JUST IN: Arizona Executed Him In The Most Painful Way For 2 Hours | 600 Gasps Before Death

What is excruciating is seeing your dad laying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister laying there in a pool of blood. That is excruciating.

On July twenty-third, two thousand fourteen, inside Florence State Prison, Arizona, a man lies flat on a gurney inside the state’s death chamber. His arms are stretched out while heavy straps hold him down, and the room remains completely dead quiet.

At one fifty-two in the afternoon, the lethal drugs go in, but nothing works the way it should. One minute passes, then five, then ten, and then the gasping starts—loud, desperate, and relentless.

Witnesses in the room freeze and look at each other, realizing that something is clearly wrong. By the time it is over, that man will have been injected fifteen times, gasping more than six hundred times throughout the ordeal.

One reporter in the room will later say his breathing sounded exactly like a fish gulping for air. An execution that should have taken ten minutes will stretch to one hour and fifty-seven minutes.

Inmate Joseph Wood had been on death row for the nineteen eighty-nine murder of his girlfriend and her father. Witnesses say he was gasping for air for nearly two hours, making the ordeal harrowing to watch.

What makes this story even harder to believe is that just before the drugs were administered, that same man looked directly at the family of the people he murdered. He smiled at them without showing a single word of remorse or offering a single apology.

He offered just a smile and a prayer directed at the family whose lives he destroyed. What this convicted killer said to his victim’s family in his final moments, and the way he said it, is something the Deats family will never forget.

What happened inside that death chamber over the next two hours is almost impossible to believe. His name was Joseph Rudolph Wood the Third, double murderer, bloody death row inmate, and the man at the center of one of the most controversial executions in American history.

To understand what happened on August seventh, nineteen eighty-nine, you first need to know who was lost. Debra Deats, known to everyone close to her as Debbie, was twenty-nine years old and lived in Tucson, Arizona.

By all accounts, she was a young woman full of life, deeply connected to her family, and hardworking by nature. She did not work for a corporation or a stranger; she worked at her family’s own auto body shop, the business her father had built with his bare hands.

That shop was not just a place of work, but a place of pride, and Debbie was right there in the middle of it. Her father, Eugene Deats, was fifty-five years old, a man who worked with his hands his whole life and built something real out of it.

That auto body shop in Tucson was his life’s work. He showed up every day, kept it running, and when his daughter started showing up for work beside him, it became a true family affair that held them together.

Eugene was also aware of something most fathers dread. He knew that the man his daughter had been romantically involved with, Joseph Rudolph Wood the Third, was not taking their breakup well at all.

Eugene saw it and felt it coming. According to those who knew the family, he was deeply worried because Debbie had made her decision and stood firm by it.

By the summer of nineteen eighty-nine, the relationship was completely over. She had walked away and moved on with her life.

In court records, she is described as Wood’s estranged girlfriend, a term that carries tremendous weight in domestic violence cases. She was not hiding or running; she was doing what any person has every right to do: living her life, going to work, and building her future.

However, Wood could not accept her decision. What he did next on August seventh, nineteen eighty-nine, did not just end two lives, but set off a chain of events that would take twenty-five years to fully reach its conclusion.

That conclusion turned out to be anything but clean. So, who exactly was Joseph Rudolph Wood the Third? On paper, he looked like nobody special.

He was born on December sixth, nineteen fifty-eight, in Belton, Texas, before eventually making his way to Arizona, where he settled in and blended into the community. To anyone passing by, he was just another man living an ordinary life in an ordinary town.

That was merely the surface, however, because beneath it lay a very different story. Court records do not show a long history of violent criminal convictions before the murders took place.

Yet, the people who knew him and the testimony that later came out at trial painted a clear picture of a man with serious red flags. He was a man who needed constant control and who did not handle rejection well at all.

His relationship with Debbie had been marked by escalating possessiveness. As she pulled away from him, he only pushed harder.

When she made it clear the relationship was over, something in him refused to accept the reality. Witnesses who knew him described a temperament that turned dangerously unstable whenever he felt challenged or dismissed.

Here is the detail that matters most: Wood knew exactly where the auto body shop was, where Debbie and her father worked every single day. He had been in that world, knew their routine, and knew precisely where to find them.

Court records also show no documented evidence of Wood having children of his own, nor did any prominent family network appear in the case files. In the story of this crime, Joseph Rudolph Wood the Third stands largely alone as a man whose entire focus had narrowed down to one thing in those final weeks.

He was focused entirely on a woman who had chosen to walk away from him, and he was simply not going to let that stand. The summer of nineteen eighty-nine was not a peaceful one for the Deats family.

Debbie had ended things with Wood, which should have been the end of the story. But Wood did not see it that way, and as the weeks passed, the tension around the Deats family began to grow noticeably.

