Drugs’ll kill ya, so Juan Garza found out the hard way today 2001, just days after mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh kicked the bucket.
Dope fiend
A mass-murderer too, Garza’s motives were different – he was fuelled by lust for drug money. Having set up a trafficking ring for the supply of marijuana, he seemed to stop at nothing to preserve his illegal narcotics network.
His tidy and lucrative potted industry started to go up in smoke, however, when he started to suspect that people privy to insider information were grassing him up to the police. So the bloodbath ensued in a bid to shut people up once and for all.
Rumbo V
His victims included a drug smuggler named de la Fuente, an accomplice by the name of Gilberto Matos and Thomas Rumbo, who was shot in the head, then four more times to be sure.
Five more murders are said to have taken place, including his own son-in-law’s, but the police hauled him in specifically for the three named above.
Garza stripped
His violent past came out and Indiana came down hard on the drugs baron. Garza was stripped of his right to life for the multiple murders. But there is controversy as to the briefing of the jury.
The prosecutor is said to have wrongly informed the jury that Garza could be eligible for parole, which may have deterred them from awarding a life sentence. However, in actual fact, Garza could well have been awarded a parole-less term of life imprisonment. Yet, without this key knowledge, the jury may not have realised that this was a possible sentencing option.
Indeed President Clinton doled out two stays of execution for Garza during his tenure, but Bush, on the other hand, remained hard-line to the end.
Ironically, drugs were used to kill Garza – he died by lethal injection and met his end a repentant man. His last words acknowledge the tragic circumstances: ‘I apologise for all the pain and grief that I caused. I ask for your forgiveness and God bless’.
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