A convicted triple-murderer, Stephen Bryant, who has been on death row in South Carolina for 17 years, has chosen to be executed by firing squad. Bryant, now 44, confessed to shooting and killing three men during a crime spree in 2004, culminating in the murder of Willard “TJ” Tietjen, 62, whose remains were used by Bryant to leave a message in blood that read “catch me if u can.”
After failing to overturn his sentence, Bryant opted for the firing squad method and will face his fate on November 14 from volunteers shooting him from a 15ft distance. This execution comes over two decades after Tietjen’s murder.
During Bryant’s trial, it was revealed that he lured Tietjen by feigning car trouble before brutally killing him, ransacking his home, and even answering a call from Tietjen’s wife and daughter to inform them of his death. Bryant callously admitted to the daughter that he had killed her father after shooting him multiple times and burning his eyes with cigarettes.
Following the gruesome incident, Bryant was found guilty of two other murders in Sumter County, South Carolina, in October 2004. He was convicted of three counts of murder and received the death sentence in 2008, a decision that the Supreme Court recently declined to review.
Bryant’s impending execution by firing squad mirrors that of Mikal Mahdi, another spree killer, who was put to death earlier this year in a similar manner after being convicted of a heinous crime spree that ended in the murder of a police officer in South Carolina.