Texas Executes INMATE who begged for Death- He murdered MUM & son -Another son played dead. but….

Tonight, a North Texas man was executed for the murders of two people in Bedford years ago. 51-year-old Cedric Ricks was sentenced to death for the May 2013 murders of his girlfriend and her 8-year-old son. They were found in an apartment in Bedford. Another son survived that attack. Earlier today, the United States Supreme Court issued a brief order rejecting Rick’s final appeal to stop his execution, and it has happened within the last hour.

On March 11th, 2026, after 12 years on Texas death row, Cedric Allen Ricks was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville unit. He was 51 years old. Seven people stood behind the glass to watch. Among them was a 25-year-old man named Marcus Figueroa. When Ricks made his final statement, he spoke to him directly by name.

 The scars were still visible on the back of Marcus’s neck above his shirt collar. In this story, we will talk about what happened in a thirdf flooror apartment in Bedford, Texas. What a jury never got to see about how it was chosen and the 10 weeks in which every protection around one family quietly ran out. The story begins 13 years earlier on a Wednesday evening in the Dallas Fort Worth suburbs.

 On May 1st, 2013, a woman named Roxanne Sanchez pulled into the colonial village at Shore Creek Apartments after a trip to Walmart. She had her three sons with her and the groceries in the back. Roxanne was 30. She worked as a medical assistant at an obstetrics practice a few minutes away, where the doctors she worked for called her part of their family.

 Her two older sons, Marcus and Anthony Figueroa, went to the elementary school down the road. Her youngest Isaiah was still in a crib. She had signed a lease on a different apartment 5 days earlier with her closest friend standing beside her. She was leaving. The man she lived with came out to the parking lot as she pulled in and started shouting at her on the stairs.

 A neighbor walked past them and heard it. Roxanne was holding two bags of groceries. 15 minutes later, an argument started inside the apartment. What almost nobody knew that evening was how much paperwork already existed on him. 6 months earlier, she had gone to the police station and reported that he had strangled her until she lost consciousness.

 A court had granted her a protective order naming her home, her workplace, her son’s school, and her mother’s house. A state agency had opened a case file. He had signed a safety plan. By that Wednesday, every one of those things had expired, closed, or been signed off as complete. There was one exception. He still had a court date pending for assaulting her.

 He had been in front of a judge on it the day before. Two people did not survive that night. One did by lying still on his own living room floor and imitating a sound. He would testify at the trial. 13 years later, he would stand at a window in Huntsville and listen to an apology. This is the story of Cedric Ricks, Roxanne Sanchez, and the family that did everything the system asks of a person and watch the protections come off one at a time on schedule.

 If you’re drawn to stories of justice, betrayal, and the people who reach a point of no return, make sure to subscribe to No Way Out. This is where true crime meets truth. Real cases, real consequences. Cedric Allen Ricks was born in Illinois in 1974, the second son of Shaderk and Helen Ricks, into a household on the south side of Chicago where the week was built around the church.

 Shader worked in the pipe trades. Helen kept the home. Their older boy Dwayne was quiet and academic. Helen smoked through the pregnancy. In his first years, Cedric struggled to breathe and she took him to the emergency room again and again. The breathing settled as he grew. Something else did not. He was aggressive and hyperactive almost from the point he could walk. He got into things.

 He broke things. He did not stop when he was told to stop. By kindergarten, Shaderk was fielding calls from the school. The trouble at that stage was small and constant. Disruption, defiance, and inability to sit through a lesson. Teachers used the word mischievous, and so did his parents. The family attended church every Sunday and Cedric was there with them.

 Jane Crossley taught his Sunday school class. She found him involved and faithful, a boy who turned up and took part. The Rick’s family were among the strongest supporters of the congregation. Bonnie McCulla, who lived close by, had known him from the day he was born and watched him grow up in the pews and on the block.

 Around 8 or 9 years old, McCulla saw him change. He began getting into trouble at school in a way that was different from before and he set a fire inside her car. Shader caught him setting another fire beside the house. Helen found a third when he set his grandmother’s curtains a light. Three fires in three places belonging to people who knew him.

 At 10, he threw a brick through a picture window. His parents took him to counselors. They took him to therapists. They arranged for an MRI looking for something physical, something that could be named and treated. The scan showed nothing. A doctor recommended putting him on Rolin and Helen refused. She did not want to medicate her son.

 So, they punished him instead and they punished him consistently and Helen was clear about the result. It did not help. The teachers at his school tried as well and she gave them credit for trying. Between the school, the church, and the house, the boy was surrounded by adults paying attention, and none of it altered the pattern.

 His cousin, Kimberly McCulla, saw the same thing the neighbors saw. A mischievous boy whose behavior worried the family more as he got older. The concern did not lift. Each year, the incidents got heavier. Alongside all of it was sport. He was athletic in a way that set him apart on the block and football above everything else. John McGee began coaching him around the age of eight and found him competitive and hardworking. He turned up. He listened.

He wanted to win. Curtis Crossley Sue knew him from church and played alongside him. Jovial, athletic, tough, and more aggressive than the game called for. The wanting had an edge on it. Keith Griffin put it plainly. Ricks was scrappy and worked hard. He was aggressive when he played and intense when he was not.

 He had a short fuse, did not like being pushed around, and decided quickly when he thought he was being pushed. To Steven Wear, he was the class clown, the one who made the day lighter. We also knew he got into a lot of trouble at school. Gary Coronan coached him in high school and rated him a very good player.

 He also found him compassionate and well-liked. During one game, a player went down injured and Ricks ran out to help him. The football held, the trouble held with it. He was on the roster and he was the student the office knew by name. In 1991, in his junior year, Ricks was suspended from school.

 A school security officer drove him home, which was the end of it as far as the school was concerned. It was not the end of it. Ricks got into his father’s car and drove back. Inside the building was his girlfriend, Tina Brown. He went in, took hold of her, and pulled her out of the school against her will. He got her into the car, and tried to drive away with her.

 The security officer, who had only recently dropped him at his house, received a call that RX was back on the property and pulling his girlfriend out of the building, he got to the car and stopped it before it left. RX was arrested. That was not the only arrest involving Brown. RX was picked up a couple of times over incidents connected to her during that period.

 After the incident at the school, his parents took a step they had not taken before. They had him admitted to a psychiatric ward. He stayed there for 30 days and he was assessed and treated and released with a prescription. He came home and refused to take the medication. Shader had seen a version of this before. years earlier they had put their son into a hospital for a month when the behavior became too much for the house to absorb and after that stay he had also stopped taking what he was given.

 The second attempt ended the same way. Whatever the doctors concluded, Ricks would not carry it out. He was old enough by then to simply decline and he declined. School ended, the football ended with it. What was left was the question of work and Shaderk answered it the way a union man answers it. He got both of his sons pipe fitter jobs and got them into the union. It was skilled work.

 It paid and it came with a card that meant something. For a young man with a record of arrests and a temper his friends had all noticed. It was a solid start handed to him by his father. Dwayne worked hard at it. So did Cedric. His brother, who had grown up as the loner in a house where Cedric was the life of the party, gave him credit for a real work ethic.

Dwayne also used a phrase that sat oddly beside the jokes and the football. He said his brother acted like he carried the weight of the world. The trade held for years. Ricks worked, earned, and stayed in the Chicago area close to his parents and to the church that had raised him. In 1998, he was in a relationship with a woman named Tashana Singleton.

 The first time he assaulted her, she was trying to end it. She told him she wanted to break up and he punched her in the jaw. They stayed together. In 2000, there was an incident serious enough to bring the police and an arrest. Singleton described it later in plain terms. He knocked her out of her chair. He kicked her.

 He punched her. He pushed her head into a wall. Then he held a butcher knife on her. After that, they reconciled. Singleton became pregnant and they married. When the baby was born, RX came to the hospital. Standing over his newborn son, he told Singleton, “I hope it dies.” She stayed. In 2001, with their son about a month old, she was holding the baby when RX knocked her to the ground.

She went down with the infant in her arms. Rick stood over her and drove a knife into the floor beside her head again and again, telling her he was going to kill her. A few months after that, he punched her in the jaw hard enough to break a tooth. A few months after that, he was driving with Singleton in the car when he became angry with her, and he told her he was going to kill all of them by driving off a cliff.

