Convicted hit man Christopher Coleman was executed Tuesday for his role in a triple-murder that took place in Houston almost 14 years ago.
Coleman, 37, was condemned for his part in a scheme by a Colombian man who hoped to eliminate a drug debt by staging a robbery. Four people wound up shot in a car on a dead-end street. Three of them, including a 3-year-old boy, died.
“Yes. Ain’t no way fo fo, I love all y’all,” were the last and only words uttered by Coleman at 6:14 p.m., just eight minutes prior to his being pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m.
It was unclear what “fo fo” meant, although in urban slang it can refer to a .44-caliber pistol or distinctive car rims made in 1984 and apparently popular in Houston.
No personal or victim witnesses attended Coleman’s execution by lethal injection — the 18th to take place in Texas this year.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier rejected a clemency request for Coleman, who was one of three men convicted in the case. The other two, Enrique Andrade Mosquera, 44, and Derrick Graham, 40, received life in prison.
Prosecutors said Mosquera owed $80,000 for four kilos of cocaine he received from Hurtado Heinar Prado, 34, also from Colombia, but didn’t want to pay. Instead, he hired Coleman for $12,000 and Graham for $10,000 to stage a robbery during the payoff.
Hurtado Heinar Prado was in the front seat of a car driven by another Colombian, Jose Mario Garcia-Castro, 33, when they met the three men at the end of a Houston street in the early morning hours of Dec. 14, 1995. Elsie Prado, Prado’s sister and Garcia-Castro’s girlfriend, and her son, Danny Giraldo, were in the back seat.
Testimony showed that Coleman approached the passenger side of the car, said something to the two men in the front and opened fire. Only Elsie Prado survived. She identified Coleman as the gunman.
Coleman was arrested at a motel in Lawrenceburg, Tenn., a week later. He told police he was at the shooting scene but denied being the gunman. At his trial, Coleman’s lawyers argued he was not the gunman.
Coleman’s appeals attorneys argued that Elsie Prado’s testimony at his 1997 trial was not truthful, that she lied about her involvement in the drug deal and that she failed to disclose that she and Mosquera knew each other and grew up in the same neighborhood in Cali, Colombia.
The 5th Circuit ruled last week that jurors could have found Coleman guilty of capital murder even without the woman’s testimony.
Coleman had no previous prison record but served 60 days in jail in Harris County for assault. He refused to speak with reporters in the weeks before his scheduled execution.
His execution was one of two set for this week in Texas.
Kenneth Mosley, 51, is scheduled to die Thursday for fatally shooting a police officer, Michael Moore, during a bank robbery in the Dallas suburb of Garland in 1997.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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