A death row inmate wrestled with guilt and addiction before his execution

ATMORE, Ala. — When Derrick Dearman entered Alabama’s execution chamber Thursday evening, he was the fifth man the state put to death this year. The difference between Dearman and the men who came before him is that he went to his death willingly.

In April, Dearman, 36, dropped his appeals and wrote a letter to Gov. Kay Ivey and state Attorney General Steve Marshall asking for an execution date, saying he no longer wanted to delay justice for the families of his victims. In the days leading to his death, Dearman got high on illegal drugs smuggled into prison and worried that giving up his life would not be enough to change perceptions of his monstrous crime. 

Dearman was convicted in 2016 of killing Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, who was five months pregnant. 

Dearman said in an interview with NBC News in April that he was awake for nearly a week before the crime, high on methamphetamine.

Bryant Randall, Chelsea’s father and the brother of Shannon and Robert, said that he forgives Dearman because of his Christian faith but that he believes Dearman is trying to relieve his own suffering.

“That might be the easy way out for him, because he might not be able to stand being in prison,” Randall said. “I believe in the death penalty, but it might be more justice for him to spend the rest of his life in prison.

“Now that he’s clean, he probably can’t live with what he’s done,” he said.

Dearman’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, said Dearman had been using for years.

“Most of the time that I’ve known him, he has been hopelessly addicted to drugs, and if he has the money, he can get anything he wants,” said Hood, an activist in the movement to abolish the death penalty. 

It was not clear that Dearman was clean in the days before his execution, according to a source at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility who requested anonymity without authorization to speak. Dearman was high in the days before he was scheduled to die, the person said.

The presence of illegal drugs in Alabama prisons is well-documented. In 2020, the U.S. Justice Department sued the state, alleging its prison conditions violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The complaint detailed the availability of drugs in the prison system, pointing to meth and fentanyl as causes of prisoner-on-prisoner violence and overdose deaths.

Last week, a correctional officer at Holman was charged with smuggling meth into the prison, which houses the state’s death row population, and distributing it to an inmate. 

In a recording Dearman made with Hood in September during their pre-execution ministry, he described his crime in vivid detail, characterizing it as an out-of-body “evil” experience.

Dearman said that after having lived in a “dope house” for “two or three months,” he reconnected with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Laneta Lester.

Lester and Dearman were in a “volatile” long-term relationship, according to court filings, but she had recently fled from him to the home of her brother, Joseph Turner; his wife, Shannon Randall; and their 3-month-old baby in Citronelle, Alabama.

Dearman went to the home and was told he could not stay the night.

“I wanted to be in a place where I could distance myself from drugs,” Dearman said. “I broke down, poured my heart out and was told no.”

After being turned away multiple times, Dearman drove off the property and ran out of gas.

“I sat there for a minute and just thought, here I am way off over here in Alabama, you know, no gas, stuck out here. Just all the failures. You know, I’m always failing,” he said. “And then in my mind, it was just something just kept pressing on my mind, you know, just, just this evil.”

Dearman walked several miles back to the house in the middle of the night.

“Everybody was asleep, so I knocked on a window in the living room where Laneta was asleep, and she looked up. She came over the front door,” he said. 

Lester did not invite him inside; instead, she and Dearman argued outside. She told him to get some sleep and something to eat and come back in the morning. 

“I didn’t want to hear none of that,” he said. “Something just took over. And I know now with the entirety of my being that it was evil.

“I walked up to the front yard; there was an ax there. I grabbed it. I went to the front door. It had a little latch thing on the inside. I popped it, and then I went inside.”

He went through the house, attacking five of the occupants with an ax while they were sleeping. The first victim was Robert Brown, who was in a recliner near Laneta, the second victim. He then moved into Turner and Randall’s bedroom, striking them with the ax but leaving their baby unharmed.

Dearman wrestled a pistol away from Justin Reed as Reed tried to defend himself and Chelsea Reed. After he shot the Reeds, he went back and shot the other victims, as well.

Then he kidnapped Lester and the baby and fled to his father’s home in Leakesville, Mississippi. 

Lester escaped with the baby the next morning and went to the police. At the same time, Dearman surrendered to Leakesville police after he had come down from his high and realized what he had done. 

“I knew that my life was over with,” he said. “I knew that something terrible had happened and that I was responsible, whether it was 100% me or not.” 

Dearman said that he still wrestled with the idea that he had the ability to carry out the gruesome murders and that he continued to struggle with his addiction, which began when he was a teenager. 

Hood said: “His drug use has opened him up to seismic manifestations of evil in his life. Derek let things into his life and into his body that manifested tremendous evil.”

A psychological evaluation during his trial found that though Dearman was “abusing methamphetamine at the time, [he] appears to have been aware of his actions and their effects on the victims and to have been able to discern the wrongfulness of his behavior.”

Dearman pleaded guilty to the murders in 2018 and said he went through the appeals process for his family. In the days before his execution, his was joined by his father, his sister and his two sons in the prison visitation room. 

The day before the execution, he told his sons that he was giving up his life because it was the only way to save his soul.

Dearman’s younger sister, Abagail, told NBC News that in the hour before his execution, she was “surprised” when her brother ultimately gave up his appeals, even though he had mentioned the possibility to her a few times over the years.

Dearman’s father, sister and brother-in-law and a friend witnessed his execution.

Strapped to the execution table with IV lines in place, Dearman expressed his remorse to the families of his victims, who were also present.

“To the victims’ families, forgive me. This is not for me; this is for you. I’ve taken so much,” he said. “To my family, I’ve already said it, y’all already know I love you.” 

In the weeks before his death, Dearman struggled to take responsibility for his actions, blaming the murders on forces outside himself. 

“I knew it wasn’t 100% me and my anger,” he said. “It was something I wish I had words that could describe, something taking me up and using that anger.”  

The Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that works with prisoners who may have been denied fair trials, represented Dearman during his appeals process and raised questions about his mental competency in a blog post this week.

“Derrick Dearman stopped his appeals only after a lifetime of severe mental illness and suicidal behavior that Alabama courts have repeatedly ignored,” it said.

Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, about 150 people have volunteered to be executed, or about 10% of all those who have been executed. 

Alabama has one of the highest per capita execution rates in the country. The execution of Carey Dale Grayson via nitrogen gas is set for next month.