By 2002, Singleton had reached the end of what she could carry. She filed for divorce and obtained a protective order. The order changed almost nothing. Ricks violated it constantly and the violations formed their own pattern. Harassing phone calls that did not stop, threatening text messages, threats aimed not only at her but at her family.

 The divorce gave them a son to hand back and forth, and the handovers became the place where everything concentrated. Singleton dropped their boy at RX’s parents’ house for visitation. RX used those minutes to say things to her that frightened her. When her father started coming along so she would not have to do it alone, RX began threatening to kill her father as well.

 He made the threat on several occasions. Once at the courthouse, he caught her father’s eye and drew his hand across the front of his own throat. Both families tried to hold it together through the church. RX, Singleton, and their parents attended counseling sessions with the pastor. RX was disrespectful to the pastor throughout that he and he objected to Singleton’s parents being in the room at all.

 The sessions did not survive his contempt for them. In July 2003, Singleton and her father arrived at RX’s parents’ house with a police escort to drop off his son. RX threatened them when they got there. He broke Singleton’s phone. He turned his anger on the officers and became irate with them and he was arrested.

 After that, the exchange point for the boy was moved to the police department itself where there would always be officers present. It made no difference. In May 2004, Singleton drove another man’s car when she came to collect their son. Ricks saw the car and understood what it meant. In front of the police station, he choked her. He beat her about the face and head until she lost consciousness.

 Their son stood beside them crying, watching his mother go down. Officers came out and tried to intervene and the assault continued even after they reached him. He was arrested. The case ended in probation with a period of jail time attached and a requirement that he complete domestic violence counseling. The following month, June 2004, he began a relationship with Tamara Partridge.

 At the start, he was charming and generous with her. He spent money on her. He paid attention to her. That phase lasted while the relationship was new and then it closed. He told her about his past selectively. He lied to her about his history of domestic violence and he lied about why he had to serve time in jail.

The violence arrived first as jealousy. Partridge confronted him about talking to another woman and he hit her in the face and knocked her down. He belittled her routinely. He became jealous easily and over very little. When she talked to a male friend, he smashed her laptop computer and hit her in the leg.

 On his birthday in 2007, he found a missed call from a male friend on her phone. He broke the phone. He held her against the wall and choked her. The pattern extended past the two of them. Partridge described being on a train with him when he became angry at strangers because he believed they were judging him for being in an interracial relationship.

 It happened again in a restaurant. His reading of a room was that people were looking at him and his response to that reading was anger. He was arrested after a bar fight. Partridge picked him up from jail and drove him to the impound lot to collect his car. The lot was closed when they arrived. Ricks climbed the fence, broke into the office to get his keys, then got into his car and rammed it into the locked gate to force his way out.

 He was charged with property damage. Partridge believed he was dangerous. She believed he was going to hurt her. After 4 years, she ended the relationship because she could no longer take the jealousy and the abuse. Work was going badly at the same time. The recession that arrived in 2007 hit the trades hard, and both Rick’s brothers were laid off from the pipe fitting jobs their father had arranged for them.

 The union card that had given Cedric a foothold stopped translating into a wage. In late 2008, he entered a relationship with Jennifer Clark. Clark had daughters and she had been widowed. Her ex-husband had died. RX was jealous of the dead man. When Clark’s daughters grieved for their father, RX became agitated with them for grieving.

 He was jealous of the closeness between Clark and her daughters and he showed it. Toward the end, the disagreements turned physical. On one occasion, he refused to leave when she asked him to. When she moved to call the police, he told her he was going to kill her. Clark went and got a shotgun and pointed it at him.

 He moved out a few weeks after that. He left Illinois behind him not long after and went south to Texas and found work as a medical assistant in the Dallas Fort Worth suburbs. He was hired through medical clinics of North Texas, a practice group with offices across the region. The job put him in scrubs in examination rooms, taking vital signs and handling paperwork, moving through a working day among nurses and physicians.

It was clinical work in a suburban practice and he was good enough at it to keep it. The recession that had taken his union card was behind him in Illinois. So were Tashana Singleton and Tamara Partridge and Jennifer Clark and the arrests and the protective orders and the courthouse. In Texas, he was a medical assistant with a badge and a schedule.

 Roxanne Diana Sanchez worked in the same field. She was 30. She had grown up in the Fort Worth area and stayed there close to her mother, Diana Mcgru. She worked as a medical assistant at the Women’s Group, an obstetrics and gynecology practice in Bedford in the northeastern corner of Tarant County, and she had been there more than a year.

The physicians she worked for were Linda Apprentice, Stephanie Taylor, and Emily EMTT. To them, she was not a name on a roa. She was part of the practice. The work she did was the work done in an obstetrics office. Women came in pregnant and came back through the pregnancy and came back after it. She weighed them and took their blood pressure and their history and their questions and she saw the same faces month after month as they changed.

 She had two sons from a previous marriage, Marcus and Anthony Figueroa. Their father was part of their lives and their surname was his. Marcus was in the sixth grade. Anthony was in the third. Both of them went to Spring Garden Elementary, close to home. Her closest friend was Amanda Gomez. Theirs was an old friendship, going out together, checking in, keeping each other current.

Sanchez and Ricks met through work. Within a few months, she was pregnant. Gomez was watching from the outside, and what she noticed first was that RX did not like her. He did not want her in the house. He did not want Sanchez seeing her. He made it difficult in the ways that are difficult to point at.

 Being present, being displeased, making the visit cost something. Their son was born, and they named him Isaiah. After that, Ricks would not allow Gomez to see him either. The friend who had been part of Sanchez’s life for years was now kept away from her home and from her newborn. When the two women did manage to go out, RX followed them.

 He turned up where they were and argued with Sanchez in front of Gomez. It happened more than once and it happened in public and Gomez was there for it. The household came together at the Colonial Village at Shore Creek Apartments in Bedford in the 1400 block of Parkplace Boulevard. Their home was on the third floor. RXen Sanchez lived there with Isaiah, Marcus, and Anthony.

 Two adults working in medicine. Two boys at the elementary school down the road and the youngest of the three in a crib in the back bedroom. On the evening of 2nd of November 2012, RX and Sanchez argued inside that apartment. Her sons were in their bedroom. RX put his hands around her throat and squeezed until she lost consciousness.

 He beat her head against the bathroom floor. She came round on the floor of her own bathroom. The man who had done it was in the apartment. So were three boys and one of them could not walk. She did not call anyone that night. The next morning she told him she was going to work. It was the thing she needed to say in order to be allowed out of the door with her sons and he accepted it.

 She took Marcus and Anthony to Spring Garden as she did every school morning and dropped them off. Then she did not drive to the women’s group. She collected her mother and the two of them went to the Bedford police station and she reported the assault. Officers took her statement and photographed her. There was a scratch across her neck and bruising over it.

There were red marks on her neck in the shape of pressure. Her scalp was injured and there was blood in her hair. There was a large bruise on her left arm. She was still at the station when Ricks walked in to give his own account. He was arrested there that day on a charge of assault causing bodily injury to a family member and a second charge alleging injury to a child.

 She saw him come through the door. She was already shaking. Inside a police station in a building full of officers with her mother beside her, she tried to hide from him. From the station, she went to the hospital. At Texas Health Harris Methodist HB in Bedford, the triage nurse on duty was Cynthia Crowe. Triage is the point where a patient is sorted, what brought them in, what their vital signs are, and how quickly they need to be seen by a doctor.

 Crow asked what had brought her to the emergency room. Sanchez told her she had been strangled the night before and that her head had been pounded on the floor. Crow asked who had done it. Sanchchez said her boyfriend. She said he had been arrested that morning. She said it had happened in Bedford. Crow asked her directly whether this was domestic violence.

Sanchez said yes. Crow recorded her as trauma rather than illness. The reported loss of consciousness moved her up to priority 2 ahead of others in the queue. Asked to rate her pain from 1 to 10. Sanchez said 10. In the space on the chart for mechanism of injury, Crow wrote it in the patients own words. I was choked until I passed out.

 She applied for an emergency protective order and a court granted it. It was broad. It ordered him to stay away from the apartment on Parkplace. It ordered him to stay away from the women’s group, the practice where she worked. It ordered him to stay away from Spring Garden Elementary where Marcus and Anthony went to school.

 It ordered him to stay away from her mother’s house. Every address that mattered to her was named in it and he was forbidden to go to any of them. He was released from jail and he went to her door. He knocked for hours. He called her names through it. He demanded to be led in. Inside were Sanchez, Marcus, Anthony, and Isaiah.

