A death row prisoner said he had tried to do a “good deed every single day” since killing a 16-year-old girl and added “I love you” to his family in Japanese, before he was given a lethal injection.
Thomas Edwin Loden Jr had pleaded guilty to capital murder, rape and four counts of sexual battery against Leesa Marie Gray who was killed in June, 2000.
A coroner pronounced Loden, 58, dead at 6.12 pm on Wednesday at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.
He wore a red prison jumpsuit and was covered by a white sheet during the execution. Brown leather straps held him down on a gurney.
Before the injection started, Loden said he was "deeply remorseful."
“I’d like a brief moment to express to the Gray family and anyone else I hurt how deeply remorseful I am for everything I did. I know these are mere words and cannot erase the damage I did," said Loden.
“For the last 20 years, I’ve tried to do a good deed every single day to make up for the [life] that I took for this world,” he added. “If nothing else, I hope you get peace and closure.”
He concluded his last words by saying "I love you" in Japanese, officials said as they were difficult to make out.
“He told us during the tie down process, him being restrained, he was going to express his remorse and say, ‘I love you’ to his loved ones in Japanese,” said Mississippi Department of Corrections Deputy Commissioner of Institutions Jeworski Mallett.
And Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain said the execution went as planned.
“There was a normal process, as far as you can call it normal,” Mr Cain said, reported WLBT.com. “He went to sleep. So, he closed his eyes and did what normally people do in the situation. His breath got short, and he passed away.”
“No glitch, no problems. The chemicals did their job,” he added.
The commissioner also confirmed that the victim Ms Gray's mother, Wanda Farris, was present at the execution.
During the summer ahead of what should have been Ms Gray's senior year of high school, she had worked as a waitress at her uncle's restaurant in northeast Mississippi. On June 22, 2000, she left work after dark and became stranded with a flat tyre on a rural road.
Loden, a Marine Corps recruiter with relatives in the area, encountered Ms Gray on the road around 10.45 pm. He stopped and began speaking with the teenager about the flat tyre saying: "Don't worry. I'm a marine. We do this kind of stuff."
Loden told investigators he became angry after Ms Gray allegedly said she would never want to be a marine, and that he ordered her into his van. He spent four hours sexually assaulting her before strangling and suffocating her, according to an interview he gave investigators.
Court records show that on the afternoon of June 23, 2000, "Loden was discovered lying by the side of a road with the words `I'm sorry' carved into his chest and apparent self-inflicted lacerations on his wrists."
After pleading guilty in September 2001, Loden told Ms Gray's friends and family during his sentencing: "I hope you may have some sense of justice when you leave here today."
Ms Farris described her daughter as a "happy-go-lucky, always smiling" teenager who aspired to become an elementary school teacher.
