July 9


TEXAS---execution

Man who killed 3, including wife and daughter, executed


A retired Army sergeant was executed today evening for murdering his
17-month-old step-granddaughter in a 1998 massacre where his wife and
5-month-old daughter also were gunned down.

Asked by the warden if he wanted to make a final statement, Christopher
Black Sr., said no. As the drugs began flowing, he made a groaning sigh
and was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m.

Black was convicted of killing Katrease Houston at the Killeen home of his
estranged wife Gwendolyn Black, the toddler's grandmother. Katrease was
found slumped in a high chair. She had been shot 5 times in the chest.

Her grandmother was shot 10 times. Black's daughter, Christina Marie, was
shot once.

"I ran out of bullets," Black told a 911 operator he called after the Feb.
7, 1998, attack.

The U.S. Supreme Court in April refused to consider Black's appeal and no
additional appeals were made, his lawyer, Jack Hurley, said.

Black bought a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol the day before the shooting. He
mailed cassette tapes to relatives explaining plans to kill his
36-year-old wife and anyone else in the house. The tapes were timed to
arrive after the shooting.

The couple had married just over 3 years earlier but relatives said
Gwendolyn Black, who worked as an elementary school teacher in nearby
Copperas Cove after leaving the Army, was seeking a divorce because she
received little help from her husband with the children and he had moved
out of town to take a security job.

Police who responded to 911 calls from Black and neighbors found him
unarmed and holding his daughter to his chest.

"We approached him and he said he wasn't going to put the baby down on the
cold ground," Officer Eric Bradley said. "As I reached up to grab the baby
from him, he said: 'I want to kiss my baby.' I said go ahead.

"As I pulled the baby toward me, the baby's head kind of just rolled to
the left... The eyes were open, fixed, no pulse, no respiration, no
nothing."

It took a jury in Killeen 15 minutes to convict Black of capital murder of
Katrease. In Texas, murder of a child under the age of 6 can be a death
penalty case and the same jury deliberated about seven hours before
deciding his punishment.

"I don't recall a case that was any more aggravated or any more vicious in
the way the crime was committed and the consequences," Lon Curtis, the
former assistant district attorney in Bell County who prosecuted Black,
said this week. "The image of that baby, the little girl, slumped over in
her high chair with 5 rounds in the chest... I wish I hadn't been reminded
of that."

Black declined to speak from death row with reporters.

"My days are long and sad," he wrote on a Web site where inmates seek pen
pals. "I do not want romance or money, the only thing that I want is a
friend."

"He made his choices," Bradley said. "And that's where he's at."

Black becomes the 18th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in
Texas and the 307th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on
December 7, 1982. Black becomes the 68th condemned inmate to be put to
death since Rick Perry became governor in 2001.

Black becomes the 43rd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in
the USA and the 863rd overall since America resumed executions on January
17, 1977.

(source: Associated Press)