 Outside was a man forbidden by court order from standing where he was standing, doing it loudly enough and long enough that Amanda Gomez, the friend he had spent a year keeping out of that apartment, came to hear about it. The order had been in effect a matter of hours. The second charge from that night, the count alleging injury to a child went before a Tarant County grand jury.

 In Texas, a grand jury sits in private, hears only what the state puts in front of it, and decides whether there is enough to send a defendant to trial. This one decided there was not. He was no build, and the count went away. The police report generated a referral to Child Protective Services, the state agency that investigates when a report suggests someone under 18 has been hurt in a household.

 The referral named Isaiah as the alleged victim and RX as the person responsible. Isaiah was the son RX and Sanchez had together, born earlier that year. He was the youngest in the apartment still in a crib and the only one of the three boys Ricks had fathered. A case was opened on the household. An investigator was assigned and he came out to interview him.

 Ricks told the investigator he had two prior misdemeanors and nothing else. He said he had no prior assault cases. He said he had no history with the agency in any state. He said he had no mental health issues. He said he had no substance abuse issues. He said he had no history of domestic violence. Not one of those statements was true.

 The agency did not run an outofstate check. His record sat in Illinois. the arrests, the convictions, the probation, the protective orders taken out against him, the domestic violence counseling a court had ordered him to complete, and nobody in Texas went to look for it. The file was built on what he said about himself. He did admit the assault on Sanchez, and he gave an account of how the argument had started.

 He said he had thrown Isaiah across a bed and punched him in the chest, and that the disagreement with Sanchez had grown out of that. His description of what followed did not match the police report and it did not match what Sanchez had said. He told the investigator he wanted to reconcile with her.

 He said he had already started anger management classes and counseling. The agency drew up a safety plan and he signed it. He agreed to comply with protective order. He agreed to refrain from any physical altercation. He agreed to continue counseling and anger management. He agreed to cooperate with the investigation.

 He and Sanchez attended coup’s counseling together. He did not stop contacting her. He called, he talked, he had counseling to point to and a plan with his signature on it, and he kept working on her. She agreed. He moved back into the third floor apartment with her, Marcus, Anthony, and Isaiah. In January 2013, Child Protective Services closed the case.

 The assessment was that the household was safe. On the 15th of January 2013, the emergency protective order expired. In February 2013, RX was issued a certificate of completion for the anger management program. Inside about 10 weeks, every measure placed around that family came off. The agency closed its file.

 The court order ran to the end of its term. The program signed him off as finished. Nothing was rescended and nothing was reversed by anyone’s decision. Each piece simply reached its expiry date in turn, and the apartment on Parkplace went back to being a private household with the same five people in it. One thing was still outstanding.

 The assault charge from November was pending in Tarant County and moving toward a court date. There were other things going on inside that apartment that spring. RX was living there again. The order had run out in January and the agency had closed its file and by February he was back on the third floor with nothing on paper anywhere saying he could not be.

He was still working as a medical assistant. At the practice he took prescription notepads belonging to two of the doctors he worked for. He wrote on them and used them to obtain medication he had no right to. The pads and the medication came home with him to Park Place. Roxanne’s mother, Diana Mcgru, found them there.

 She read the names printed at the top of the pads and she contacted those doctors directly and asked. They told her they had prescribed nothing. Money was short. In April, he called his cousin Thomas Abner in Illinois. Abner had known him most of his life, and what came down the line was a man in trouble.

 Ricks was worried about money. He sounded stressed. Abnner told him he could send him something in a few months. Then RX offered him jewelry. There were other things going on inside that apartment that spring. RX was living there again. The order had run out in January, and the agency had closed its file, and by February, he was back on the third floor with nothing on paper anywhere saying he could not be.

He was still working as a medical assistant. At the practice, he took prescription notepads belonging to two of the doctors he worked for. He wrote on them and used them to obtain medication he had no right to. The pads and the medication came home with him to Park Place. Roxanne’s mother, Diana Mcgru, found them there.

 She read the names printed at the top of the pads and she contacted those doctors directly and asked. They told her they had prescribed nothing. Money was short. In April, he called his cousin Thomas Abner in Illinois. Abner had known him most of his life, and what came down the line was a man in trouble.

 RX was worried about money. He sounded stressed. Abner told him he could send him something in a few months. Then RX offered him jewelry. He called Courtland Bird Jr. in the same stretch of weeks. Courtland Bird Jr. had grown up with him, too. A friend from those same years on the same streets. He took a call in the same stretch of weeks and something in the conversation was off.

 Bird could hear it. Ricks told him he wanted to come back to Chicago. That was what he was telling the people back home, that he was short of money, that he was under strain, that he wanted to come back. He was telling it to a cousin who had known him since he was a boy and a friend from the old block 12200 miles from Bedford.

and he was offering to hand over jewelry to one of them in Bedford. He saidnone of it. He was still a medical assistant with a job and a schedule. He was still living on the third floor at Parkplace with Sanchez, Marcus, Anthony, and Isaiah. He was still turning up at a practice where he had helped himself to two doctors prescription pads.

 And Diana Mcgru had already found those pads and already knew what the doctor said about them. and Sanchez was making her own arrangements. She and Ricks were in the process of splitting up. On Friday, 26th of April 2013, Amanda Gomez went with her to sign a lease. It was for a different apartment.

 Sanchez had decided to leave him. She had found somewhere to take Marcus, Anthony, and Isaiah, and she put her name to it with her closest friend standing beside her. That was the last time Gomez saw her. On Tuesday, 30th of April 2013, Ricks appeared in a Tarant County courtroom on the pending charge for assaulting her.

 He went home to Parkplace afterwards. The next day was Wednesday, 1st May 2013. That afternoon, Sanchez took her three sons to Walmart and did the grocery shopping. They came back to the complex shortly after 7 in the evening and parked. She lifted Isaiah out and picked up some of the bags, leaving the rest in the car for a second trip, and started up the stairs to the third floor.

 RX came outside as they pulled in and started cursing at her. Between 10 and 20 7, a neighbor passed the two of them on the stairwell. RX was shouting. What the neighbor heard him say was, “Don’t have me [ __ ] come down here and waste my [ __ ] time on this bulls.” He stopped as the neighbor went by. Sanchez was carrying two bags of groceries. She looked distraught.

 Inside the apartment, Marcus and Anthony went to the bedroom with Isaiah to play. Sanchez started cooking dinner. About 15 minutes later, RX and Sanchez began to argue. The yelling turned into screaming, and Marcus and Anthony came out of the bedroom into the living room. Their mother and RX were hitting each other. RX pushed her to the floor.

 The two boys went to her. They tried to get between her and RX to break it up. RX pushed Marcus down and kept hitting Sanchez with his fists. Then he went to a kitchen drawer and took out a knife. He stabbed Sanchez repeatedly while she tried to protect herself with her hands and arms.

 Marcus ran into his bedroom closet with his phone and tried to call the police. Ricks came after him and pulled the closet door open. Marcus dropped the phone. He reached out and took hold of the blade of the knife RX was holding and it cut his hand. RX chased him back into the living room. Anthony was standing next to the couch. There was blood on his face.

 He was asking Marcus to get help. RX pushed Marcus to the ground, held his head down, and stabbed him in the back of the neck. Then he pushed Anthony to the ground beside Marcus and stabbed him while Marcus watched. Anthony made a gurgling noise and RX stopped. Marcus tried to get up. RX got on top of him and started again.

 Marcus made himself go still and he made the same gurgling noise he had just heard his brother make. Rick stopped. He carried the knife into the kitchen and put it down and washed his hands at the sink. He walked to the master bedroom and took a shower. He made a phone call. He packed his clothes into a bag.

 He picked up Isaiah and put him in his crib in the back bedroom. Then he took the keys to Sanchez’s car and left the apartment. Marcus lay on the living room floor and did not move. He was bleeding badly, and he was afraid that if he got up, Ricks would come back and start again. He stayed down until he was certain the apartment was empty.

 Then he got up and went to the window and looked out at the parking lot. His mother’s car was gone. As RX had come up the stairs earlier, a woman going down had passed him. That was about 10 minutes before the first call to 911. The first call did not come from inside the apartment. Driving north out of Bedford in Sanchez’s 2011 Nissan Ultima, Ricks called his cousin Tamara Buts, who lived with her parents in Mansfield on the other side of Tarant County.

