MCALSTER, Okla. (AP) — Oklahoma has executed a man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her 7-month-old daughter nearly 20 years ago.
Raymond Johnson, 52, was pronounced dead at 10:12 a.m. Thursday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester after being injected with three drugs, prison officials said.
He was sentenced to death in June 2007 for the deaths of 24-year-old Brooke Whitaker and her 7-month-old daughter Kya.
Prosecutors said Johnson and Whitaker got into an argument at her Tulsa home, after which Whitaker struck her in the head multiple times with a metal claw hammer. Whitaker suffered a fractured skull and more than 20 lacerations to his face and scalp. Prosecutors said in documents prepared for Johnson’s pardon hearing in April that she remained conscious and begged Johnson to let her go with Kia, who was sleeping in the bedroom.
“She begged him to call 911. She begged him to let her mother pick up Kia. She begged him to think about her child,” the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office said. Whitaker also had three other children.
The attorney general’s office said Johnson took a gas can from a backyard tool shed, doused Whitaker and the house with gasoline, lit a dish towel, threw it at Whitaker, and left. Whittaker died from head injuries and smoke inhalation, while her daughter died from severe burns.
“Raymond Johnson was a brutal murderer who inflicted unimaginable pain on his victims,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said in a statement.
Johnson’s lawyers did not file a last-minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his execution.
His lawyers unsuccessfully argued in earlier appeals that Johnson’s arrest was illegal, that police forced him to plead guilty and that his trial lawyers pleaded guilty in Whitaker’s death without his permission.
In April, Oklahoma’s five pardon and parole boards voted unanimously to deny clemency to Johnson. At that pardon hearing, Johnson apologized to the victims’ families and asked for forgiveness, saying he was a changed man.
“I apologize. No excuses, no reasons, a sincere apology. To know it’s sincere, look at my actions. Look at my life. Look at how I’ve changed. I’m living a life of remorse. I’m living it,” Johnson said in an interview with Death Penalty Action, a national anti-death penalty organization.
Whitaker’s family is asking that the lethal injection proceed.
“Executing him will not give my mother or sister back, nor will it erase nearly 20 years of pain,” Whitaker’s eldest daughter, Logan Kleck, said in a letter to the board. “It will ultimately stop him from continuing to hurt us.”
In addition to first-degree murder, Johnson was nine years into a 20-year sentence after being convicted of manslaughter in 1996.
Johnson was the second person executed in Oklahoma this year and the 11th nationwide.
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Lozano reported from Houston. Follow Juan A. Lozano: https://x.com/juanlozano70