Eugene felt it, as a father always does. He watched his daughter go to work every morning and carry on with her life quietly and bravely without giving Wood the reaction he was looking for.

Eugene stayed close to her during this period. He was not going to leave her exposed to potential danger.

That shop was his place of work, but it was also where he could keep a watchful eye on things and keep an eye on her. Debbie, for her part, refused to shrink away in fear.

She kept showing up and kept working, refusing to let a man who could not accept the word “no” take her sense of safety away from her. That kind of courage is worth naming because it was real, even though it ultimately cost her everything.

Meanwhile, Wood’s behavior was becoming harder and harder to ignore. According to court testimony, his anger was building continuously as the rejection settled in.

Instead of walking away, he was moving in the opposite direction. Those who knew him could see that he was reaching a dangerous breaking point.

His mood was volatile and his focus was lethal. Yet, no restraining order was ever filed, and no formal police intervention appears in the records before August seventh.

The warning signs were clearly there and the danger was real, but the formal protection that might have changed everything simply was not in place. The days kept moving as August arrived and the clock kept ticking.

Everyone around them could feel that something was deeply wrong. What they could not know was that by the end of that August afternoon, two people would be dead and the family auto body shop in Tucson would become a gruesome crime scene.

Here is something that separates this case from many others in true crime: there were no accomplices, no middlemen, and no one Wood recruited, paid, or pulled into his plan. Court records confirm clearly that this was a solo act from beginning to end.

That detail matters because in cases where a second or third person is involved, there is always a chance that someone talks, gets nervous, or drops a warning. That did not happen here, leaving no loose thread for the Deats family to pull and no tip that could have reached them in time.

What court records do confirm is that Wood did not stumble into that auto body shop by accident on August seventh, nineteen eighty-nine. He arrived armed with a firearm, walking in with a weapon already in his possession.

He had a clear target in mind—two of them, in fact. This was not a confrontation that got out of hand or a fight that turned physical in the heat of the moment.

He came prepared to shoot, and that is exactly what he did. Witnesses who knew Wood in the period leading up to the murders later testified about his state of mind.

They spoke about his anger, his fixation on Debbie, the things he said, and the way he was acting. People around him could see where his head was at, but none of that testimony stopped what was coming.

Wood had already made up his mind alone, quietly, and without anyone to answer to. August seventh, nineteen eighty-nine, in Tucson, Arizona, began as an ordinary Tuesday workday.

The sun was up, and the Deats family auto body shop was open for business, just as it had been countless times before. It was a place built on hard work that belonged to a family, a place that should have been completely safe.

Debbie was there doing what she always did—showing up, working, and living her life. Her father Eugene was there too, fifty-five years old, standing in his shop beside his daughter.

Neither of them knew what was about to walk through that door. Wood arrived armed and walked into that shop carrying a firearm.

He did not come to talk or argue. Court records confirm he came with one purpose, and he carried it out with devastating speed.

He shot Eugene Deats first—a fifty-five-year-old father and business owner shot down in his own shop. Then Wood turned the gun on Debbie, his twenty-nine-year-old estranged girlfriend who had simply chosen to end a relationship and move forward with her life.

She never got that chance. Court records confirmed both deaths resulted from deliberate, targeted gunshot wounds.

This was not random violence; every single shot was directed at a specific person. The chaos that followed was immediate as witnesses at or near the scene reacted.

Someone called nine-one-one, sending out the emergency call. Law enforcement responded quickly, making their way to the auto body shop on what had started as a perfectly normal Tuesday afternoon.

When first responders arrived, they found two bodies: a father and his daughter, both gone. The shop that Eugene had spent years building was now a crime scene, marked off with tape, surrounded by officers, and stripped of everything it once represented.

Years later, at Wood’s execution, Debbie’s sister, Jean Brown, put into words what no crime report ever could: “What’s excruciating is seeing your dad lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister lying there in a pool of blood.”

Those words, spoken on July twenty-third, two thousand fourteen, drew a straight, unbroken line from that Tuesday afternoon all the way to the death chamber. Twenty-five years apart, the pain was still raw and still bleeding.

As for Wood, he did not disappear into the desert or cross state lines. Court records confirm he was apprehended shortly after, failing to evade law enforcement for long.

The only question left was what the state of Arizona was going to do about it. When the shots were fired, everything stopped for the Deats family.

August seventh, nineteen eighty-nine, did not just mark the loss of two lives; it marked the moment their entire world split in two—between the life they had before that Tuesday and the heavy reality they were left to carry afterward.

Jean Brown lost both her father and her sister in a single afternoon. One phone call, one moment, and they were gone.