 He told her he had done something bad. He asked to speak to her father, Joseph Sanders. To Sanders, he said he had messed up. He said he had killed Sanchez and the boys. He asked Sanders to go to the Bedford apartment and get Isaiah. Tamara Butts came back on the line and he told her the same thing directly, that he had killed Sanchez, Anthony, and Marcus.

 He told her his hands were injured and cut. She asked him how he had done it and where he was, and he would not tell her either. He insisted that she go to the apartment and get Isaiah. He told her he was hurt. He told her he needed stitches. He said he was sorry. He said he was stressed and that he could not take it anymore.

 He said nobody loved him. Buts urged him to turn himself in. He told her he would die before he went to jail. He hung up and Buts called 911 and told the operator what her cousin had just said. Then she got in a car with her parents and started driving to Bedford to collect Isaiah as he had asked.

 Bedford police were dispatched to the apartment at 8:42 p.m. on a welfare check. Officers Clayton Baxley, Brian Meers, Brett Bowen, Noel Scott, and an officer named Crowwell were sent. Baxley arrived first. Standing outside the third floor door, he could hear a baby screaming inside. He was told over the radio not to go in alone and to wait for backup.

 While he was standing there, a second 911 call came in from inside the apartment. Marcus had reached a phone. He told the operator that his mother’s boyfriend had killed his mother and his brother. He told her he had stabbed them. He told her that the man had taken his mother’s car and left. He said two people in the apartment were dead and that his little brother was crying in the back.

 He gave the operator the man’s name. The operator stayed on the line with him and relayed what he was saying to Baxley outside the door. Baxley asked Marcus to open it. Marcus could not. His hands were injured and he could not work the handle. He gave the operator permission for the officer to open the door himself. The operator asked Marcus whether he was hurt.

 He said everywhere. He also said, “My brother is not talking to me.” Baxley opened the door and found him covered in blood from head to toe. He called him out onto the landing. As Marcus came through the doorway, Baxley could see the lacerations across the back of his head, his neck, and his shoulders, and that he was bleeding heavily.

 Marcus could not sit down. He was in shock. Meters arrived. He and Baxley went inside to sweep the apartment for anyone else who was hurt and for anyone who might still be there. There was blood on the lenolium just inside the door. Sanchez and Anthony were on the floor of the living room. The officers found Isaiah crying in his crib in the back bedroom.

 He was not injured. They left him where he was and went back to Marcus because Marcus was the one who could still be helped. Baxley and Meters stayed with him until the paramedics and the other officers reached the landing. Bowen, Crowell, and Scott went through the apartment and saw in plain view the two people on the floor, blood on the walls, and a knife in the kitchen sink.

 Marcus was flown by helicopter to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth. Isaiah was taken there as well as a precaution and examined and found to be unharmed. Downstairs, Sanchez’s family began arriving at the complex. A neighbor, Melissa Huarez, could hear Sanchez’s mother from her own apartment. She was screaming that it was not true, that her daughter was not gone, that she had spoken to her at 6 that evening.

Emergency medical personnel checked Sanchez and Anthony and left at around 9:00. An officer secured the apartment and stood on it, preserving what was there until the criminal investigation division and the medical examiner’s office could get there. Detective Joey Galer of the Bedford Police Department arrived at the complex and was briefed on what the officers had found.

 Crime scene technician Mark Fontaine came with him. They walked the third floor landing and Gager looked through the open doorway at what was inside. He did not go in. There were two people dead in the living room, blood on the floor and the walls and a knife in the kitchen sink. And every officer who had entered so far had gone in for one of two reasons.

 To find survivors, and to make sure the man who had done it was not still there. Both of those reasons were now spent. Gage stood at the threshold and made the decision to stop. At 11:18 p.m., he began drafting a search warrant. While he wrote, “The apartment stayed sealed. An officer held the door.

 Nothing moved inside it. The bodies stayed where they were. The knife stayed in the sink, and the groceries stayed where Sanchez had set them down.” God’s affidavit laid out what the officers had seen and heard. the welfare check, the call from Mansfield, the second call from inside the apartment, the injuries on the older boy, the two people on the living room floor.

 He named the man Marcus had named. He asked a judge for authority to enter and process the scene. The warrant was signed. God and Fontaine went in. They photographed the apartment as they found it. They collected the knife from the sink. They collected clothing. They took swabs and lifted prints and recorded the position of everything in the living room, the hallway, the bedroom closet, where a phone lay on the floor, and the master bedroom, where a shower had recently been run.

 The pattern of blood told them where people had been, and in what order they had moved. It ran from the living room to the bedroom closet and back again. While Fontaine worked, other officers were working the parking lot. Sanchez’s Nissan Alultima was gone. They had a description, a plate, and a name, and they put all three out over the wire.

They also had a phone number. Ricks had used a phone to call Mansfield, and that call had been logged. Bedford investigators contacted the carrier and requested emergency location assistance on the handset. The carrier began returning position data. The phone was moving north. It crossed out of Tarant County and kept going up Interstate 35, past Denton toward the Red River.

 It crossed into Oklahoma. It kept moving north through Love County and Carter County, and it was still moving when the carrier placed it in the area of Ardmore. Bedford put out a broadcast asking that the vehicle be stopped and the driver detained, and the request went to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. Troopers Kevin Laxton and Chad Green were working that stretch of I35.

At about 10:30 p.m., they received the broadcast. It gave them the make and model of the car, the license plate, the direction of travel, and the reason. The driver was wanted in connection with a double homicide in Texas. They set up and watched northbound traffic. The Ultima came past them. The plate matched.

 They pulled out and initiated a traffic stop. The car pulled over. Laxton approached and looked at the driver and compared him against the description that had come with the broadcast. It was the man they had been told to look for. RX was taken out of the car and handcuffed. His hands were injured. The cuts were deep enough that they were going to need attention and the troopers could see it as soon as they took hold of him.

 He was booked into the Garvin County Jail in Paul’s Valley, some 70 mi north of the Texas line. Then he was taken to a hospital to have his hands treated and brought back. The car was seized. It was Sanchez’s and everything in it was evidence. Word went back to Bedford that he was in custody. Detectives Mac and Shel got on the road and they reached the Garvin County Jail at 3:06 a.m.

 They waited. At 8:16 a.m., they sat down with him. They identified themselves and told him why they were there. Before they could take a statement, Ricks invoked his right to counsel. The interview ended at that point and the detectives put their notebooks away. They asked him about extradition. Under Oklahoma law, he could wave it and be handed straight back across the state line, or he could refuse and force Texas to obtain a governor’s warrant.

 He refused to wave it. That set a slower machine in motion. Texas would have to apply to Governor Rick Perry’s office for a warrant. and Oklahoma would hold him until it arrived. Tarant County set his bond in the meantime. $4 million on the capital counts and $500,000 more on a charge of causing serious bodily injury to a child.

 Garvin County held him on a $2 million Texas warrant. He was put in a cell with other inmates. Later that same day, he was taken back to the hospital. He was, however, taken to the hospital again. The second hospital trip was for injuries he had not arrived with. He had been beaten by the men he was housed with. The account that reached the jail staff was that it had started after he told them what he was in for, that he had killed his girlfriend and her sons.

 A jailer had already warned him not to talk about his offense in front of other inmates. He had talked about it anyway. He was treated and returned to the jail. On the morning of thr of May, he asked to see a judge. Garvin County Under Sheriff Jim Mullet confirmed the change of position. Ricks had fought extradition at first, and that morning, he requested a hearing, and the county found him a slot with the judge that afternoon.

 He waved his extradition rights. That Friday afternoon, he was handed over to Tarant County officers and driven back across the Red River to Fort Worth, where he was booked in on two counts of capital murder and one count of serious bodily injury to a child. At the Tarant County Medical Examiner’s Office, autopsies were completed on Roxan Sanchez and Anthony Figueroa.

 Both had died of stab wounds to the head and neck. In Sanchez’s case, blunt force trauma to the head and esphixia were recorded as contributing factors. At Cook Children’s Medical Center, Marcus was in critical condition. Surgeons worked on the injuries to the back of his head, his neck, and his shoulders, and on his hands, which he had cut when he took hold of the blade. He survived.

