An alabama inmate convicted of killing a woman after breaking into her apartment while she slept was executed on Thursday night in the fourth execution of the nation using Nitrogen gas.
Demetrius Frazier, 52, was declared dead at 6:36 PM CST in a prison in southern Alabama for his conviction for murder in the rape and murder of Pauline Brown, 41. It was the first execution in Alabama this year and the third in the United States in 2025, after a lethal injection on Wednesday in Texas and another last Friday in South Carolina.
“First of all, I want to apologize to Pauline Brown’s family and friends. What happened to Pauline Brown should never have happened,” Frazier said. He also criticized the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Witmer, so he said it was his inability to pass the appeals that he was returned to fulfill a life sentence in his state.
“I love everyone in the death corridor. Detroit Fuerte,” he said.
Recently, the mother’s opponents and Frazier’s death penalty had appealed to Whitmer to take Frazier to Michigan to complete his life imprisonment for the murder of a teenager before being delivered to the Alabama authorities years ago. Michigan does not have the death penalty.
The Michigan Attorney’s Office wrote in a presentation of the January court that the State did not want Frazier to return. It was in 1992 while he was in custody in Michigan that Frazier confessed to kill Brown, police said.
The governor of Michigan, Whitmer, told Detroit News before the execution that his predecessor in office, Rick Snyder, “unfortunately” he agreed to send Frazier to Alabama where he was in the hands of the officials there.
“It is a really difficult situation,” he told the media before the execution was carried out. “I understand supplications and worries. Michigan is not a state of death penalty.”
Prosecutors said that on November 27, 1991, Frazier, then 19, broke into Brown’s department in Birmingham while he was asleep. The prosecutors said he demanded money and raped Brown at a gunpoint after she gave him $ 80 of his bag. Then he shot him in the head, they said, and added that he returned later to take a snack and look for money.
Frazier was sentenced to life imprisonment in Michigan for the murder of Crystal Kendrick of 1992, 14. Then, in 1996, an Alabama jury condemned him for killing Brown and recommended by a 10-2 vote that received a death sentence. Frazier remained in Michigan’s custody until 2011, when the then governors of the two states agreed to transfer him to Alabama’s death corridor.
Alabama became the first state in Carry out nitrogen gas executions When three inmates were executed last year using the method. It involves placing a respirator gas mask on the person’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing death due to lack of oxygen.
The execution began around 6:10 pm after a correction officer made a final verification of the respirator mask used to administer the nitrogen gas. Frazier moved his extended hands in a circular movement during the first minute more or less before starting to make a grimace and tremble on the stretcher. At 6:13 pm he lifted both legs several inches from the stretcher
He seemed to breathe panting. Then, his breathing slowed in a series of sporadic breaths. I had no visible movement at 6:21 pm the curtains closed to the execution chamber at 6:29 pm
Alabama’s corrections commissioner John Hamm said the gas flowed for about 18 minutes. He said the instruments indicated that Frazier no longer had a heartbeat 13 minutes after the gas began to flow.
Hamm said he believed that Frazier lost his conscience quickly, noting that the movement of the turn of the hands had stopped. The commissioner said he believed that the other movements, such as the elevation of the legs and periodic breaths were involuntary movements.
A federal judge last week rejected a request to block the execution of Frazier. His lawyers had argued that the new method does not work as fast as the State promised. The witnesses of the media, including the Associated Press, described how they killed them to death with the method shook the stretcher at the beginning of their executions.
The judge, however, ruled that the Execution descriptions He did not support the discovery that none of the men “experienced severe psychological pain or anguish above what is inherent in any execution.”
Some of Brown’s family members witnessed execution, but chose not to make a statement to the media
“In Alabama, we enforce the law. You do not come to our state and get our citizens and leave with yours. Loved ones,” said Alabama governor Kay Ivey, in a statement.
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