A Texas death row inmate decided this morning to jump the gun (or, knife, as it were) killing himself 15 hours before his scheduled execution.
A death-row inmate slit his own throat with a makeshift knife early Thursday, committing suicide about 15 hours before he was scheduled to be executed, a prison official said. Michael Dewayne Johnson, 29, was on death row for the 1995 killing of a convenience store clerk near Waco.
Early Thursday, he slashed his own throat and arm with a makeshift blade fashioned from a small piece of metal attached to a wooden stick, said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville.
Prison guards had been checking on Johnson’s welfare every 15 minutes, as is customary, when they found him unresponsive in a pool of blood in his cell, Lyons said. He was taken to a hospital in nearby Livingston, where he was pronounced dead, Lyons said.
While I applaud Johnson’s initiative, the timing could have certainly been better.
