Mississippi to execute man for killing 16-year-old girl

The execution of a Mississippi man who admitted raping and killing a 16-year-old girl is set for Wednesday night. He would be the second prisoner put to death in Mississippi in the previous ten years.

The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman is about to administer a fatal injection to Thomas Edwin Loden Jr., 58. Since admitting guilt to murder, rape, and four counts of sexual abuse against Leesa Marie Gray in 2001, he has been awaiting execution.

Despite a lawsuit being filed by Loden and four other death row convicts in Mississippi challenging the state's lethal injection technique, a federal judge declined to stop Mississippi from carrying out the execution in a late-night decision on December 7. The most recent execution in Mississippi took place in November 2021.

One of Loden's attorneys, Mark McDonald, stated Wednesday morning that Loden has no intention of requesting any additional postponements of the execution.

“It is not Mr. Loden’s intent at this time to make any legal challenges,” McDonald told The Associated Press.

Gray had worked as a server at her uncle's restaurant in northeast Mississippi during the summer before what should have been her senior year of high school. She left work after hours on June 22, 2000, and soon found herself trapped on a country road with a flat tire.

Around 10:45 p.m., Loden, a Marine Corps recruiter with relatives living nearby, came across Gray on the road. He halted and started a conversation with the teen about the flat tire. "Avoid worrying. As a Marine, I. We carry out activities like these, he remarked.

When Gray allegedly responded she would never want to join a Marine, Loden said he lost his cool and instructed her to get in his van. According to an interview he provided investigators, he spent four hours sexually assaulting her before strangling and smothering her.

According to court documents, Loden was "found laying by the side of a road with the words 'I'm sorry' cut into his chest and apparent self-inflicted lacerations on his wrists" on the afternoon of June 23, 2000.

When Loden was sentenced in September 2001 after entering a guilty plea, he said to Gray's friends and family, "I hope you may have some sense of justice when you leave here today."

Gray's mother, Wanda Farris, described her as a "happy-go-lucky, usually smiling" teenager with aspirations of teaching elementary school.

“She wasn’t perfect, now, mind you,” Farris said. “But she strived to do right.”

Farris intends to go to the execution on Wednesday.

On behalf of two death row inmates, attorneys with the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center filed a lawsuit against the Mississippi prison system in 2015, claiming the state's lethal injection process is cruel. Later, Loden and two additional Mississippi convicts on execution row joined as plaintiffs.

In July 2021, the Mississippi Department of Corrections disclosed in court documents that it had purchased three medications for its fatal injection protocol: the sedative midazolam, the muscle-paralyzing chemical vecuronium bromide, and the heart-stopping potassium chloride.

Only Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Tennessee have carried out executions using a three-drug protocol since 2019, according to Jim Craig, a MacArthur Center attorney, who stated this during a court hearing in November.