The grief that followed was not the kind that fades with time, but the kind that reshapes a person completely. An entire family network—parents, siblings, and extended relatives—was thrown into shock and mourning all at once.

The Tucson community felt the blow as well. Two members of a working, contributing family had been killed at their own place of business on an ordinary Tuesday.

That kind of loss does not stay contained to one household; it ripples through an entire community. As for Wood, court records and trial testimony speak to his behavior in the immediate period following the shootings.

He was located and taken into custody without resisting in a way that extended the investigation significantly. Law enforcement moved quickly, with investigators processing the scene thoroughly.

What they found confirmed what the evidence already pointed to: a targeted attack, two victims, one shooter, a firearm, and a motive that had nothing to do with money, property, or financial gain. This was not about insurance or inheritance; court records document no financial motive whatsoever.

This was personal, rooted in possession—about a man who believed that a woman who had left him had no right to simply walk away. That twisted belief cost two innocent people their lives.

This was not a case that kept investigators guessing. Wood had a documented relationship with both Debbie and her father, and witnesses could place him at the scene.

The crime scene itself confirmed the rest. Law enforcement moved with clear purpose, identifying and arresting Wood in connection with the murders without significant delay.

When the formal charges came down, they were severe. Court records show Wood was charged with two counts of first-degree murder—one for Eugene Deats and one for Debra Deats.

The charges did not stop there, as he was also charged with two counts of aggravated assault against a police officer stemming from his conduct during his arrest. That detail alone speaks to the kind of man investigators were dealing with.

The prosecution’s path was clear. To secure a first-degree murder conviction, they needed to establish premeditation.

They argued that Wood planned the attack in advance, and the facts made that argument straightforward. He had arrived at the shop armed, targeted two specific people, and fired on both of them.

That was not a crime of impulse, but a crime of intent. Intent was exactly what the prosecution was prepared to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

As the case moved toward trial, the evidence against Wood was stacked mountain-high. The weapon, the witnesses, the crime scene, and the documented relationship between Wood and his victims all pointed to the same conclusion.

Every piece of evidence supported the prosecution’s case, which they were ready to lay out piece by piece in front of a jury. There was no self-defense argument that could hold up in court.

Eugene Deats and Debbie were at work, posing no threat to anyone and completely unarmed. Court records confirmed that both shootings were deliberate and targeted.

Wood made the conscious choice to walk in armed and pull the trigger twice. The defense faced an uphill battle from the very start.

When the facts are this direct and the evidence this clear, there is very little room for legal maneuvering. There was no credible alibi, no alternate suspect, and no ambiguity in the physical evidence.

Meanwhile, the Deats family sat and waited. Jean Brown and those who had lost Debbie and Eugene wanted just one thing: accountability.

The Tucson community, shaken by the loss of two people at a local family business, watched closely as the legal process moved forward. The courtroom was the final stage, and Wood was about to face it.

The jury did not take long to deliberate. When the verdict came in, it sent Joseph Rudolph Wood the Third on a journey that would take twenty-five years and end in a death chamber that became the center of a national controversy.

The verdict came back clear: guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault against a police officer. Every single charge was confirmed.

The jury had looked at the evidence, weighed it carefully, and returned with a verdict that left no room for doubt. Then came the sentencing phase.

The judge handed down two death sentences—one for the murder of Eugene Deats and one for the murder of Debra Deats. In addition, Wood received two fifteen-year prison sentences for the aggravated assault convictions, set to run concurrently.

The death sentences, however, were what defined everything that came next. The court’s rationale was straightforward: the attack was premeditated and targeted.

Wood had arrived at that shop armed and with clear intent. The severe impact on the Deats family—the grief, the loss, and the permanent damage done—was placed firmly on the official record.

However, the story did not end in that courtroom. Over the next twenty-five years, Wood’s legal team filed round after round of appeals.

They challenged his conviction, Arizona’s execution procedures, and the constitutionality of how the state planned to carry out his death sentence. Every legal avenue was explored, and every door was knocked on.

By the time the twenty-tens arrived, the legal argument had shifted entirely. Wood’s attorneys were no longer contesting his guilt, as the evidence had long settled that question.

Instead, they turned their attention to the lethal drugs Arizona planned to use to execute him: a combination of midazolam and hydromorphone. Medical experts had already raised serious concerns regarding this specific mixture.

This drug combination had rarely been used in executions and was considered experimental. Specialists warned it could cause undue suffering and was not guaranteed to cause death within a reasonable timeframe.

Those warnings, as it turned out, were far more accurate than anyone wanted to admit. From nineteen eighty-nine to two thousand fourteen, Joseph Rudolph Wood the Third sat on death row in Arizona.

