Kristine Guerra of The Washington Post breaks her readers hearts with the lead into her story on Jeff Wood: “In Texas, a man who didn’t kill anybody is about to be executed for murder“.
Terri Been’s voice shook as she read a long text message from her niece.
“I had a nightmare about my dad last night,” Paige Rowan told her aunt in the text.
Rowan described a dream in which she watched helplessly as the execution needle pierced her father’s skin.
She woke up screaming, panicking and feeling hopeless, she told Been.
Then, she said, she dropped to her knees and prayed.
“Please don’t allow this to happen,” Rowan wrote. “Don’t take my father away.”
Been struggled to finish reading the text message, her voice breaking as she paused several times to regain her composure during an interview with The Washington Post.
The message was sent Sunday, Been said, less than three weeks ahead of the date her niece has come to dread: Aug. 24, when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice plans to inject Jeffrey Lee Wood with a lethal dose of pentobarbital to stop his heart.
Rowan’s nightmares have been happening more often as her father’s execution date looms closer.
It is so close now that she can feel it, Rowan told her aunt.
The scheduled execution is Wood’s punishment for the 1996 death of a man he did not kill — and, by some accounts, did not know was going to be killed.
Legal experts say his case is rare, even in Texas, the execution capital of America — and a state that allows capital punishment for people who did not kill anyone or did not intend to kill.
Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.