 Isaiah, examined and found unheard, was placed in the care of Child Protective Services. He was the only one of the three brothers RX had fathered and the only one who had not been touched. At the women’s group in Bedford, the doctors Sanchez had worked for issued a statement. Lind apprentice Stephanie Taylor and Emily EMTT said their hearts were broken by the deaths of Roxanne Sanchez and her son that she had been a valued member of their working family for more than a year and that their thoughts were with her family.

At the complex, reporters found neighbors who had heard screaming that Wednesday night and had thought nothing of it at the time. Court records were pulled and reported. They showed the emergency protective order Sanchez had obtained in November, the addresses it covered, the apartment, the school, her mother’s house, and the date it had run out.

 It had expired on the 15th of January. They also showed that the grand jury had declined to indict him on the injury count from that November night and that the assault charge was still pending against him when the order lapsed. In Tarant County, the district attorney’s office reviewed the file and announced that the state would seek the death penalty.

 Ricks was appointed counsel. Mary B. Thornton and Adam Arrington took the case. The state assigned prosecutors Bob Gil and Robert Husman. The case was set in the 371st District Court before Judge Molly Westfall under cause number 3361004R. The defense filed motions to suppress. Their argument had two parts. The first was that officers had entered the apartment and seized and observed items before any search warrant was obtained and that everything that flowed from that entry should be excluded.

 The second was that the Oklahoma troopers had stopped the Ultima without observing any traffic violation and that the stop was therefore unlawful and everything taken from the car should go with it. Judge Westfall heard the suppression evidence. Baxley meters Bowen Croll and Scott described going in to look for survivors and for a suspect and described what they had seen in plain view while doing it.

 Gager described standing at the doorway and deciding not to enter and drafting his affidavit at 11:18 p.m. Trooper Laxton described receiving a broadcast that named the vehicle, the plate, and the reason, and stopping the car on that basis. The motions were denied. Jury selection began in the spring of 2014. Capital voor dire in Texas is conducted one person at a time with each prospective juror questioned individually by both sides on their views about the death penalty and their ability to answer the special issues. The panel was called and

worked through the strike zone. The group from which the jury would actually be drawn came to 36 people. 18 of them were women. Within that 36 there were two black women. Their names were A. Stafford and W. Stafford. There was one person who identified as Hispanic named Flores. There was one other black member of the group named Barnes.

 In a Texas capital case, prospective jurors are questioned one at a time. Each is brought into the courtroom alone and examined by both sides on what they believe about the death penalty, on whether they could answer the questions the law would put to them at sentencing, and on anything they have written on their questionnaire.

A Stafford had filled hers out. She wrote that she was not in favor of the death penalty. She wrote that it should be available for violent acts against children. She disclosed that she had served on a jury before in a case that ended in an acquitt. She disclosed that she had a brother with a criminal conviction.

 She had no children of her own. She was one of two black women in the strike zone. the group of 36 people from which this jury would be drawn. The state questioned her. The prosecutor asked about her brother’s conviction. He asked and he came back to it and he came back to it again. She answered each time.

 The questioning ran on past the point where the subject had been covered and it kept running. When she was finally excused, the judge remarked on the record about how long she had been there. The better part of an hour and 20 minutes. The state exercised a peremptory strike against her. A permptory strike is one a lawyer does not have to explain.

 Each side gets a fixed number and they can be used on anyone for any reason or none with one exception. They cannot be used because of a person’s race. W. Stafford came next. She was the other black woman in the strike zone and she was an ordained minister. The state questioned her about grace and about forgiveness and about whether her faith would allow her to sit in judgment on another person.

 At one point, the prosecutor pointed across the courtroom at Ricks and told her that was the man they were asking her to help execute and asked whether she could do it. She said she could. The state exercised a permptory strike against her. Flores was the one person in the strike zone who identified as Hispanic. The state struck him as well.

 Among the people the state accepted and seated were two jurors named Tedberry and Flint. Adterbury had an uncle who had been convicted of a sexual offense and she said she believed he had been falsely convicted. The state asked her two questions about it and moved on. She also had a son with a family violence case against him.

 Flint had a son who had been incarcerated. Three of the seated jurors had written on their questionnaires that they were not in favor of the death penalty. Three had served on juries before and two of those were never asked about it. The first juror the state accepted a white man had no children. Of the 13 permpary strikes the state used, nine were used on women.

 Mary Thornton, one of the two lawyers appointed to defend Ricks, rose and made a Batson objection. the objection a lawyer makes when they believe the other side is striking jurors because of race. She put the numbers on the record. Her client was black. There had been two black women in the strike zone and the state had struck both.

 There had been one person who identified as Hispanic and the state had struck him. Then she asked the court for something specific. She asked that the state’s jury selection notes be produced and reviewed. and she asked that they be sealed into the record so that a court looking at this case later would be able to open them and see what the prosecutors had written down while they were choosing.

 Bob Gil and Robert Hughesman, the prosecutors trying the case, objected. Judge Molly Westfall ruled on both requests. She would not require the state’s notes regarding those strikes to be included in the record. And she denied the Batson objection at the first step on the numbers alone without requiring the prosecutors to come forward and give raceneutral reasons for the strikes they had made. The jury was seated.

 Trial began. The state’s case in the guilt phase was built from the people who had been inside the apartment and the people who had come to it. The neighbor who had passed Rick’s and Sanchez on the stairwell testified to what she had heard him shout and to Sanchez standing there holding two bags of groceries looking distraught.

 The witness who had passed him coming up the stairs testified to the time Tamar Buts the cousin he had phoned from the car testified to that call that he told her he had done something bad that he asked to speak to her father. that he came back on the line and told her he had killed Sanchez, Anthony, and Marcus, that his hands were cut, that he would not tell her how and would not tell her where he was, that he asked her to go to the apartment and get Isaiah, and that he told her he would die before he went to jail.

Her father, Joseph Sanders, testified to what Ricks had said to him. Officer Clayton Baxley, the first Bedford officer to reach the third floor, described standing outside the door and hearing crying inside it. He described opening the door and finding Marcus covered in blood from head to toe and calling him out onto the landing and the state he was in when he came through.

Officer Brian Meers, who went in with him, described the sweep of the apartment. Officers Bowen, Croll, and Scott described what they had seen in plain view. Detective Joey Diller described standing at the doorway and not going in and drafting a search warrant at 11:18 that night.

 Mark Fontaine, the crime scene technician, described processing the apartment once the warrant was signed. The Tarant County Medical Examiner testified to the cause of death for Roxanne Sanchez and for Anthony Figueroa. Trooper Kevin Laxton of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol described the broadcast that reached him on Interstate 35, the plate on the Ultima, the stop, and the condition of the driver’s hands.

Then the state called Marcus Figueroa. He took the stand in a Fort Worth courtroom and told 12 strangers what had happened in the living room of his home. He described the argument. He described coming out of the bedroom with his brother when the yelling turned to screaming and seeing his mother pushed to the floor and the two of them trying to get between her and Rick’s.

 He described running to his closet with his phone and the door being pulled open and taking hold of the knife. He described being pushed down in the living room. They convicted him of capital murder. The trial moved into its second stage the same day. A Texas capital trial is two trials. The first decides guilt.

 The second decides whether the man found guilty lives or dies. And it is put to the jury as two questions. The first question is whether there is a probability that he would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society. The second is whether taking into account everything about him, his character, his background, and the offense itself, there is sufficient mitigating circumstance to warrant a sentence of life imprisonment without parole rather than death.

 To answer the first, Bob Gil and Robert Husman called the women who had lived with him. Tashana Singleton was called first. She told the jury she had been in a relationship with him from 1998. She said the first time he assaulted her was when she tried to end it. She told him she wanted to break up and he punched her in the jaw.

 She described the incident in 2000 that brought the police to them. He knocked her out of her chair. He kicked her. He punched her. He pushed her head into a wall. Then he held a butcher knife on her. She told the jury she reconciled with him afterwards, that she became pregnant, that they married. She told them what he said in the hospital standing over their newborn son. I hope it dies.

 She described 2001. Their son was about a month old. She was on the floor holding him and Rick stood over her and drove a knife into the floorboards beside her head again and again telling her he was going to kill her. She described the punch that broke a tooth. She described being in a car with him with her sons in it when he became angry with her and said he would kill all of them by driving off a cliff.

 She described filing for divorce in 2002 and obtaining a protective order and the calls and the messages that came anyway aimed at her and at her family. She described the visitation handovers at his parents’ house and her father coming with her so that she would not have to do it alone. and what RX began saying about her father once he did.

