McALESTER, Okla. — Oklahoma ready to execute a person on Thursday for fatally taking pictures a lady right through a home-invasion theft twenty years in the past.
Wendell Grissom, 56, will obtain a deadly injection on the Oklahoma State Penal complex in McAlester in Oklahoma’s first execution of 2025, officers mentioned.
Grissom and a co-defendant, Jessie Floyd Johns, had been convicted of killing of Amber Matthews, 23, and wounding her good friend, Dreu Kopf, at Kopf’s Blaine County place of dwelling. Johns was once sentenced to existence in jail with out parole.
Prosecutors mentioned Grissom, who had a long legal document, picked up Johns, who was once hitch-hiking, and the 2 males had been using west on Interstate 40 once they determined to dedicate robberies. They randomly decided on Kopf’s domestic close to Watonga, the place Matthews was once visiting Kopf and her two babies.
Matthews was once shot two times within the head and left clinging to existence at the flooring as Kopf, additionally shot two times and significantly wounded, controlled to escape in Grissom’s truck to get lend a hand, prosecutors mentioned. Grissom and Johns additionally fled, on a stolen four-wheeler, however briefly ran out of fuel and had been captured after hitching a experience to a restaurant in a close-by county.
Government discovered Kopf’s kids nonetheless inside of the house, bodily unharmed. Matthews died after being flown through helicopter to an Oklahoma Town sanatorium.
Grissom’s legal professionals didn’t dispute his guilt, however argued at a clemency listening to that he suffered from mind harm that was once by no means offered to a jury. The state’s Pardon and Parole Board denied Grissom’s request.
His legal professionals instructed the board Grissom all the time accredited accountability, even writing an apology to Matthews’ circle of relatives right through his first interview with police.
“He can not trade the previous, however he’s now and all the time has been deeply ashamed and remorseful,” mentioned Kristi Christopher, an lawyer with the federal public defender’s place of business.
Kopf instructed the board that she nonetheless carries deep psychological and bodily scars from the assault, together with bullet fragments that stay in her frame. For years thereafter, she mentioned she referred to as 911 when the doorbell rang or a stranger seemed in her group.
“I lived in a heightened state of worry always,” she mentioned tearfully.
Oklahoma Lawyer Common Gentner Drummond has referred to as Matthew’s killing a “textbook” loss of life penalty case.
“The crimes dedicated through Grissom, random, brutal assaults on blameless strangers within the sanctity of their very own domestic, are the very type that stay other people wide awake at evening,” Drummond mentioned right through ultimate month’s listening to.
The deadly injection in December of Kevin Ray Underwood was once the 127th execution through the state of Oklahoma because the U.S. reinstated the loss of life penalty in 1976, state jail information display.
