Columbia, SC (AP) – I have now looked through glass and bars while 11 men were put to death in a prison in South Carolina. None of the previous 10 prepared me to look at the death of the Brad Sigmon fire team on Friday evening.
I may now be unique among American reporters: I have witnessed three different methods – nine deadly injections and an electric version of electric chair. I can still hear the Thunk van de Breker fall 21 years later.
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In the two weeks because I knew how Sigmon would die, I read on shooting squadrons and the damage caused by the bullets. I looked at the autopsy photos of the last man who killed Utah in Utah in 2010, in Utah.
I also came across the transcript of his trial, including how public prosecutors said it took less than two minutes before Sigmon took his ex-girlfriend nine times in the head with a baseball bat, went back and forth between them in different rooms of their Greenville County house in 2001 until they were dead.
But you do not know everything when some version protocols are kept secret, and it is impossible to know what to expect if you have never seen anyone at a short distance, straightforward.
The shooting team is certainly faster – and more more violent – than deadly injection. It is also much more tense. My heart started to pound a bit after the Sigmon lawyer had read his last statement. The hood was placed over Sigmon's head and an employee opened the black pulling shadow that protected where the three volunteers of the prison system were.
About two minutes later they shot. There was no warning or countdown. The abrupt burst of the guns was shocked. And the white target with the Red Bullseye who had been on his chest, accumulator trees against his black prison jumpsuit, disappeared immediately when Sigmon's entire body shrunk.
It reminded me of what happened to the prisoner 21 years ago when electricity shocked his body.
I tried to keep track of the digital clock on the wall to the right in one go, Sigmon to the left of my left, the small, rectangular window with the shooters and the witnesses for me.
A whimsical red spot about the size of a small fist appeared where Sigmon was shot. His chest moved two or three times. There was no sound outside the gun tear.
A doctor came out within less than a minute and his investigation lasted about a minute. Sigmon was declared dead at 6.08 pm
Then we left through the same door where we entered.
The sun underwent. Heaven was a pretty pink and purple, a stark contrast with the florescing lights of the Death Chamber, Gray Firing Squad chair and block walls that reminded me of a doctor in the 70s.
The Death Chamber is less than five minutes' drive from the headquarters of the correction department along a busy highway in the suburbs. I always look out of the window on the disk of every version. There is a meadow with cows behind a fence on one side, and on the other I can see the razor of the prison in the distance.
Armed prison employees were everywhere. We were in vans outside the Death Chamber for what I think was about 15 minutes, but I can't say for sure because my watch, mobile and everything else was removed for security, except for a path and a pen.
To my right I saw the skinny, blocked windows of the death cell of South Carolina. There were 28 prisoners there earlier on Friday, and now there are 27.
That is lower than 31 last August. After a 13-year-old break, while South Carolina had trouble obtaining the drugs for deadly injections, the state resumed the executions. Prisoners can choose between injections, electrocution or the shooting team.
I witnessed Freddie Owens who were put to death on 20 September. He locked his eyes with every witness in the room.
I saw Richard Moore dying on November 1 and looked at the Celling as his lawyer, who was close to him while he fought for his life for a decade, cried.
And I was there too, when Marion Bowman Jr. Die on January 31, a little smile on his face when he turned to his lawyer, then closed his eyes and waited.
I also remember other executions. I have seen relatives of victims staring at a murderer on the Gurney. I saw a mother throwing a mother's gone while she saw her son dying, almost close enough to touch when the glass and the beams were not in the way.
Such as that Thunk van de Breker in 2004, I will not forget the crack of the guns on Friday and that target disappears. Also etched in my mind: talk Sigmon or in the direction of his lawyer, in an attempt to let him know that he was in order before the hood continued.
I will probably come back to Broad River Correctional Institution on 11 April. Two more men in the death cell are from appeal and the State Supreme Court seems ready to plan their death with intervals of five weeks.
They would be the 12th and 13th men I killed through the state of South Carolina. And if it is over, I will have seen more than a quarter of the state's executions because the death penalty was restored.
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Collins was one of the three media witnesses for the Firing Squad version of Brad Sigmon. He witnessed 11 executions in South Carolina during his almost 25-year career at the Associated Press.