She described the courthouse and Rick’s catching her father’s eye and drawing his hand across the front of his own throat. She described the counseling sessions with their pastor and how Rick’s behaved in them. She described July 2003 when she and her father came to the house with the police escort.

 He threatened them. He broke her phone. He turned on the officers and was arrested. After that, the exchange point for their son was moved to the police department itself where officers would always be present. Then she described May 2004. She said she drove another man’s car when she came to collect her son. In front of the police station, Ricks choked her and beat her about the face and head until she lost consciousness.

Their son stood beside them crying. Officers came out of the building and it did not stop when they reached him. the state called Tamara Partridge. She told the jury the relationship began in June 2004, a month after that assault outside the police station. She said he was charming at the start, and spent money on her and paid attention to her.

 She said he lied to her about having a history of domestic violence and lied about why he had served time in jail. She described confronting him about another woman and being hit in the face and knocked down for it. She described speaking to a male friend and him breaking her laptop computer and hitting her in the leg. She described his birthday in 2007 when he found a missed call from a male friend on her phone, broke the phone, held her against the wall, and choked her.

 She described being on a train with him when he became angry at strangers because he believed they were judging him for being with a white woman. She described it happening again in a restaurant. She described collecting him from jail after a bar fight and driving him to the impound lot to get his car.

 The lot was closed. She watched him climb the fence, break into the office for his keys, get into his car, and ram it through the locked gate to get out. She told the jury she had believed he was going to hurt her. She said she ended it after 4 years because she could not take the jealousy and the abuse any longer.

 The state called Jennifer Clark. She said the relationship began in late 2008. She said she had been widowed, her ex-husband had died, and that she had daughters. She said RX was jealous of the dead man. She said that when her daughters grieved for their father, he became agitated with them for grieving.

 She said he was jealous of how close she was to them. She described the arguments turning physical toward the end. She described asking him to leave her home and him refusing to go. She described moving to call the police and him telling her he was going to kill her. She described going and getting a shotgun and pointing it at him.

 He moved out a few weeks later. That was the Illinois years given to the jury by the three women who had lived through them. The state then moved to Texas and called Diana Mcgru. Mcgru told the jury she was Roxanne Sanchez’s mother. She testified that 6 months before her daughter was killed, Sanchez had obtained an emergency protective order against Ricks because he had assaulted and injured her.

 She described the morning after that assault, her daughter pretending she was going to work in order to get out of the apartment, taking her sons to school, and then coming with her to the Bedford Police Station to report it. She described the state her daughter was in at the station, and that Rick’s walked in while they were there, and that Sanchez tried to hide from him inside the building.

 Mcgru also told the jury about the prescription pads. She said she had found notepads belonging to two doctors in the apartment along with medication and that when she contacted the doctors whose names were printed on them, they told her they had written no such prescriptions. The state called Cynthia Crowe. Crowe explained that she was a triage nurse at Texas Health Harris Methodist HB and that her job was to take a patients history and vital signs and determine how quickly they needed to be seen.

 She said she had seen Roxanne Sanchez in the emergency room in November 2012. She read from her chart. She had asked what brought her in and had written the answer in the patients own words that she had been choked until she passed out. She had asked who had done it and been told it was her boyfriend and that he had been arrested that morning in Bedford.

 She had asked directly whether this was domestic violence and been told yes. Crow testified that she had classified her as trauma rather than illness and that the reported loss of consciousness moved her up in priority to be seen sooner. She said that when she asked her to rate her pain from 1 to 10, Sanchez said 10. The state put in the photographs Bedford officers had taken of her injuries that morning, the marks on her neck, the bruising, the injury to her scalp, the bruise on her arm.

 The state then called evidence about what Ricks had told child protective services after that arrest. The investigator’s record showed he had said he had two prior misdemeanors, no prior assault cases, no history with the agency in any state, no mental health or substance abuse issues, and no history of domestic violence.

 Set against the testimony the jury had just heard from three women, every one of those answers was false. The agency had not run an outofstate check on him, and his Illinois record had never surfaced in the file. The record also showed what he had admitted, that he had thrown Isaiah across a bed and punched him in the chest, and that the argument with Sanchez had grown out of that.

 It showed the safety plan he had signed in which he agreed to comply with the protective order, to refrain from physical altercations, to continue counseling and anger management, and to cooperate with the agency. It showed the case being closed in January 2013 on an assessment that the household was safe. It showed his certificate of completion for anger management.

 In February 2013, the state established the date the protective order had expired and the fact that he had violated it immediately upon release from jail by standing outside Sanchez’s door for hours, calling her names and demanding entry, and the state established where he had been on the day before the killings in a Tarant County courtroom on the pending charge for assaulting her.

 The prosecutors then turned to how he had behaved in custody. They called a jailer from the Garvin County Jail in Oklahoma. She testified that she had warned RX not to reveal his offense to the men he was housed with. They called an inmate from that cell who testified that Ricks had told them he had stabbed his wife and his kids and that he had not seemed remorseful about it.

 The state’s position was that he had been beaten by his cellmates as a consequence of boasting about what he had done. Then the prosecutors called Deputy Moore. Moore testified about an incident that had occurred during the trial itself. Ricks had been in a holdover cell at the courthouse, changing out of his jail smok into the civilian clothes he wore in front of the jury.

 Moore heard something drop and looked down and saw a pencil on the floor. Moore explained why that mattered. Because of RX’s classification, he was not permitted to have implements of any kind. He was on suicide watch. A pencil could be used to injure himself or to injure someone else. And Moore agreed with the prosecutor that it could function as a weapon.

 Ricks was asked about it some weeks afterwards, and he said he had hidden it in the straps of his smok when he was taken from his cell to the courtroom. Adam Arrington cross-examined. Moore acknowledged on cross that RX had done nothing dangerous with the pencil. He had not threatened anyone with it. In all of Moore’s dealings with him, there had been no incident of violence.

Moore agreed that RX could have used it against him or against another deputy and had not. Moore also acknowledged that when RX was taken back to the jail, the pencil was given back to him. The state rested its case in aggravation. The defense case in mitigation was made of the people who had known him longest.

Helen Ricks took the stand and told the jury about her son. She said she had smoked while she was pregnant with him. She said he had been a sickly baby who struggled to breathe and that she had taken him to the emergency room repeatedly in his early years. She said he was aggressive and hyperactive from the time he could walk.

 She described the calls from the kindergarten. She described the fires. The one he sat beside the house. The one in a neighbor’s car. The one that took hold of his grandmother’s curtains. She described the brick through the picture window when he was 10. She told the jury what they had tried. Counselors, therapists, an MRI that found nothing.

 The doctor recommending Rolin and her refusal because she did not want to medicate her son. She said they had punished him consistently and that it had not helped. She said the teachers had tried too. She described having him admitted to a psychiatric ward for a month after the incident at his school when he was in his junior year and that when he came home, he refused to take the medication he had been prescribed.

She said the same thing had happened after an earlier hospital stay when he was younger. Shader Ricks testified. He described getting the calls from the school when his son was in kindergarten. He described catching him setting a fire beside the house. He described getting both of his sons pipe fitter jobs and getting them into the union.

 And he described both of them being laid off when the work dried up in the recession. Dwayne Ricks testified about his younger brother. He said he himself had been the loner and the academic one and that Cedric was the opposite. He said his brother had a strong work ethic. He said he acted like he carried the weight of the world.

 Cousin Kimberly McCulla described a mischievous boy whose behavior worried the family more as he got older and said the concern had deepened over time rather than eased. Bonnie McCulla had known him since the day he was born. She told the jury his family were among the strongest supporters of their church and that she had watched him grow up.

 She said that around 8 or 9 years old, he changed and began getting into trouble at school and that he set a fire in her car. Jane Crossley had taught his Sunday school class. She described him as involved and faithful, a boy who came and took part. The coaches came next. John McGee had coached him from about 8 years old and told the jury he was a normal, competitive boy who worked hard.

 Gary Coronan had coached him in high school and called him a very good player who was compassionate and well-liked and told the jury about watching him run onto the field to help an injured player. Curtis Crossley the sect described him as jovial, athletic, competitive, and tough and said he was more aggressive than the game called for and that he always wanted to win.

