John Allen Rubio, 46, was executed by lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville on Thursday after spending more than a decade on death row for the 2003 killings of three young children.
The Brownsville man was pronounced dead 21 minutes after the sedative pentobarbital began flowing, during which witnesses said he took three breaths, began what sounded like snoring, and then lay motionless. His execution came just hours after Oklahoma put to death James Pavatt, 73, a former Sunday school teacher convicted of fatally shooting his girlfriend’s estranged husband in 2001.
Rubio’s final moments included an expression of spiritual readiness that referenced reunion with his victims. “I’m going to be with my kids in a little bit,” he said. “I’m ready to go to heaven to be with my lord and saviour.”
The convicted killer also addressed his wife’s relatives directly, acknowledging the permanence of his crimes and their lasting pain. “I want to say I’m sorry to my wife’s family,” Rubio said. “I can’t change the past but I can tell you my life is going to be over. But that’s not going to make you happy.”
Before the injection was administered, Rubio thanked prison staff for helping him find God during his years of incarceration. He also expressed gratitude to his own family and friends for what he described as their “love and understanding,” adding that he was “not the same person I once was.”
Rubio and his wife, Angela Camacho, were both convicted for their roles in the 2003 deaths of his infant daughter Mary Jane Rubio and his two young step-children, Julissa Angela Quezada and John Esteban Rubio. The three children were stabbed and beheaded in the couple’s windowless Brownsville apartment.
At trial, defense experts testified that Rubio suffered from schizophrenia. The convicted killer himself claimed he had killed the children because he believed they were demonically possessed. A jury rejected those arguments and sentenced him to death in 2010.
Camacho, who also participated in the killings, is serving a life sentence.
Rubio’s execution marked Texas’s continued use of capital punishment for crimes involving multiple child victims, even as national death penalty rates have declined. The state has historically accounted for the largest share of executions in the United States.
The back-to-back executions in Texas and Oklahoma on Thursday highlighted the concentration of death penalty cases in a small number of states, with both men put to death by the same method within hours of each other.