Oklahoma execute a man who killed a woman 20 years ago in a random robbery of invasion at home

McAlester, Okla. (AP) -Oklahoma prepared to execute a man on Thursday for fatally shooting a woman during a robbery of invasion at home 20 years ago.

Wendell Grissom, 56, will receive a lethal injection in the Penitentiary of the state of Oklahoma in Mcalester in the first execution of Oklahoma of 2025, authorities said.

Grisom and a coacusado, Jessie Floyd Johns, were convicted of killing Amber Matthews, 23, and wounding her friend, Dreu Kopf, at the Kopf Blaine County residence. Johns was sentenced to life imprisonment without probation.

Prosecutors said Grissom, who had a long criminal record, picked up Johns, who was doing Caketop, and the two men drove west by the interest 40 when they decided to commit robberies. They randomly selected Kopf’s house near Watonga, where Matthews was visiting Kopf and his two young children.

Matthews was shot twice on the head and clung to life on the floor like Kopf, also shot twice and seriously injured, managed to flee in the Graysom truck to get help, prosecutors said. Grissom and Johns also fled, in a four -wheel stolen vehicle, but quickly ran out of gas and were captured after taking a coffee walk in a nearby county.

The authorities found Kopf’s children still inside the house, physically unharmed. Matthews died after being transferred by helicopter to an Oklahoma City hospital.

Grissom’s lawyers did not play their guilt, but argued at a clemency hearing suffered from brain damage that never appeared to a jury. The forgiveness of the State and the Board of Probation denied the grassom application.

His lawyers told the Board that Graysom always accepted responsibility, even wrote an apology to Matthews’s family during his first interview with the police.

“You can’t change the past, but now it is and has always been deeply ashamed and repentant,” said Kristi Christopher, lawyer from the Federal Public Defender’s office.

Kopf told the board that it still has deep mental and physical scars of the attack, including bullet fragments that remain in his body. For years later, he said he called 911 when the bell rang or a stranger appeared in his neighborhood.

“I lived in a state of high fear at all times,” he said cryingly.

Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, has called Matthew killing a case of “textbook” death.

“The crimes committed by the attacks of Grissom, random and brutal against innocent strange in the holiness of their own home, are the guy who keeps people awake at night,” Drummond said during the audience last month.

The lethal injection in December of Kevin Ray Underwood was the 127th execution of the state of Oklahoma since the United States restored the death penalty in 1976, as shown by the records of the state prison.