 Keith Griffin described as scrappy, hard worker who was aggressive when he played and intense when he was not. He said Ricks had a short fuse and did not like being pushed around. Steven Wear described the class clown fun to be around who got into a lot of trouble at school. Thomas Abner testified about the phone call in April when his cousin sounded stressed and worried about money and Abner offered to send him some in a few months and Ricks offered him jewelry. Courtland Bird Jr.

 testified about his own call and that RX had said he wanted to come back to Chicago. Then the defense called its expert. Dr. Jeffrey Louine was a neuroscientist who had examined imaging of RX’s brain. Outside the presence of the jury, the defense made an offer of proof. Louine was prepared to testify that RX’s propensity for violent outbursts had genetic origins.

 Judge Westfall ruled that portion inadmissible. The scientific support for tying the imaging to a genetic cause was not sufficient, and the jury would not hear it. What the jury did hear from Louine was narrower. He testified that RX was impulsive and had a predisposition for violence and that this could not be definitively linked to factors present at birth or to his early environment.

 He testified that it was clear RX did not have a normal brain. He was cross-examined on it and the state had its own expert, Dr. Price, available to testify about RX’s propensity for violence if the defense opened that ground any wider than it already had. Then Cedric Ricks told his lawyers he wanted to testify.

 He was brought into the courtroom before the jury was seated. Because of his classification and the restraint order in place, arrangements had been made in advance to keep the jury from seeing that he was in leg restraints. He was placed on the witness stand before the panel came in so that the walk to the chair happened in an empty courtroom.

 A curtain was set up around the defense table to block the jury’s view of his legs when he sat there. The jury came in and he was sworn. He admitted that Dr. Louine had been accurate about him, that he was impulsive and aggressive. He admitted he had trouble controlling his anger. He agreed that he and Sanchez had been in the process of splitting up.

 He was asked about the offense. He said, “Explaining my rage, I was upset. Things happen. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I wish I could bring them back like right now. He told the jury he wanted to die. He also admitted on the stand that he had violated Sanchez’s protective order immediately after being released from jail in November.

 He was asked about his Illinois arrests. He said he had been arrested five or six times for domestic violence and five times for resisting arrest and that he could not remember how many times he had been arrested for violating protective orders. His testimony finished. Judge Westfall said, “You may step down, sir.

” Rick stood up and walked back across the courtroom to the defense table in front of the jury with the leg restraints on him before either lawyer could say anything. Both sides closed. Bob Gil argued the first special issue. He told the jury that the answer to whether Ricks would be a continuing threat was undoubtedly yes.

 that this was a man who was a threat wherever he was and to whoever he was around and he told them they had seen him walk back to council table that morning with shackles on. The defense argued the second special issue, the brain imaging, the boy his mother could not manage, the doctors and counselors and hospital stays that had gone nowhere, the church, the coaches, the friends who had come from Illinois to speak for him. The jury retired.

 They deliberated for about seven hours. On 16th of May 2014, they answered the first special issue yes and the second no. Judge Westfall sentenced Cedric Allen Ricks to death. He was transferred into the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, given the number reserved for a condemned inmate, and housed at the Allen B.

 Pollinsky unit in Livingston, where the men under sentence of death in Texas were held in single cells. His conviction and sentence went automatically to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Mary Thornton handled the direct appeal. The record she was given contained everything from the trial except one thing.

 The state’s jury selection notes had not been sealed into it because the trial court had declined to require it. She investigated the Batson issue. Without the notes, there was no way to raise it on the record she had. The appeal she filed argued the suppression points that officers had entered and observed items in the apartment before the warrant was signed and that the Oklahoma stop had been made without an observed traffic violation.

The appeal went to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and was briefed over 2 years. On the 4th of October 2017, the court ruled the officers had entered lawfully. They had been sent on a welfare check after a caller reported a man saying he had killed a woman and her sons. Baxley heard crying through the door.

 A second call came from inside from someone saying people had been stabbed and that he was hurt everywhere. Officers entering on that were entitled to look for anyone who needed help and what they saw while doing it was in plain view. Danger had arrived, looked through the doorway and stopped. He began writing a warrant at 11:18 that night, and an officer held the scene until it was signed.

 Nothing was seized before it issued. On the traffic stop, the court applied the rule that officers acting on another AY’s broadcast may rely on the information behind it. Bedford had a name, a plate, a vehicle, a direction of travel, and a phone moving north. Laxton and Green did not need to see a traffic violation first. Every point was overruled.

 The conviction and the sentence of death were affirmed. Mary Thornton took it to the Supreme Court of the United States. The court declined to hear it. That closed the direct appeal, which is limited to what appears in the trial transcript. Next came state habius corpus, the proceeding for what is not in the transcript, what his lawyers failed to do, what the state failed to disclose.

Catherine Burnernhard was appointed at the Pollinsky unit in Livingston. RX was held in a single cell in the section reserved for men under sentence of death. Meals came through a slot. Recreation was alone. Visits were through glass. He wrote letters to his sons. La Holtz, who had grown up next door to him in Illinois, began writing to him.

 He wrote back and the exchange went on for years. Burnernhard investigated the trial, the lawyers, and the mitigation case, and asked the Tarant County District Attorney’s Office for the state’s complete file. Material came on compact discs, and through a discovery portal, and she reviewed it. The state’s jury selection notes were not in any of it.

 She filed the application. Trial council had failed to investigate evidence that RX was physically abused as a boy and had called a neuroscientist whose central opinion was excluded instead of a mental health expert who could have tied the violence to it. The state had suppressed evidence that pencils were permitted in the jail.

 Deputy Moore’s testimony was false. The account of the Oklahoma beating was false. She produced a report indicating the attack may have been racially motivated rather than a response to anything he said and nine of the state’s 13 strikes had been used on women. The convicting court took evidence by affidavit. RX’s trial lawyers described repeated requests to their client for information about his life and extensive time with his family.

Neither he nor they had told them about any abuse. The court found council could not be faulted for failing to present what was never disclosed to them. The choice of expert was reasonable. Evidence of mental illness cuts both ways and calling a psychologist would have opened the door to Dr. Price testifying for the state on his propensity for violence.

 On the pencil, the court drew a distinction. Moore had testified about the courthouse holdover cell, not the jail. Whether pencils were allowed in a cell did not make it untrue that he concealed one and carried it into a courthouse. On the Oklahoma beating, the report might show a racial motive, but it did not make the jailer’s testimony false or the cellmates.

 Both had described what Rick said. On the strikes against women, the state had accepted nine of the 18 in the strike zone. The Court of Criminal Appeals adopted the findings and denied relief in 2020. The case moved into federal habius corpus in the northern district of Texas. Jeremy Don Shepard of the office of the federal public defender took over. Judge Reed Okconor was assigned.

Federal habius has discovery. Records held by the state were assembled for federal council. In November 2021, the defense received a set of materials from the state’s file. Inside were the prosecution’s jury selection notes. They had been asked for in 2014 and refused. They had not been sealed into the record.

 They had not been in the discs or the portal. They were now in the hands of RX’s lawyers. 7 years after the jury was picked with nothing to indicate the state had meant to hand them over, the defense read them. The first was a list of everyone called for jury duty in the case. 17 pages of names. Next to each name, someone had written a short code.

 W over M over F B over F B over M H over M next to one name a longer note other/M South Asian the codes were race and sex whoever made the list had gone down it and recorded for every single person what they were the second page was a chart of the 36 people the jury would actually be chosen from four names on that chart had been circled in purple pen next to each circle in green ink someone had written the letters AA W Stafford A Stafford, Barnes, and Flores marked with an H.

 Nobody else on the chart was circled. Nobody else was marked. The white members of the strike zone carried no marking. A claim never put to the state courts cannot ordinarily be granted by a federal one. The procedure is to ask the federal judge to hold the case while the prisoner takes it back to Texas. Asked for that stay. It was denied.

 The federal case went forward on the exhausted claims. The shackling claim was that Ricks had walked in front of the jury in leg restraints during the punishment phase and that the prosecutor had used the sight of it in closing to prove he was a continuing danger. On the 26th of September 2023, Judge Okconor denied relief.

 He accepted that the trial court had ordered the least restraint possible and ordered it kept from the jury and that arrangements had been made. Ricks seated before the jury entered a curtain around the defense table. Then he held that what followed was invited error. The judge had said, “You may step down, sir.

” Rick stood and walked without waiting. The order set out why the restraints were ordered at all. He had fled the state to avoid arrest. He had tried to carry a pencil into the courtroom. He was on suicide watch and he had a documented history of violence. Okconor certified the shackling and the race-based jury selection for appeal.

