Stay for Brian

Sabine · #1 05-07-2002, 05:04 PM

White supremacist wins stay of execution

Associated Press

HUNTSVILLE -- Convicted killer Brian Davis was granted a stay of execution today, just hours before he was set to die for fatally stabbing a Harris County man whose corpse was decorated with a swastika and the initials of a skinhead group.

Davis, 33, was be the 11th Texas prisoner executed this year and the first of two scheduled to die this week. Another is set for Thursday.

"I'm innocent of this crime," Davis said recently from death row. "I was wrong to confess ... but I was trying to save my wife."

Davis' now ex-wife, Tina McDonald, 31, is serving 40 years after pleading guilty to aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and auto theft for an offense a week after Michael Foster was killed at his apartment in Humble, just northeast of Houston.

The pair was tied to the Foster slaying while in custody for the other offense. They had married two months earlier and met while Davis was in jail. At the time, she was the friend of another inmate Davis knew.

"You couldn't think of a worse couple hooking up," said Harris County assistant district attorney Kelly Siegler, who prosecuted Davis for killing Foster.

Davis, who went to prison at age 18 for violating probation on a marijuana delivery conviction, was paroled to Houston after serving 14 months of an eight-year term and became involved with drugs, white supremacists, transvestites and male prostitutes who robbed their customers.

Davis said McDonald, whom he described as a skinhead, was responsible for stabbing Foster 11 times after they met him at a Houston bar and drove him home the night of Aug. 10, 1991.

He said his wife also used a ballpen to inscribe on Foster's abdomen a swastika and the letters "NSSH" -- which stood for National Society of Skinheads.

Prosecutors said Foster had offered the couple gas money in exchange for the ride home, then told them he didn't have any cash, enraging Davis.

"He had a violent streak in him that he couldn't control," Siegler said. "They had been drinking and he was with Tina."

Davis contended he was drunk and asleep in the backseat of a car and never was inside Foster's apartment.

McDonald has given multiple explanations, including one where she described how Foster refused to stop putting his arm around her so she stabbed him repeatedly.

In another, sent to the Harris County district attorney's office last week, McDonald affirmed an earlier affidavit saying Davis was responsible for Foster's death and that she'd taken the blame previously at Davis' request.

"She's always flip-flopped," Siegler said. "One minute she's in love with him and the next minute she's not."

Davis blames the Texas prison system for shaping his beliefs that white people are superior.

"I am what they made me," he says. "I stand for the white race, but I'm no racist."

Davis, who grew up in Millsap, about 40 miles west of Fort Worth, was expelled from the seventh grade and wound up in Texas Youth Commission custody after an auto theft arrest at
age 12.

The 1986 marijuana conviction got him probation, which he violated and wound up in prison.

He said he was beaten there by black inmates, who outnumbered the whites, and sought protection by allying himself with white gang members.

On his chest is a tattoo of swastika outlined with flames and lightning bolts. Another swastika tattoo is on one arm and an obscene motorcycle logo is tattooed on the other arm.

"Swastikas sell fear," he said. "I don't believe in hating just for skin color. Any hatred I have was beat into me.

"To me, this is worse than death," he said of his confinement on death row. "For me, I'm ready to go."