HUNTSVILLE, Texas—Michael Rodriguez’s downfall began with an infatuation.
If he follows through with his plans to be held accountable, it ends Thursday evening in the Texas death chamber.
Rodriguez, 45, a key member of the “Texas 7″—a group of seven fugitives who broke out of a South Texas prison in one of the state’s most notorious escapes—has dropped all his appeals and is volunteering for execution for his part in the killing of a Dallas-area police officer almost eight years ago.
“Whatever we do, there’s restitution to be made,” Rodriguez, 45, told The Associated Press in a recent interview outside death row. “But in this situation, the only thing I can do is be held accountable. and express sincere condolences.”
Rodriguez’s execution, the eighth this year in the nation’s busiest death penalty state, would cap more than two years of efforts he initiated to short-circuit the appeals process and accelerate his punishment.
“Sadly, a lot of people got hurt,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez would be the first of the six surviving members of the infamous “Texas 7” to be executed.
At the time of the December 2000 escape, Rodriguez was serving a life term for hiring a hit man to kill his wife, Theresa, 29, to collect her life insurance proceeds. She was gunned down in 1992 getting out of her car outside their San Antonio home. The triggerman, Rolando Ruiz, also is on death row.
Rodiguez was taking college classes and wanted to get rid of his wife because he’d been smitten with a younger female student.
“The lust of a coed,” he said. “I can’t explain it. My wife was a wonderful person and didn’t deserve this. I fell for a coed. It was stupid. … But I was a willing participant. … I really thought I would get off, like a lot of people who are deluded.”
His father, who would be convicted of helping the escaped convicts, arranged to have a vehicle waiting near the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Connally Unit south of San Antonio after the inmates got out.
The gang was captured in Colorado in January 2001 after six weeks on the run. One of them, Larry Harper, killed himself rather than surrender to authorities.
By then, however, they were involved in the fatal shooting of Aubrey Hawkins, an Irving policeman, during a Christmas Eve 2000 robbery of a sporting goods store in the Dallas suburb.
“I’m glad we got caught, so no one else would get hurt,” Rodriguez said.
His five remaining accomplices—George Rivas, Randy Halprin, Donald Newbury, Joseph Garcia and Patrick Murphy—also are there and awaiting the outcome of appeals. None of them has an execution date.
Rodriguez’s punishment was expected to draw dozens of police officers to Huntsville to stand vigil outside the prison while Hawkins’ widow, Lori, was inside watching the convicted killer die.
“I’ll be there,” she said. “Absolutely. I wouldn’t miss this.”
Lori Hawkins credited Rodriguez with being “the first one to really admit his guilt” but said his words of apology were “a little too late.”
“It didn’t have to happen,” she said of the fatal shooting of her husband of four years. “Aubrey didn’t need to die.”
Rodriguez first wrote to a federal judge in Dallas in early 2006, mailing a hand-printed letter mailed asking that his appeals be stopped. Court hearings eventually were held to ensure Rodriguez was competent to make that kind of decision, but his execution was on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considered a Kentucky case that stopped all executions in the country with a challenge arguing lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel. When the justices in April upheld the method as proper, Rodriguez’s death date was set for Thursday.
“I’m ready to go,” he said.
Toby Shook, a former Dallas County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Rodriguez, said he thought the former restaurant operator in San Antonio was being “very pragmatic.”
“It’s going to happen,” Shook said, describing the case against him and the other former fugitives as “iron tight.”
“He’s able to at least make one decision on his own,” Shook said. “He’s choosing the time.”
The seven prisoners overpowered workers at the Connally Unit near Kenedy on Dec. 13, 2000, took the workers’ clothes, then grabbed 16 guns from the prison armory and fled in a stolen truck. They ditched that truck for another that had been left for them by Rodriguez’s father.
Then 12 days later, while robbing an Irving sporting goods store of cash, clothing and more weapons, they killed Hawkins, who was shot 11 times and then run over with his own patrol car.
Acting on a tip from a resident of a trailer park outside Colorado Springs, Colo., Rodriguez and three of his cohorts were captured there Jan. 22, 2001. Harper killed himself. The remaining two surrendered two days later.
