A South Carolina killer who taunted police by writing a message in blood after murdering three men in a week has become the third inmate executed by firing squad in the state this year.
Stephen Corey Bryant, who once scrawled "catch me if u can" on a wall using the blood of 62-year-old victim Willard "T.J." Tietjen, was executed on Friday, Nov. 14, for the 2004 murder. He was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m.
Bryant's executioners strapped him to a chair and placed a hood over his head. Three volunteer corrections officers shot him simultaneously from 15 feet away.
Bryant's attorneys had argued that he should be spared from execution because he was sexually abused as a child and had brain damage caused by his mother using drugs and alcohol while she was pregnant. The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected those arguments earlier this week and allowed the execution to proceed.
"Mr. Bryant is the seventh man South Carolina has executed in fourteen months," one of his attorneys, Bo King, said in a statement after the execution. "Each was forced to make the barbaric and unconscionable 'choice' between bloody, burning, or protracted deaths. Each execution has been brutal and shameful. None has made South Carolina safer or more just.”