 On the 4th November 2024, the fifth circuit affirmed. On the strikes, no primapaci case had been made at trial. The state had accepted two black members of the venire and one black juror had been seated. On the shackles, the majority agreed the error was invited. Judge Steven Higginson desissented in part.

 RX had stood and walked because a judge told him to step down. A defendant who does what the judge instructs has not invited the consequences of it. Reasonable jurists could debate the conclusion and the claim should have gone forward. He quoted the prosecutor’s closing that the answer to the first special issue should undoubtedly be yes, that this was a man who was a continuing threat wherever he was and to whoever he was around and that they had seen him walk back to council table that morning with shackles on. Reharing was denied.

papers petitioned the Supreme Court in 2025, arguing its own precedent forbids visible restraint before a capital jury because of the inference drawn from it and that here the inference had not been left to the jury. It had been argued to them. In October 2025, the court declined to hear it.

 Federal review was complete. Tarant County applied to the convicting court for a date and Judge Ryan Hill of the 371st District Court signed the order. The execution of Cedric Allen Ricks was set for Wednesday, 11th of March, 2026. A date changed what the case was. Until then, it had been legal questions moving between courts on their own timetable.

Now there was a deadline. Shppers worked two tracks at once. The first was clemency. In Texas, a condemned prisoner may ask the board of pardons and paroles to commute the sentence to life or to grant a reprieve. The board votes by written ballot. The governor cannot commute without a favorable recommendation from it, though he may grant a single 30-day reprieve himself.

The process is not public. The second was the claim that had come out of the file in November 2021. Four years had passed since the notes surfaced, and every attempt to litigate them had hit a wall. The federal court had refused to hold the case. The fifth circuit had ruled on the trial record. The Supreme Court had declined the shackling question, ending federal review.

 What remained was a subsequent state habius application in Texas, and Texas restricts those severely. A prisoner who has already filed one cannot file another unless he shows the factual basis for the new claim was unavailable at the time of the first. Without that showing, the court dismisses it as an abuse of the writ without ever reaching the merits.

Shepers built the showing. Mary Thornton gave a declaration. She had raised Batson at trial, asked the court to require the state’s notes and seal them into the record and been refused. She had investigated the issue on direct appeal and could not raise it without them. Had they been in the record, she would have.

 Catherine Burnernhard gave a declaration. She had asked the district attorney’s office for the state’s complete file, received discs and a discovery portal, and the notes were not among the materials. Then he set the notes against what had happened in that courtroom. The state had explained striking a Stafford in part because she wrote she was not in favor of the death penalty.

 Three-seated jurors had written the same. She had also written it should be available for violent acts against children in part because she had a brother with a conviction. A Tbury seated had an uncle convicted of a sexual offense and a son with a family violence case. Flint, seated, had a son who had been incarcerated, in part because she had served on a jury that acquitted.

 Three seated jurors had prior jury service, and two were never asked about it, in part because she had no children. The first juror the state accepted had none. And the questioning itself, the prosecutor had gone at a Stafford about her brother at such length that the judge commented on how long she had been in the chair. Attempor had been asked two questions about her uncle.

 The application was filed with the Court of Criminal Appeals. Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization of elected prosecutors, filed in support. Its position was that the race of prospective jurors had been explicitly noted that both black women in the pool had been struck and that a court should examine what that meant before an execution was carried out.

 The Texas Attorney General’s office opposed its position was that the records showed showed the decisions were raceneutral, that the lower courts had already concluded there was no discrimination and that the case had been fully litigated over more than a decade. On the 4th of March 2026, the court of criminal appeals dismissed the application as an abuse of the writ.

 It did not reach the question of whether the notes showed discrimination. The stay was denied with it. 7 days remained. On Friday, 6th of March, Shepers filed in the Supreme Court of the United States a petition asking the court to review the Texas ruling and an application to stay the execution long enough for it to be considered.

 The stay was docketed 25A983 and submitted to Justice Samuel Alo, the circuit justice for the fifth circuit. Campaigns that had followed the case for years, moved into their last phase. The community of Santidio, an international organization opposed to capital punishment, had been corresponding with Ricks since 2022.

Three of its members in Italy, Barbara, Linda, and Carmen wrote to him and received letters back. In one, he wrote about a wall standing in front of him and asked not to be pulled away from it, but to be given the strength to finish. The organization published an appeal for his life.

 The Texas Coalition to abolish the death penalty, announced a vigil for 5:00 on the evening of the execution. Death Penalty Action ran a petition to Governor Greg Abbott and the board of pardons and parrolles, and published a script for callers teleoning his office. At the Pollinsky unit, the routine began.

 Ricks was moved to the section used for prisoners with dates. His property was inventoried. He was asked to name his witnesses and to say what he wanted done with his body. On Monday 9th of March, the board of pardons and parrolles voted. It denied the commutation. It denied the reprieve. Governor Abbott took no action of his own.

 On the morning of Wednesday, 11th of March, RX was transported from Livingston to the Huntsville unit, the walled prison in the center of Huntsville, where Texas carries out its executions. The drive is about 45 mi. He was placed in a holding cell a short distance from the chamber. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice released the list of media witnesses.

 Michael Gratchic of the Associated Press who had covered Texas executions longer than any other reporter working. Vania Castillo of Fox 4 in Dallas Fort Worth. Emerson Clarage of the Fort Worth Star Telegram. Penny Lin Webb of the Huntsville item. The execution was set for 6:00 in the evening.

 Outside the walls, people opposed to the death penalty began gathering in the street across from the prison at 5. The Houston Peace and Justice Center had organized the gathering and it was broadcast. The coalition’s online vigil began at the same hour in Washington. The application sat with Justice Alo. At some point that day, he referred it to the full court.

Seven members of the victim’s family arrived at the Huntsville unit that afternoon to serve as witnesses. Roxan Sanchez’s stepfather came, her brother came, Anthony Figueroa’s father came, and his grandmother and his brother. And Marcus Figareroa came. He was 25 years old.

 The witness rooms at the Huntsville unit are two small chambers on either side of the execution chamber, each with a window looking directly into it. The room for the victim’s family sits on one side, the room for the condemned prisoners witnesses on the other. Nobody in either room can see into the other. The distance from the window to the gurnie is a matter of feet.

 The order denying the stay came from the Supreme Court that day. The application for a stay of execution presented to Justice Alo and referred by him to the court was denied. The petition for a rid of Sirari was denied with it. That was the last of it. There was nothing else filed anywhere.

 Shortly after 6:00, RX was taken from the holding cell into the chamber and secured to the gurnie. Intravenous lines were placed in his arms and run through the wall to the room where the drug would be administered. The witnesses were brought in and the blinds were opened. Through the glass on one side stood the seven people who had come for Roxan Sanchez and Anthony Figureroa.

 Marcus Figueroa stood among them, feet from the gurnie. He was wearing a shirt with a collar. Above the collar and below his hairline, the scars on the back of his neck were visible. RX was asked whether he had a final statement. He said, “I just want to say that I’m sorry for taking Roxan and Anthony from y’all.

 I can’t imagine the pain it has caused you. I’m glad to be able to speak to tell y’all that face to face.” He said he hoped they would be able to forgive him so that they would not have to carry the pain of it. Then he spoke directly to the young man standing at the window. And to Marcus, I always thought about you and I’m sorry that I took your mom and your brother away.

 I hate that you had to experience that. I just can’t imagine. But I’m truly sorry for what I’ve done and I wish you all peace and joy as much as you can, but I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. His voice broke. A tear formed in his eye. He said he hoped to find Roxanne and Anthony in heaven so he could tell them he was sorry face to face.

 He said, “I hope y’all go in peace.” Marcus Figareroa listened to all of it without any change in his expression. So did the six people standing with him. The statement ended. The warden gave the signal and the pentobarbatital began to flow. RX was pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m. Outside the walls, the people in the street were told and the gathering ended.

 In the room where the reporters had stood, Gratzic, Castillo, Clarage, and Web wrote up what they had seen. The seven witnesses were escorted out. None of them made a statement to the press. None of them answered questions. They left the prison and went home. It was the second execution carried out in Texas and the sixth in the United States.

 It was the 598th execution Texas had carried out since it resumed the practice in 1982 and the 47th from Tarant County, a jurisdiction with a total exceeded in Texas only by Harris County and Dallas County.