A South Carolina death row inmate who horrifiedly killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat in 2001 is scheduled to be executed for firing a squad on Friday.
Brad Sigmon (67), who admits to killing because his ex-girlfriend refuses to return to him, is tied to a chair around 6pm, with three volunteers armed with rifles about 15 feet away fire bullets into his heart.
Each is armed with .308 caliber, a Winchester 110-grain tap city ammunition that is often used by police shooters. The bullet is designed to crush the impact with something violent, like the bones in the inmate’s chest, sending fragments intended to destroy the heart and cause death almost immediately.
Brad Sigmon will be killed by firing the squad on Friday. (Kinard Lisbon/South Carolina Separt of Corrections of AP, left, via the South Carolina Department of Corrections, right.)
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If South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster and South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson sign off, the executions will proceed. Sigmon’s lawyer asks McMaster to commute his death sentence to prison life, claiming he is a model prisoner and works every day for the murders he commits after succumbing to a severe mental illness. However, the governor of South Carolina has not given his tolerance in 49 years since the death penalty resumed.
Sigmon chose the method of firing squads on an electric chair, “cook him to life” or a fatal injection.
He has decided to decide on a shooting squad because South Carolina keeps information secret about how to give the fatal injection. On Thursday, Sigmon’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to delay the execution as the state has not released enough information about the fatal injection drug.
Sigmon said he committed the brutal murder because he was angry at being kicked out of a trailer owned by the victim. They were in separate rooms in Greenville County home, and Sigmon attacked them and went back and forth until they died, investigators said.
He shot his ex-girlfriend as she ran away, but missed it, prosecutors said.
A graphic depicting the shooting execution scheduled for Friday. (AP)
South Carolina schedules run again after vacation pause
“My intention was to kill her,” Sigmon said in a confession that the detective typed out after his arrest. “That was my intention all along. If I couldn’t have her, I wouldn’t have anyone else to have her.
Five states, Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah, allow firearms to be used in certain circumstances.
In Utah in 1977, 1996 and 2010, three inmates faced shooting squads in the United States since the death penalty was revived in 1976. Ronnie Gardner was a prisoner fired in Utah in 2010.
This photo, provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections, shows the state’s death room in Columbia, South Carolina, which includes an electric chair, right and a shooting squad chair. (Correctal Department via the AP of South Carolina)
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The executions in South Carolina resumed in September. It resumed in September when one of the once busiest states for enforcement ended its 13-year hiatus in carrying out the death penalty.
The suspension was partly caused by states where it was difficult to obtain fatal injection drugs after supply expired due to concerns that they had to disclose that they had sold the drug to state authorities. The state legislature then passed a Shield Act that allowed authorities to keep deadly injectable drug suppliers private.
Last year, 25 executions were carried out in the United States. Five people have already been implemented in 2025 for each death penalty information center.
Fox News’ Landon Mion and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Michael Dorgan is a writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business.
You can submit tips to Michael.dorgan@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @M_Dorgan.
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