For twenty-five years—a quarter of a century—he went through round after round of appeals and legal filings. Yet every challenge ultimately failed, and every legal door eventually closed.

On July twenty-third, two thousand fourteen, the final execution date arrived at Florence State Prison in Arizona. The execution was scheduled, and there was nothing left to stop it.

The night before, Wood was offered what many condemned inmates receive: a special last meal of his choice. He declined the offer.

Instead, he ate sausage and mashed potatoes, the exact same meal served to every other inmate in the prison that evening. There was no ceremony or special treatment, just a standard tray of food served in a prison cell.

The next afternoon, Wood was brought into the death chamber. The Deats family was present, watching and waiting to see it through to the end after twenty-five long years.

Wood looked directly at them and began to speak. He thanked Jesus Christ as his savior and stated that his pain was finally ending.

Then, with full composure, he told them, “May God forgive you all.” He followed those words with a smile directed right at them.

Jean Brown and the rest of the Deats family were immediately and visibly enraged by the gesture. The audacity of that smile, directed at the family he had destroyed, was something no one in that room would ever forget.

At one fifty-two in the afternoon, the drugs were administered. The first dose, consisting of fifty milligrams of midazolam and fifty milligrams of hydromorphone, went into his system.

According to the state’s protocol, that single dose was supposed to be sufficient to end his life. For about eleven minutes, the process seemed to be working as intended.

Then a witness noticed his lip quiver, followed quickly by a sharp gasp. Then came another gasp, and another, and another.

A witness later told reporters that the sound was loud and disturbing, far from a peaceful sleeping sound, leading everyone to realize something had gone terribly wrong. The medical team kept administering doses in an attempt to complete the process.

A second dose was given at two-nine in the afternoon, followed by a third at two-thirteen. By three-nine, the tenth drug protocol had been completed, yet Wood was still gasping for air.

An Associated Press reporter present in the room counted more than six hundred individual gasps. A media witness noted that his breathing looked exactly like a fish gulping for air on land.

Wood’s attorneys, watching the horrific scene unfold in real time, filed an emergency appeal directly to the United States Supreme Court while their client was still alive on the gurney. Their motion stated plainly that he had been gasping and snorting for more than an hour and remained alive.

Justice Anthony Kennedy ultimately denied the emergency appeal, though the ruling came back only after Wood had already passed away. At three forty-six in the afternoon, the fifteenth and final drug protocol was completed.

In total, Wood had received seven hundred fifty milligrams of midazolam and seven hundred fifty milligrams of hydromorphone. This was exactly fifteen times the amount specified in the state’s original execution protocol.

At three forty-nine in the afternoon, Joseph Rudolph Wood the Third was officially pronounced dead. The entire execution procedure had taken one hour and fifty-seven minutes from start to finish.

The response from state officials was immediate and deeply divided. Charles Ryan, director of Arizona’s Department of Corrections, insisted that Wood was comatose throughout and never experienced pain or distress.

A spokeswoman for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office who witnessed the execution claimed there was no gasping, only snoring, describing the event as quite peaceful. Conversely, Wood’s public defender, Dale Baich, viewed the execution as a catastrophic failure.

He called it a direct violation of the United States Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, asserting that the suffering could have been prevented. The very next day, July twenty-fourth, two thousand fourteen, Arizona suspended all executions pending a full review of its procedures.

Executions in the state remained paused for eight years following the botched procedure. It was not until May eleventh, two thousand twenty-two, that Arizona carried out another execution, putting Clarence Dixon to death for murder.

That eight-year hiatus was the direct result of a single afternoon that lasted one hour and fifty-seven minutes. After the ordeal finally ended, Jean Brown stood before reporters to speak for her family.

She stated that what she witnessed during the execution was nothing compared to the horrors of August seventh, nineteen eighty-nine. She reiterated that the true agony was seeing her father and sister lying in pools of their own blood.

One hour and fifty-seven minutes in a death chamber paled in comparison to a lifetime of grief for the survivors. That is the unbearable weight the Deats family has carried every single day since that fateful Tuesday in Tucson.

The governor ordered a formal review of Arizona’s execution protocols shortly after the incident. This served as a quiet acknowledgment that something had gone terribly wrong, despite official claims to the contrary.

Nationally, Wood’s execution did not occur in a vacuum. Occurring alongside other botched executions in Ohio and Oklahoma, it sparked a sweeping federal review of execution protocols across the United States.

His prolonged death became a major turning point in the ongoing American debate over capital punishment. The underlying irony of the situation remains striking.

A man who walked into a family business armed to inflict quick death spent nearly two hours experiencing a death the state could not cleanly deliver. The case leaves behind a complex legacy of crime, legal battles, and lingering questions about justice and punishment.