Texas is set to execute Ruben Gutierrez on Tuesday for the 1998 murder of an elderly woman in Brownsville after he spent the past decade fighting for DNA testing of evidence that he says would prove he did not kill her. Gutierrez would be the third person this year. For the rest of 2024, Texas has scheduled five more executions, the same as all other states combined, the Death Penalty Information Center.
Gutierrez, now 47, was sentenced to death in 1999 for the stabbing and beating murder of 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison during a home robbery. Harrison, who lived with her nephew in the mobile home park she owned and who distrusted banks, had $600,000 stashed in her home at the time of her death, according to court records. Alex Hernandez, the victim’s nephew and godson, planned to drive six hours from his home in Brownsville to the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville to attend the execution with his girlfriend and a few friends on Tuesday.
He had made the trip in 2020 and was in the waiting room when the warden told him the U.S. Supreme Court had halted Gutierrez’s execution just over an hour before it was set to take place.
He thought the news was a “really bad joke.” Now, four years later, “it’s just really hit home,” he said on Monday. “It’s really heart-wrenching, heartbreaking again having to relive it.
” Hernandez, 55, remembered his aunt, whom family members affectionately called “Aunt Peco,” as “a really happy person, always wanting to s.