Curtis Wilkie Beasley, a 77-year-old man sentenced to death for the murder of a woman in Florida in 1995, delivered a brief apology before being executed by lethal injection.
"I want to apologize for all the mistakes I made," Beasley said when the warden asked if he wanted to make a final statement, according to a report by AP, the agency that witnessed the execution.
Beasley was executed on September 29 at the Florida State Prison near Starke. The curtain of the execution chamber opened at 6:00 p.m., when the inmate was already strapped to a gurney and accompanied by a spiritual advisor.
Following their last words, the administration of the three-drug protocol began. Beasley was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m.
The man had been convicted of first-degree murder, robbery, and grand theft of a vehicle for the death of Carolyn Monfort, which occurred in 1995 in Polk County, south of Orlando.
According to the case records, Beasley was temporarily staying at Monfort's residence while performing maintenance work at a nearby apartment complex.
The victim's daughter went to the house after being unable to communicate with her mother for two days. There, she found her body in a laundry room. The woman had suffered multiple blows to the head, and investigators located a bloodied hammer head wrapped in a towel at the residence.
The authorities later focused their suspicions on Beasley after a neighbor reported seeing him driving Monfort's car.
The man first traveled to Miami and then moved to Alabama, where he was arrested while working for an electric company using a false identity.
In 1998, a jury found him guilty and recommended the death penalty by a vote of ten to two. He remained on death row for decades.
His lawyers tried to prevent the execution citing, among other arguments, his advanced age and cognitive decline. The Florida Supreme Court rejected those arguments and, hours before the execution, the Supreme Court of the United States also refused to intervene.
Beasley became the sixteenth person executed in Florida in 2026 and the seventh inmate aged 70 or older executed in the state during the year.
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