up neighbors 21-year-old Audrey Brown and 19-year-old Jessica Quinones. At the time of her murder, Quinones was nine months pregnant with a child.
Jose Tovar’s wife, Rachel, and another person were both shot during the drug robbery gone wrong. However, they were not killed at the time and survived the shocking ordeal.
“I don’t see how anybody could have just killed a pregnant woman and then made her suffer so much,” said Quinones’ older sister Maricella before Brown’s execution this past Thursday in Huntsville. “It’s just beyond words.”
In a last-ditched effort to delay the execution, Brown’s attorneys claimed he should not receive the death penalty due to his intellectual disability, a claim prosecutors never agreed to.
“Mr. Brown’s intellectual limitations were known to his friends and family,” the killer’s attorneys wrote in their petition. “Individuals that knew Mr. Brown over the course of his life have described him consistently as ‘slow.’”
Nevertheless, Brown’s final words sent shockwaves through the Texas community.