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Texas is set to execute an admitted killer who begged his lawyers to stop filing appeals, saying he’d rather die than keep “living in this hell-hole.”
Barney Fuller Jr. — who pleaded guilty to killing his neighbors in front of their children in 2003 after a two-year feud and refused to make a courtroom appearance until a jury handed down his death sentence — is scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday evening.
Fuller asked his attorneys last year to stop appealing his death sentence.
“I do not want to go on living in this hell-hole,” he wrote attorney Jason Cassel. “Do not do anything for me which will prolong my appeals and time here on Texas death row.”
A federal judge in June ruled Fuller was competent to make that decision. Fuller had testified at a hearing he was satisfied with his legal help, no one had coerced him and he was "ready to move on."
Fuller began making threatening phone calls to his neighbors Nathan and Annette Copeland two years before the killings.
The couple had long had a tense relationship with the Fuller because they didn’t like him shooting his weapons on the rural property in Lovelady, about 100 miles north of Houston. It became even more strained on New Year’s Day 2001, when he shot out an electrical transformer that provided power to the Copelands' home.
“Happy New Year,” Fuller told Annette Copeland in a Jan. 1, 2001 call. "I'm going to kill you."
The Copelands pressed charges, and two years later Fuller was summoned to court. His anger smoldered for two days as he began drinking; eventually he decided to seek revenge.
On May 14, 2003, Fuller toted a 12-gauge shotgun, a military-style semi-automatic carbine and a .40-caliber pistol to the Copeland’s yard and fired 59 shots into the house.
Fuller is set to die by lethal injection Wednesday night.
(Pat Sullivan/AP)
He kicked in the back door and walked inside, opening fire again. Nathan Copeland, 43, was killed in his bedroom, shot four times. His wife, 39, was gunned down in a bathroom while calling 911.
“Party’s over ***!” Fuller screamed as he shot Annette Copeland, according to the 911 call audio.
The couple's 14-year-old son, Cody, was hit twice and survived, and their 10-year-old daughter, Courtney, avoided gunshots because Fuller couldn't find the light in her dark bedroom. Cody found his mother's cellphone and called police.
Hours after the shooting frenzy, Fuller called Houston County authorities and told them he would surrender peacefully at his home.
He pleaded guilty to capital ***, declined to be in the courtroom after individual questioning of prospective jurors began at his July 2004 trial, and asked that the trial's punishment phase go on without his presence.
He didn't return to the courtroom until jurors returned with their death verdict.
"He was very adamant not wanting to be there," William House, one of his trial lawyers, recalled. "From the very start, he just really didn't care."
Fuller will be the seventh convicted killer executed this year in Texas and the first in six months.
With News Wire Services