HOUSTON – A Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problems pulled out his only good eye and told authorities he ate it. Andre Thomas, 25, was arrested for the fatal stabbings of his estranged wife, their young son and her 13-month-old daughter in March 2004. Their hearts also had been ripped out. He was convicted and condemned for the infant’s death.
While in the Grayson County Jail in Sherman, Thomas plucked out his right eye before his trial later in 2004. A judge subsequently ruled he was competent to stand trial.
A death-row officer at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood on his face and took him to the infirmary.
“”Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it,” agency spokesman Jason Clark said Friday.
Thomas was treated at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler after the Dec. 9 incident. Then he was transferred and remains at the Jester Unit, a prison psychiatric facility near Richmond southwest of Houston.
“He will finally be able to receive the mental health care that we had wanted and begged for from day 1,” Bobbie Peterson-Cate, Thomas’ trial attorney, told the Sherman Herald Democrat. “He is insane and mentally ill. It is exactly the same reason he pulled out the last one.”
At his trial, defense lawyers also argued he suffered from alcohol and drug abuse.
Thomas does not have an execution date.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in October upheld his conviction and death sentence for the death of 13-month-old Leyha Marie Hughes. Also killed March 27, 2004, were his wife, Laura Christine Boren, 20, and their son, 4-year-old Andre Lee.
Thomas, from Texoma, walked into the Sherman Police Department and told a dispatcher he had just murdered the three and had stabbed himself in the chest.
Thomas told police how he put his victims’ hearts in his pocket and left their apartment, took them home, put them in a plastic bag and threw them in the trash.
Court documents described the three victims as having “large, gaping wounds to their chests.”
Source:
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090109/ap_on_re_us/death_row_eye;_ylt=Agv.yeEnNmI0gO8DpY46_KMDW7oF
I am sooo close to calling this man my hero.
Favorite This!
Wow. While I’m not a proponent of the death penalty, in this case, I think it might be a mercy killing.
Weird, I think I submitted this like 2 or 3 months ago.
Could it be? Internet-D’s queue line is longer than MCS’?
@Dreth: Nah, tiki is totally sloshed by the time he gets around to MCS’s little sister.
I dunno about the death penalty, but prison needs to be tougher on it’s prisoners ala lose rights that should be privileged. No more gangs within prison, no more crimes within prison and no more being a kingpin to the criminals outside of prison. Obviously making prison some sort of strict place with rules where felons can congregate with one another is not working.
And people like this guy deserve a straight jacket in a mental ward.
Only pissed because California is going to release prisoners into the world due to overcrowding and growing deficit. Which will work wonders with the dwindling police force.
Okay rant is over.
@Puulaahi: What you’re talking about is nearly impossible, actually it is totally impossible. Inmates are people and notoriously difficult to control. You’d think it would be easy, but it’s not. They spend 24/7/365 figuring out ways to get around the system. Even in segregation or ASIA they fond ways to so what they want. It comes down to one rule really. It is one of the responsibilities of the prison system and it’s employees to protect inmates from each other. This forces staff interactions w/ inmates. Wherever you have have interaction, problems arise and the kind of total control you’re looking for disappears..
@nyokki: Compared to other countries our prisons are a cake walk. They are so difficult to control because the prisoners have so much freedom within the prison and are treated like people. I am just saying if our prisons were harsh and perhaps even inhumane like other countries, our prisons would not be overcrowded and criminals would think twice before committing a crime.
@Puulaahi: We’re also the only country that incarcerates its non-violent offenders (possession) w/ violent repeat offenders (assault). The officers are then put in the position of having to protect the inmates from each other. I’m tellin’ ya, hubby worked in MD State prison system for 20 years. There is no real fix for the situation we find ourselves in. It will be several years (prolly decades) before a serious reform of the legal/penal system happens.
All that said, it will take a lot of people to change their thinking about what an inmate is and what his/her rights are before anything can change.